Email box for members of a legal department to obtain work from clients, or not pick up work??

Here is a bizarre way to get work from clients. As written in Mark Prebble, Managing In-House Legal Services: Providing High Value Support for Your Organisation (Thorogood 2009) at 24, “Legal departments use a variety of methods to deal with incoming work, which include: 1. A central email address which clients use to log work with the legal team, members of which then pick up the items, with a process for allocating items which are not picked up.”

To be blunt, I find this system impossible to imagine working. No legal department should deal with its clients through email primarily. Clients can’t write out problems they face and certainly do not want to. Second, in-house lawyers should not themselves decide which matters they will take on. A manager decides workload. Third, where does external counsel fit into this strange scheme?