Application Overview

What this app is for

Corporate Legal Operations is the operating system for an in-house legal team. It gives the business a single front door for legal work, gives Legal a controlled way to triage and run matters, and gives the General Counsel visibility of workload, risk, decisions and — critically — outside-counsel spend against budget. It turns "email the legal team" into a governed, measurable service.

The operating chain

INTAKE                  RUN THE MATTER              GET HELP & CONTROL COST      GOVERN & MEASURE
requests + intake   ->  matters + issues + tasks -> counsel engagements +    ->  documents + knowledge +
questions -> triage     + risks + decisions          spend                       SLAs + dashboard
                        + approvals

Read left to right, that is the sidebar: Intake & Matters → Matter Work → Counsel & Spend → Documents & Knowledge → Service Levels → Directory.

The six functional areas

1. Intake & Matters — the front door

LegalRequest (typed, prioritised, risk-rated, with a required-by date and SLA), IntakeQuestion (structured intake), LegalMatter (the matter a request converts into — owned by a business owner and a legal owner) and MatterStakeholder.

2. Matter Work — running the matter

MatterIssue (points in contention, legal vs business position), MatterTask (the work, with predecessors), LegalRisk (inherent → residual, acceptance), LegalDecision (the recorded legal decision with rationale and implementation) and Approval (delegated authority sign-offs).

3. Counsel & Spend — outside help, controlled

CounselEngagement (internal/external, panel-firm, fee arrangement, conflict check, approved budget) and SpendEntry (invoices and forecasts booked against the engagement and the matter budget).

4. Documents & Knowledge — the work product

MatterDocument (with privilege status and versioning), Communication and KnowledgeItem (reusable guidance harvested from matters).

5. Service Levels — responsiveness

ServiceLevel (first-response / triage / resolution targets by priority) and SLAInstance (the running clock on a request or matter, pausable when awaiting the business).

6. Directory — the org

BusinessUnit (self-nesting), Person (legal-team flag, authority level) and Organisation (panel firms, counterparties).

Two ideas that make it trustworthy

  • Spend is controlled, not just recorded. Every SpendEntry books against a CounselEngagement and a matter budget, so over-budget matters and high-value invoices are visible (and, in Phase 2, gated by approval).
  • Privilege and authority are explicit. Documents and decisions carry a privilege status; approvals record the authority basis — so external issue and delegated sign-off are governed, not assumed.

Build status

Phase 1 (this build): the full schema (19 models), navigation, dashboards and a coherent seeded demo are complete and browsable as AI-Safe CRUD.

Phase 2 (documented — see the next page): the runtime — the SLA engine, the five state machines, spend/budget controls, and the reactive rules that drive triage, approvals, privilege gating and deadline alerts. Today those outcomes are modelled statically in the seed.