Solutions / Law firms / Widening a conflicts search past exact spelling

Widening a conflicts search past exact spelling

Generating name variants, checking corporate affiliates and assembling the candidate list for review. The output is a memo a lawyer signs, never a cleared conflict. That boundary is not a limitation of the tooling, it is the rule.


Context / law firms Why this one is worth doing here

The same client name is typed into the conflicts database, the practice management system, the document management system and the ledger, and a conflict is only found later if two people spelled it the same way.

A firm organises everything by matter, and the matter record is created by hand from an intake form. That single re-keying step seeds four systems, and because there is no shared identifier between them, every later reconciliation is a name match against human typing.

Systems this usually touches

  • Clio
  • Filevine

When this is the wrong thing to build

Pick something else if you want the system to decide. It cannot, and a vendor who implies otherwise has not read the conduct rules.

The constraint that shapes it

The conduct rules decide what may be automated here, and they are adopted state by state rather than nationally, so specifics have to be checked against your own jurisdiction. More on how this sector works.

The same shape elsewhere / Reconciliation 12 sectors run it

Two sources of truth. One queue of the rows that do not line up. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.

Real estate
Rebuilding an annual operating expense reconciliation from the lease
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Reconciling a broker trust account three ways every month
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Matching a closed transaction back to the lead that produced it
Real estate
Collapsing two overlapping MLS feeds into one property list
Field services
Matching refrigerant bought against refrigerant put into equipment
Field services
Finding the parts the truck says it still has
What people ask about this 4 of them
  • How do I search conflicts for name variants and nicknames?
  • Does a conflicts check need to cover corporate parents and affiliates?
  • Why did our conflicts database miss a party we had sued before?
  • What should a conflicts memo contain before a lawyer signs it?

Back to law firms, or see how this is priced and scoped.