Tell a lawyer they have an SLA and watch the eyebrow go up. Service-level agreements? For legal? The profession that bills by the hour and measures work in “it'll be ready when it's right”?

Stay with me, because this is where a legal service desk stops being a fancier inbox and starts being a system. In Part 1 we built the front door — request types, a portal, and confidentiality from the first ticket. A front door is lovely. But if requests walk in and then pile up in an undifferentiated heap, you've just built a nicer place for work to stall. This part is about flow: routing it, moving it, approving it, and holding honest time on it.

Queues that reflect how legal actually works

In JSM, queues are how your team sees and prioritizes work — and the trick is to build them around reality, not an org chart. Route by request type or practice area so employment matters land with the employment folks and a standard NDA doesn't wait behind a merger. Sort by risk or contract value so the high-stakes deals rise to the top. And build the one queue every busy team swears by: “breaching soon.” A queue that surfaces work about to miss its target, checked every morning, prevents more misses than any reminder ever will.

A workflow everyone can see

Legal work has stages, even when it doesn't feel like it. A contract review, for instance, tends to move: New → In Review → Info Needed → In Legal Review → Approval → For Signature → Done. The point of putting that in JSM isn't bureaucracy — it's visibility. When the business can see a request parked at “Info Needed,” the “any update?” email evaporates, because the answer is right there: legal is waiting on them.

Approvals: the part legal has been waiting for

This is where JSM quietly shines for legal. Built-in approvals let you put a formal gate in the workflow: a contract over a set value routes to the GC for sign-off; a policy change requires two approvers; a vendor gets a compliance nod before anything moves. Approvers get a clear ask and approve or decline — from their phone if they're between meetings. No more chasing a signature through a forwarded email chain that dies in someone's drafts. The approval is logged, timestamped, and attached to the request forever, which — for a team whose whole job is defensible records — is not a small thing.

Yes, legal can have SLAs (the honest kind)

Here's the reframe that makes “legal SLA” stop sounding like a punchline. Nobody is promising to win a case in two hours. An SLA is a service commitment about responsiveness, not a pledge to rush judgment. “We'll acknowledge your request within one business day.” “A standard NDA turns around in three days.” Those are promises legal can keep, and keeping them is how legal earns the business's trust instead of its resentment.

JSM's SLAs are built for this nuance: set targets against business-hours calendars so the clock doesn't run over the weekend, pause the timer automatically when you're waiting on the requester, and escalate before a breach rather than after. If you want the nuts and bolts of configuring SLA start, pause, and stop conditions, I went deep on the mechanics in this piece on JSM's SLAs, queues, and automation — the same plumbing, viewed through a legal lens here.

One piece of advice I'll repeat until I'm hoarse: set targets you can actually hit, then tighten them. An SLA you consistently miss is worse than no SLA at all — it quietly teaches your team that the numbers are theater. Start slightly above your current average turnaround, prove you can hold it, and ratchet down from there.

Automation: build the express lane, keep the judgment

Once the workflow and SLAs exist, automation is what makes the whole thing feel effortless — and the highest-value rules for legal are the boring ones. A standard NDA on your standard template can be auto-routed, auto-approved where policy allows, and moved to signature without a human touching it: an express lane for the requests that genuinely don't need a lawyer's eyes. Auto-assign by practice area so nothing sits unclaimed. Auto-nudge the business when a request is missing information. Auto-escalate an SLA that's about to breach. Atlassian's Rovo AI can even help you build these rules, so you're not writing automation logic from scratch.

A word of restraint, because it matters more in legal than almost anywhere: fewer, well-owned rules beat a sprawl of clever ones. Automate the busywork around the decision — the routing, the reminders, the record-keeping — and leave the decision itself to a human. The goal is to free your lawyers for the work only lawyers should do, not to automate away the judgment that is the entire point of having a legal team.

The Avaratak Take

SLAs in legal aren't about turning counsel into an assembly line. They're about making a set of honest promises to the business and then keeping them — visibly, consistently, and with a record to show for it. The fastest way to lose the room is an SLA you can't hold; the fastest way to win it is a workflow where everyone can see exactly where their request stands and a set of approvals that actually move. Get routing, approvals, and realistic SLAs working together and you've built something the inbox could never offer: trust that scales.

Configuring approvals and SLAs so they fit your team — and don't quietly annoy your lawyers into abandoning them — is the part worth getting right the first time. That's the kind of thing we do at Avaratak every day.

In Part 3, we close the loop: how knowledge, Assets, and AI turn a working legal desk into one that answers half its own questions.