London — (February 5th, 2013) – Frayman Group, a leading provider of new business intake, risk and compliance software for law firms, today announced that major UK national law firm Weightmans LLP (“Weightmans”) has chosen Compliguard Protect, the leading legal information barriers solution based on the Microsoft’s .NET platform.   Weightmans will use Compliguard Protect to satisfy the increasing requirements for a centralised client security mechanism as part of a comprehensive approach to confidentiality across its network.

Weightmans are a National firm of over 1200 staff with offices in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, London, Leicester, Knutsford and Dartford.

“Compliguard Protect provides our firm with a powerful yet easy-to-use capability to meet the increasing demand for centralised client information protection,” said Stuart Whittle, IS and Operations Director at Weightmans.

Compliguard Protect is a next generation information barriers application designed from the ground up to help law firms deal with increasing demand from clients to demonstrate and ensure that their information can be ring-fenced with total security across all of the systems in use by the firm, limiting access to authorized personnel only.  In addition, the system monitors information access and highlights unusual levels of activity to Partners and Compliance Officers.

“We are delighted that Weightmans are joining the fast-growing list of UK Compliguard Protect customers,” said Bryan Roberts, Managing Director of Frayman Group UK. “Frayman Group’s purpose-built business intake, risk and compliance applications are now leading the way for law firms to be highly competitive, attractive to clients and compliant with regulations and privacy requirements.”

Compliguard Protect is part of Frayman Group’s end-to-end risk management platform, which includes:

• Compliguard Flow – legal industry’s fastest design-to-production new business workflow application
• Compliguard Analyze – second generation conflicts management application designed to deliver smart automation, mobility and accountability to the mission-critical conflicts management process
• Compliguard Protect – information governance, confidentiality management and unusual activity monitoring application
• Compliguard Hold – non-intrusive legal hold process management for law firms

The Compliguard platform is built on the latest Microsoft technology, requiring nothing but a web browser on the client desktop to operate.

Follow Frayman Group on Twitter: @thefraymangroup

About Frayman Group

Frayman Group, a leading provider of software and services for law firms, combines industry expertise with innovative technology to help customers automate business processes, mitigate risk, manage compliance and improve competitiveness. The company is headquartered in New York City.  For more information, visit www.fraymangroup.com.

Press Contact:

Alp Hug
The Frayman Group
718.648.7700
press@fraymangroup.com

Fundamental to the practice of law are lawyers’ duties of loyalty and confidentiality to their clients. According to the rules of professional conduct, a lawyer cannot represent one client if doing so adversely affects the interests of another. In a global economy of multi-national conglomerates, determining the ownership relationships that create ethical conflicts and the competitive relationships that create business ones is complicated and highly nuanced. In addition, law firms must protect themselves from taking on problem clients and do so with due diligence that verifies the identity of a client or service beneficiary and the purpose and intended nature of the business relationship.

Forward-thinking law firms are changing the duties and staffing of their Conflicts Departments. They need a conflicts system that is a repository of the wide-ranging information needed for due diligence and the backbone for the conflicts clearance conflicts process. Is this an area where there is a safe choice between a best-of-breed application and an integrated product suite? We don’t think so; in legal, the focus of the integrated product suite remains time and billing; not the mission critical clearance of conflicts. It shows in their offerings.

Here’s the new standard for a conflicts clearance application.

1. Accurate, Up-to-Date Information through total, real-time immersion of commercial corporate family, financial service, regulatory and risk-related reference databases in the conflicts app. There should be no need for Conflicts staff to go through tedious, multi-step processes to bring data from commercial repositories into their search results.
2. Context-Sensitive Presentation of Information so that both the context of the hit and reason it is being presented are immediately apparent. Information associated with Specially Designated Nationals, strategic initiatives, marketing contacts, or attorney prior work history need not be shoe-horned into a fixed record layout.
3. Sophisticated Search Operations that automatically remove noise words, apply synonyms and nicknames, and – when false hits are identified – keep them from being published in future searches. Senior analysts can set and save these search parameters, which can then be run by more junior personnel with confidence. Great leverage of expertise!
4. On-Line Decision Making that let Conflicts staff “slice-and-dice” conflicts search results online to see issue patterns, separate potential conflicts from real ones, and identify those to be escalated for approval.
5. Precise Escalation of Issues not Reports to affected attorneys and senior management – via email, no less.
6. Mobile Approval via tracked email conversations that untethers decision makers from the office and provide the highest degree of flexibility in responding to conflicts inquiries.
7. Behind-the-Scenes Decision Tracking that retains a clear and instantly accessible history of the decision making.

