Ironclad workflow stuck at "pending legal review" - the approval never fires

Fix an Ironclad workflow stuck at "pending legal review"

TL;DR

The workflow is parked on a human approval step whose assignee never acted: the approver may have missed the notification, be on leave, or be offboarded. Open the workflow's activity and approval history, see exactly who the step is assigned to, then reassign or nudge them. To stop it recurring, add a backup approver or an escalation rule to the workflow design.

pending legal review

Steps

1. Open the workflow record and its approval/activity history. Expected: one step shows "pending" with a named assignee and a timestamp of when it was assigned.

2. Verify the assignee: still at the company, right person for this review, notification actually reachable. Expected: you either confirm they'll act now or discover the assignment is wrong (offboarded user, wrong group).

3. Reassign the approval to the correct person, or trigger a reminder from the workflow UI. Expected: the step advances once the new assignee approves; the workflow resumes.

4. Fix the workflow design: add a backup approver, an escalation after N days, or a group assignment instead of a single person. Expected: future runs can't be stalled by one absent approver.

Use this when

• A workflow has sat at "pending legal review" past its normal turnaround
• The assigned approver says they never saw the request
• Approvals keep stalling on the same step across multiple workflows

Not for this skill when

• The workflow errors on launch (that's an API/payload problem)
• The approval fired but the workflow went somewhere unexpected (that's a routing rule problem)
• Nobody can log in to Ironclad at all (that's an SSO/access problem)

Variant phrasings

ironclad approval never fires

Same diagnosis path: find the assigned step in the activity history first.

ironclad workflow stuck in review

Check whether it's the approval step or a conditional branch that never matched.

reassign ironclad approver on a running workflow

You can reassign mid-flight; the workflow keeps its state and history.

Why it happens

Approval steps are human gates with no automatic escalation by default. Notifications go to one person; if that person is out, offboarded, or the notification lands in spam, nothing moves and nothing alerts anyone. Conditional approval branches add a second failure mode: the condition never matches, so the step waits forever.

Edge cases

• Group-assigned approvals can stall if everyone assumes someone else will click first; name a primary.
• An approver who left the company may still be the assignee on the workflow design; audit assignments quarterly.
• Escalation rules only help if someone watches the escalation target; point them at a staffed queue.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_VAd1RDxVJI9SF7GzPiE3Pg