The front door

On 13 October Legora launched Intake, which it calls an agentic front door for in-house legal teams. An employee mentions Legora in Slack; the agent reads the request, asks in the thread for whatever is missing, routes it to the right lawyer as a tracked task with an owner and a due date, and drafts the work from the team's own playbooks and precedents. On 14 October Harvey launched a product with the same name and the same shape. Harvey says its Intake takes requests from email, Slack, Jira, ServiceNow, iManage and other tools, sends each one to an approved agent, to its contract product or to a lawyer under rules the legal team sets, and records every step in an audit trail: the request, Harvey's work, the team's review and the final response.

Autonomy in a regulated function does not arrive all at once. It arrives one request type at a time, and the company that keeps the list of which ones is the company that owns the function.

The coincidence of names made the trade press. The coincidence of design is the story. Neither company is small: Harvey says it works with 1,600 in-house legal teams, and Legora says it serves more than 2,000 law firms and in-house teams. Until now both sold mostly a better tool for the person who already does the work: draft faster, review faster, research faster. Both companies have now moved one step upstream, to the point where the business asks legal for something and someone decides who, or what, answers.

Read the autonomy terms closely, because they are where this is going. Legora says that by default a lawyer reviews all work before it goes back to the requester, but that for routine requests the team has approved in advance, a standard NDA for example, the agent can complete the task and send the answer without a lawyer's review, and that the team decides how far the agent goes request type by request type. Harvey says its approved agents handle routine work such as HR policy questions and first-pass contract review against approved positions, while exceptions and higher-risk items, cross-border hiring questions or new or high-risk marketing claims, go to a lawyer.

That is the shape of autonomy in a regulated function, and it is not the one most pitch decks draw. Nobody switches the lawyer off. The legal team grants authority one category at a time, against its own playbook, with a record of what the machine did and who signed off. Each grant is small. The list of grants is the thing that compounds.

The pressure behind it is staffing, not novelty. Legora's announcement cites the Association of Corporate Counsel's 2026 benchmarking: by Legora's calculation the median in-house lawyer now supports 367 employees, up 26 percent in a year, and it cites CLOC's 2026 report that only 32 percent of legal departments expect to hire more attorneys. A department that cannot add lawyers has to decide which questions stop needing one.

Notice also what Harvey says about the business side: people who send requests can track them without a Harvey seat. When the product owns the queue, the seat stops being the unit of value. What is being bought is resolved requests, and the share of them that never touched a lawyer.