ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery (LSD): A Complete Guide

ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery (LSD) is a purpose-built solution designed to optimize a company’s legal processes. It eliminates repetitive tasks and allows legal teams to focus on other strategic work. Built on the ServiceNow AI Platform (formerly known as the Now Platform), it offers a digital-first legal operations platform that streamlines and centralizes how requests are captured, tracked, and resolved.

Let’s learn more about the solution’s offerings and benefits for modern-day business legal operations. Let’s begin!

What does ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery do?

Legal Service Delivery was aimed at aiding an organization’s in-house counsel and legal teams’ processes. It does it by providing them with real-time actionable insights, enabling a self-service for their employees, and eventually driving optimal operational efficiency.

Legal service delivery works alongside other Service Now products, such as ITSM, HR products, and Workplace Service Delivery, Procurement Service Delivery, and it’s all really focused around the needs of the employee. For instance, legal requests tied to HR cases or procurement contracts can be tracked and resolved more efficiently. This alignment ensures that legal services are not siloed but instead embedded into everyday workflows, enhancing operational agility.

With ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery, businesses can achieve the following benefits:

Streamlined legal operations: Legal teams have to spend less time on admin and more on high-value work. The platform removes manual email processes with a self-service portal. Plus, it enables the teams to balance, manage, and prioritize demands against all other matters in the process. This is achieved through automated workflows, centralized request tracking, and built-in prioritization tools that help legal teams work quickly within a single platform.

Improved compliance management: Since every matter is documented and auditable. The compliance and regulatory standards of the organization can be managed well.

Workflow automation: Using prebuilt logic, LSD routes tasks (like contract reviews or policy updates) to the appropriate person or team. Low-risk requests like standard NDAs can even be auto-approved and fulfilled with preloaded templates.

Faster request turnaround: The workflow automation routing ensures timely legal responses across departments. It automates responses for common legal requests with the help of virtual agents. Improving faster request resolutions and cross-departmental harmony.

Data insights: The organization’s upper management (Chief Legal Officers and Legal Services Delivery Manager) can gain real-time visibility into processing requests and performance metrics. It also lets the corporate legal teams accurately track, prioritize, and fulfill ongoing legal affairs (based on metrics like SLA adherence and legal risk exposure). Eventually leading to continuous improvement.

How is the solution capable of achieving all of this? It is due to its extensive range of features. Let’s discuss them one by one.

Core features and offerings of ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery explained

Here are some of the most prominent features and offerings of the platform.

Legal Request Management

This ServiceNow product enables employees to submit legal requests through a structured, user-friendly portal. The platform then ensures that incoming requests are automatically categorized and routed to the appropriate legal teams based on predefined business rules through its request management module.

Further, as per Yokohama’s release, the AI agents can now handle the manual work by:

• Analyzing general legal requests
• Categorizing them in subcategories based on predictive intelligence
• Then, based on appropriate legal categories, send the requests further for matter resolution (based on severity) for enhancing efficiency in legal service delivery.

Legal Matter Management

The purpose of this module is to centralize and track the complete lifecycle of legal matters without having to look for messy spreadsheets. It does it efficiently by keeping track of ongoing cases within a structured organizational framework.

It enables legal teams to initiate matters through:

• Structured intake forms (with details like parties involved, type of dispute, urgency)
• Assigned tasks,
• Pre-defined rules and deadlines,
• Progress monitoring through dashboards and workflows.

Along with that, with built-in notifications, audit trails, and secure document storage all in one place lets the teams collaborate efficiently.

Note: ServiceNow Legal Case Management operates under this module only. It is more tactical and often used by internal teams to manage specific legal incidents. It handles structured internal legal cases like investigations or HR-related legal issues.

Legal Practice Apps

ServiceNow offers configurable applications designed for specific legal functions, such as:

• Conflict of Interest Management
• Legal Investigations
• Gift and Entertainment Approvals
• Insider Trading Pre-Clearance
• Legal Hold and eDiscovery
• IP Rights Requests

These applications are built with pre-configured workflows, forms, and logic, allowing legal teams to implement governance and compliance policies more consistently and with less effort.

Legal Counsel Center

The Legal Counsel Center provides a centralized workspace for legal professionals with a personalized dashboard displaying their assigned matters, tasks, SLA commitments, and action items. It improves visibility, workload distribution, and prioritization.

Self-Service Legal Portal

This is a user-friendly interface for employees to interact with legal services. Users can raise new legal requests, track progress, and see status updates, eliminating the need for follow-ups or emails. Here, ServiceNow’s intelligent Virtual Agent assists users in finding information, completing forms, or initiating legal requests through guided conversations.

Employee Center

For offering unified enterprise services that are accessible through a single enterprise portal that integrates with other departments, such as HR, IT, and Finance. This ensures employees do not need to navigate multiple systems to request support.

