What a conflict check in software can and cannot do for you

Most small firms run conflict checks the same way: somebody who has been there a long time thinks about it for a moment, and if nothing surfaces, the matter opens. It usually works, because a two-attorney firm can hold most of its own client list in its head.

It stops working quietly. A paralegal who joined last year opens the matter. The long-serving person is on holiday. The client’s company was named something else when you acted against it in 2023. Nobody was careless; the method simply depended on a person being in the room.

Software can help with exactly one part of this, and it is worth being precise about which part, because the gap between what a conflict feature does and what people assume it does is where firms get hurt.

What it can do

Search your own files, every time, without being asked. This is the real contribution, and it is not clever — it is just reliable. A search that runs on every new matter runs when the usual person is away, when it is late, and when nobody thought there was any reason to look. Human memory does none of those consistently.

Interrupt. A check that produces a report somebody reads later has not prevented anything; it has documented it. What changes behaviour is a check that happens at the moment the matter is created and does not let the creation finish until the results have been seen. In Pertavo’s conflict check, opening a matter searches the firm, and if it finds anything, the matter is not created until somebody ticks to say they have reviewed what it found. The tick is not decoration — it is the point. It converts a thought into a record.

Leave a record that the look happened. Six months later, the useful question is rarely “was there a conflict”. It is “did anyone check, and what did they see”. A system that stores what was found and who acknowledged it answers that. A memory does not.

What it cannot do

It does not know the other side. This is the big one, and it is the assumption worth breaking early. A conflict system that holds your clients and your matters knows about your clients and your matters. It does not know that the defendant in the new case is the brother-in-law of a client you act for, unless somebody typed that in. Most real conflicts live in relationships that were never recorded anywhere.

It does not know your history before you started using it. A firm with fifteen years of files and eight months of software has a search that covers eight months. That is better than nothing and much worse than complete. The older files are still a manual job, and pretending otherwise is the most dangerous thing a vendor can let you believe.

It cannot tell that two records are the same person. “R. Aldridge”, “Rosalind Aldridge” and “Aldridge Holdings LLC” may be one party or three. Matching on names catches the obvious case and misses the deliberate one. Anybody trying to avoid detection will not be detected by string matching.

It cannot make the judgement, and it must not be described as if it could. Whether a potential conflict is actually disqualifying, whether it is waivable, whether a waiver is informed — those are questions for a lawyer against the rules of their own jurisdiction. Software can put the information in front of you at the right moment. The decision is where your professional judgement starts, not where it ends.

We would say this about anybody’s conflict feature, including ours. If a vendor’s marketing tells you their check makes you compliant with your conflict obligations, that sentence is doing work it cannot support.

The honest division of labour

Put the two lists together and the shape is clear enough.

The software’s job is to be the thing that never forgets to ask. It is fast, it is literal, it runs at three in the morning, and it has no opinion. Your job is everything that requires knowing what the names mean: the relationships that were never written down, the corporate history, whether the match it found is the same person, and what to do about it if it is.

A firm that treats the search as the whole process has automated the easy half and dropped the hard half. A firm that ignores the search because it is incomplete has kept the hard half and lost the reliability. The useful posture is to treat it as a prompt that cannot be skipped, attached to a process that is still yours.

What to do with this

Three things are worth doing whether or not you ever buy software for it.

Write your process down, even if it is four lines. Who runs the check, when, against what, and what happens when something is found. Most small firms have a process and no document describing it, which means it varies by who is doing it.

Decide what gets recorded. A check that produced no record is, from the outside, indistinguishable from a check that did not happen. If your system does not store the result, store it yourself — a line in the matter file is enough.

Deal with the back catalogue separately. If you adopt software, your old matters do not come with it unless you bring them. Decide deliberately whether to load historical clients and parties in, or to keep running the old files by hand, and write down which you chose. The failure mode is assuming the search covers everything because it covers everything it was given.

If you want to see what the interrupting version looks like in practice, conflict checks walks through the screen, and matters covers what gets recorded against the file once it opens. Or get in touch and we will open a matter on a call so you can see the check fire and tell us where it would fall short at your firm.

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This article describes how a software feature behaves. It is not advice about your professional obligations, which are set by your own jurisdiction’s rules and the opinions interpreting them, and those are the ones that bind you.