The 'does anyone know this company?' email
A new enquiry comes in. Before anyone can open the matter, someone types the client's name and the other side into the search box of your practice management system. Nothing comes back, or three things come back that look vaguely similar. So an email goes to all fee earners: 'New matter, client Harbour Lane Developments, other side Mr J Okafor, any conflicts?' Half the office replies 'no', a quarter never reply, and the matter sits in draft until the supervising partner decides enough people have answered.
Meanwhile the prospective client is waiting, and they may well be talking to another firm. The fee earner who took the call is chasing replies on Teams. And nobody is quite sure whether the search covered the directors of Harbour Lane, or the company it changed its name from two years ago.
Why a name search is not enough
Practice management systems store parties, but they store them the way they were typed. 'J. Okafor', 'John Okafor' and 'Okafor, John (deceased)' are three different records to a simple search. Companies are worse: trading names, previous names, parent companies and directors usually sit in free text notes, if they were recorded at all.
Older matters make it harder again. Files migrated from a previous system often lost their party records and kept only a matter description. And the other side in a closed matter is often recorded less carefully than the client, even though that is exactly who a conflict check needs to find.
| What gets searched today | What usually gets missed |
|---|---|
| Client name as typed on the matter | Spelling variants, initials, married or former names |
| Company name | Previous names, trading names, group companies, directors |
| Open matters | Closed and archived matters, especially from a migrated system |
| The fee earner's memory | Matters run by people who have since left |
What slow or patchy checks cost the firm
The cost shows up in two places. The first is speed: every hour a new matter sits waiting for conflict clearance is an hour a competitor can use to call the client back first. The second is exposure. A missed conflict discovered halfway through a matter is painful to unwind, and it usually means someone has to explain how the check was done. 'We emailed everyone' is not a comfortable answer.
There is also a quieter cost. Your risk or compliance person spends a real part of their week reading reply-all emails and manually cross-referencing spreadsheets, which is not the work they were hired for.
How we build a proper conflict search
We work alongside your practice management system, whether that is Clio, LEAP, Actionstep or another platform with an API or a reliable export. The system of record does not change.
- Party index: we pull every client, other side, third party and linked person from open and closed matters into one searchable index, including records from any archive or older system you can give us access to.
- Name matching: the search compares names phonetically and by token, so 'Okafor J' and 'John Okafor' surface together, and it strips out 'Ltd', 'Limited' and similar noise before comparing companies.
- Company links: where you allow it, we look up the company on the public Companies House register and add previous names and officers to the search, so a director of the other side is checked too.
- Ranked results with reasons: each possible match shows why it was flagged (same surname and postcode, former company name, shared director) and which matter it came from.
- Clearance record: the person your firm authorises marks each hit as not a conflict, a conflict, or needing a decision, with a note. That record is saved against the new matter.
- Escalation: anything marked for a decision goes to the named partner with the evidence attached, rather than living in an email thread.
The system does not decide whether something is a conflict. It finds the candidates faster and more completely, and it keeps a record of how the question was answered.
What changes at the front of each matter
The fee earner who takes a new enquiry runs one search and gets a short list of real candidates instead of an empty result or a pile of noise. The office stops receiving 'any conflicts?' emails several times a day. Your compliance lead can see, for any matter, what was searched, what came up and who cleared it, without digging through inboxes.
Because the index covers closed files and former names, the search gets more useful the longer the firm has been trading, instead of less.
Is this your firm?
- Conflict checks involve an all-staff email or a message on Teams.
- New matters sit in draft while you wait for replies.
- Your old system's matters are not included in the search.
- Company previous names and directors are not checked routinely.
- Nobody could easily show how a particular conflict check was cleared.