Pro-tip: Wondering how Legal Counsel Center, Employee Center, and Self-Service Legal Portal are interconnected? Here’s how! They are in a complementary relationship. All employees, regardless of their department, can access the Employee Center. Within the Employee Center, there is a self-service portal where employees can submit their legal requests. Once a request is submitted, it is processed further in the Legal Counsel Center.

Legal Contracts

The contract module supports intake, review, approvals, and routing of various types of contracts. The legal teams can set up automated workflows that ensure consistency, reduce risk, and accelerate processing time.

Here, the integration with AI-based tools like Now Assist for Contracts also allows automatic extraction of contract clauses. Along with the comparison of versions and identification of risk elements, further streamlining the review process.

Legal Knowledge Management

With Legal Knowledge Management, legal teams can publish policies, templates, FAQs, and procedural documentation to a centralized knowledge base. These resources are indexed and searchable, enabling employees to resolve basic queries without raising tickets. This centralized knowledge base can easily reduce the volume of repetitive requests, such as “When is an NDA required?” or “What is the process for third-party risk assessments?”.

Now Mobile & Mobile Agent

Legal agents and representatives can view, approve, or act on matters and requests directly from mobile devices using the Now Mobile and Mobile Agent applications. This capability supports faster response times, especially for urgent matters.

How does ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery work?

This is a simple breakdown of how ServiceNow LSD works:

• There is a request intake initiated by the user.
• Then, based on the prioritization categorization and routing takes place.
• The request gets to the Legal Counsel Center workspace for further processing.
• In case the matter needs more in-depth legal investigation, it gets escalated to Legal Matter Management for intervention.
• Document Handling is done via the centralized knowledge base.
• Then the specified teams and the user get notifications regarding the status of the case.
• Finally, the case gets a closure and resolution.

Let’s understand this flow with the help of these two hypothetical examples.

Scenario 1: Contract Review Request

• Imagine there’s a sales employee who needs a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) reviewed.
• He logs into the Employee Center and submits a request.
• The system will automatically route the request to the designated Contracts team.
• The legal team will then review the NDA, update the request status, and attach the final document.
• Finally, the employee will receive a notification with the completed NDA.

Scenario 2: Ethics Complaint

• There’s an employee who witnesses a potential conflict of interest and wants to report it anonymously.
• They can use the self-service portal to submit a complaint.
• Then, via routing, the Legal Investigations team will receive the request in the Legal Counsel Center.
• They will then initiate an investigation, gather evidence, and document findings from the knowledge base.
• Then, a final report will be generated and stored securely, escalated to the designated teams with recommended actions.

Who should use Legal Service Delivery by ServiceNow?

ServiceNow LSD is designed for organizations of all sizes that require efficient management of legal operations. It is particularly valuable for:

• Corporate legal departments that manage high volumes of contracts and compliance requests.
• In-house legal teams for efficiently tracking ongoing matters, investigations, and ensuring timely responses.
• Human Resources departments handle employee-related legal requests, contract reviews, and workplace investigations.
• Procurement teams that require automation in vendor contract processes.

Real-world examples of companies using ServiceNow LSD

ServiceNow

ServiceNow’s legal team uses LSD for transforming its internal processes into fast, automated workflows that improve productivity and manage costs efficiently.

Tennessee DHS

Tennessee DHS earlier was dealing with disorganized legal workflows reliant on paper, email, and spreadsheets. By adopting LSD, they automated routing, enhanced visibility, and improved service timelines.

Snowflake

Snowflake’s manual legal processes couldn’t keep up with post-IPO volume. Their stock approvals and vendor contracts were also siloed in emails. LSD brought automation and SLA tracking. Eventually, reducing approval times and transforming them into a fast-moving business enabler.

KPMG

KPMG’s legal processes were slowed by manual contract approvals and fragmented workflows. This limited employee productivity and delayed client service. By deploying LSD, they automated approvals and integrated risk management. Along with that, they empowered their staff with low-code tools, freeing up time for high-value client work.

Summary

As businesses scale, so do their complexities. While their legal teams remain under pressure. Not anymore, ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery bridges this gap by introducing structure, automation, and insight into legal operations. At Cyntexa, we as a ServiceNow Consulting & Implementation partner help businesses explore the possibilities of ServiceNow LSD for their organizations. So if you’re ready to transform how your legal team works, let’s connect!

Schedule a consultation call today!

AUTHOR

Shruti

ServiceNow, Sales Cloud

Shruti is a ServiceNow Consultant with 5+ years of experience across ServiceNow ITSM, AWS, Salesforce Loyalty Management, and managed services. She blends technical expertise with strategic insights to deliver transformative IT services and CRM solutions that enhance efficiency and customer satisfaction.