How Instacart's Legal Team Streamlined Operations with Gumloop

Nicole Altman, Dylan Tonti, and Nicholas Dominici transformed Instacart’s legal team’s operations by addressing a critical challenge faced by in-house counsel: managing overwhelming volumes of inbound legal requests. Managing the legal@ inbox had long been a challenge, and the team had tried other solutions, but none worked well until they discovered Gumloop. 

With hundreds of weekly emails ranging from critical matters to routine inquiries, manual sorting and prioritizing consumed valuable time that could be better spent on strategic initiatives.

The breakthrough came when the team—with no engineering background—used Gumloop to build an AI-powered triage system. By translating legal expertise into an automated workflow, they freed the team from administrative busywork without requiring engineering resources or IT support.

Key Results

✅ Reduced Time on Legal Request Management by 80%
Instacart's legal team experienced a substantial decrease in hours spent sorting and triaging emails, freeing up more time for proactive, strategic legal work.

✅ Designed and Implemented by Legal Experts, Not Engineers
The entire solution was built by the legal team members themselves, allowing them to incorporate their domain expertise directly into the system without technical translation or dependency on IT resources.

✅ High Satisfaction Among Legal Staff
Team members reported increased job satisfaction as they shifted away from repetitive manual tasks to more engaging and meaningful work.

The Challenge

Instacart's legal team was drowning in emails. Hundreds of requests flooded their legal inbox weekly—ranging from urgent contractual matters and compliance questions to routine inquiries and irrelevant distractions.

Every day, the litigation operations team would spend valuable time manually sorting through this digital pile, trying to prioritize what needed immediate attention and determine who should handle each request. This process was:

• Time-consuming: Taking up to 20 hours per week
• Error-prone: Significant effort to ensure important requests did not slip through the cracks
• Inefficient: Significant time spent on triaging this inbox

The Solution

The legal team partnered with Gumloop to create "Legal@Intelligence," an AI-powered triage tool designed specifically to automate and streamline the management of inbound legal communications. By leveraging Gumloop's intuitive platform, the team built a workflow that automatically:

• Categorizes incoming emails by urgency, subject, and required expertise
• Routes requests directly to the appropriate teams throughout the company 
• Flags high-priority items instantly

Legal-Designed Intelligence

The team leveraged their deep understanding of legal request patterns to teach the AI how to:

• Distinguish between urgent matters and routine questions
• Identify subject categories based on legal terminology and context
• Recognize which team members had the right expertise for specific issues

Built by Legal, for Legal

The entire workflow was designed by the legal team based on their specific needs:

• They created custom categorization rules based on legal priorities, not technical frameworks
• They defined routing logic that mirrored their team's actual organization and expertise
• They built in legal-specific safeguards to ensure important matters received proper attention

As Nicole puts it: "We didn't have to translate our needs to engineers or wait in the IT queue. We understood our problems best, and with Gumloop, we had the tools to solve them ourselves."

Instacart's legal team exemplifies how AI-driven automation can elevate legal departments, empowering them to maximize their impact through strategic, high-value work rather than routine administrative tasks.

The Future

Following the success of Legal@Intelligence, the Instacart legal team plans to expand the use of Gumloop to:

• Extract deeper insights from their legal data, including identifying patterns in legal requests that could inform process improvements
• Implement predictive analytics around common legal challenges
• Develop proactive risk identification tools
• Automate contract review for standard agreements

"As a legal leader, I've always believed that innovation shouldn't be limited to our product and engineering teams. Nicole, Dylan, and Nicholas's initiative demonstrates that legal departments can drive meaningful technological change without deep technical expertise. This project has become a model for how other business units at Instacart approach automation and AI adoption." - Morgan Fong, General Counsel, Instacart

A Company-Wide AI Strategy

Instacart's legal team is just one example of how the company is embracing automation across the organization. Teams in sales, operations, and product are also leveraging Gumloop to automate workflows, with hundreds of use cases across 10 departments.

Rather than relying on lengthy approval processes or pulling engineering resources away from core product development, Instacart employees are building their own AI solutions—spending less time on manual work and more time delivering value to retailers, advertisers, and consumers.

Ready to Streamline Your Legal Operations?

Discover how Gumloop can automate your team's workflows, enhance operational efficiency, and empower your lawyers to focus on what they do best. Contact us today to learn more.