Widening a conflicts search past exact spelling
The search as typed finds only what was spelled the same way twice. Widening it means generating the variants people actually file under, the nickname against the formal name and the trading name against the registered entity, then walking the corporate parents and affiliates that intake never recorded. What comes back is a candidate list with the reason each row matched written beside it, assembled into a memo a lawyer signs. Clearing the conflict itself stays where the conduct rules put it, which is with the lawyer, and the tooling exists to widen the net rather than to close the question.
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.
- Clio
- Filevine
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if you want the system to decide. It cannot, so the honest scope is a wider search and better evidence, with the clearance decision staying on the desk of the person whose licence answers for it.
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.
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.
- Rebuilding an annual operating expense reconciliation from the lease
- Reconciling a broker trust account three ways every month
- Matching a closed transaction back to the lead that produced it
- Collapsing two overlapping MLS feeds into one property list
- Matching refrigerant bought against refrigerant put into equipment
- Finding the parts the truck says it still has
- 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.