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There is growing propaganda in the marketplace that claims Conflicts Management is mostly about search. Nothing can be further from the truth! Read on.
If you are reading this blog and got past the first paragraph, you must know a thing or two about the conflicts management practice at a law firm. Some of you may even be conflicts administrators, conflicts managers, or running a global 24/7 conflicts department for one of the large multi-national law firms.
So let’s break it down, shall we?
- Conflicts Management is a practice.
- It’s about orchestration of activities related to a conflicts clearance process, before a new client/matter can be taken on by the firm.
- It requires coordination between people, departments, prospects, existing clients, partners, support staff.
- It needs to capture all the coordination, communication, questions and responses as it relates to the conflicts clearance activity.
- It requires the capture of a reproducible audit trail, so that in the likely event that the law firm needs to produce evidence as to the steps followed, sign-offs, approvals and decisions made, it can do so with ease.
Conflicts Management, just like any other practice, is based on a well-defined process. And at the core of every business process is…. you guessed it, a workflow engine/platform, and not a search engine.
Does a conflicts management system require a search engine? Absolutely! Should it provide a solid search engine that delivers the ability to index and search across all business-critical firm systems? Oh yeah. Should it be fast? Yup. Should it return a result list based on a solid relevance ranking algorithm? Sure. Is most of the activity, the guts of a conflicts management process/practice, in the search activity? Nope.
If I would want to represent the weighted relevance of various activities in the conflicts management practice at a law firm, the resulting pie chart would look like this:
15% – Pre-Search: Activity related to determining a search strategy. Do we search internal sources only? Do I do a full corporate tree analysis from D&B? Do I include the entire tree? Only subs? Only US? Who are on the boards of directors for the companies in question? Where else do they serve? Do I include them?
5% – The Search: I click the search button, the system goes away, and comes back with 4000 hits.
15% – Post-Search: Elimination of false-positives, re-ranking of results as appropriate, building of reports with relevant data.
65% – Process: Also known as orchestration, coordination, tracking, capture, audit.
Do not let anyone fool you that the core of a conflicts management system is the search engine. The magic is in the process. Choose a conflicts management system wisely. Based on how it can help you with your practice, how it can help you orchestrate, coordinate, track, capture and audit. Do not consider a conflicts management system that does not have a strong dependency on a workflow platform/engine/system at its core.
Talk to us about your Conflicts Management practice. We know what we’re talking about. We wrote LegalKEY Conflicts Management. The most broadly utilized conflicts management system by law firms in the world.