Are there benefits to the conflicts module of an integrated product suite? Well, not that we see. The standard arguments include:

1. My firm doesn’t’ have special requirements. Possible if yours is a firm that has:

• Never merged
• Never takes on a problem client
• Only practices domestically
• Doesn’t need to follow international anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing standards
• Has lawyers with enough time and ethical wherewithal to clear conflicts with only clerical assistance.

1. My firm must have an integrated platform. Perhaps, but integration is easily achievable with a best-of-breed product that is based on Microsoft’s technology stack, has pre-developed integrations to the APIs of Aderant, Elite Enterprise, Elite 3E, InterAction, Open Text and iManage document management, and proven methodologies to integrate with pre-existing data warehouses.
2. My firm wants to deal with one vendor. OK, but be careful about getting locked in. Once the suite is purchased, it’s unlikely that the vendor will give its conflicts module proportionally equal R&D resources, and it’s likely that upgrades to the conflicts module will be constrained by the timing of the “big gorilla” time and billing core of the suite.
3. Best of Breed is more expensive. You get what you pay for. We’re worth it.

Conclusion

In the mission-critical conflicts arena, it’s the functionality of the best-of-breed application that rules. In the small world of law firm specific applications, integration is easily accomplished.

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. And now we have delivered again with Compliguard Analyze, the legal-industry’s only patented conflicts system that features a process-driven conflicts clearance solution.

Traditional approaches that rely on fee earners and support staff to enforce confidentiality on a per application basis rely heavily on administrative staff, and are no longer sufficient to satisfy clients’ needs and regulatory requirements.

Increasingly, there are many real-life examples of ineffective ethical walls (or lack thereof) and the resulting fines and disqualifications law firms are regularly faced with.  A recent example is of this is Line Trust Corp. Ltd, et al. v. David Lichtenstein, et al, heard before the Supreme Court of the State of New York.  In this case, a lawyer made a lateral move and brought his client with him, which resulted in a firm representing adverse parties.  The firm’s IT department audit revealed document access by an unauthorized party and caused a judge to conclude that an ethical wall either did not exist or if it did, it was ineffective.

At the root of these issues is the inability of an ad-hoc, home-grown system to automatically monitor, identify and resolve ethical wall conflicts.  Today’s regulation-heavy law firm environment requires a system where the firm can manage automatic creation of walls, monitoring of all systems to ensure proper wall enforcement, and ensuring ethical walls extend and encompass all key systems and repositories where sensitive information is stored.

What is needed is an enterprise ethical walls system designed for law firms to manage confidentiality, protect sensitive information and reduce risk exposure by establishing, monitoring and updating security from a single point of entry for all mission-critical firm systems and content, in real-time.

An enterprise ethical walls system automates the creation and monitoring of all ethical walls across all information repositories from a single control center, providing the firm with the ability to defend its position, along with a comprehensive audit trail to demonstrate how and when information was secured, and all attempts to access this information by authorized and unauthorized parties and any actions taken. It streamlines the process of wall creation and monitors all access to ensure compliance throughout the lifecycle of a wall.

In addition, a commercial system is maintained and functionality is further enhanced to meet the ever changing needs of the market. This ensures firms will never fall behind in terms of functionality and will continue to easily comply with ethical wall requests based on ethical and regulatory requirements.

For more information about ethical walls and Frayman Group’s industry-leading ethical walls system Compliguard Protect, see here. Compliguard Protect 6 delivers many industry-firsts and is the most comprehensive confidentiality management application at an affordable price point.

New York — (Aug 28, 2012) – Frayman Group, a leading provider of new business intake, conflicts and risk management software for law firms, today announced that Stikeman Elliott LLP is now in production with Compliguard Flow, the legal industry’s most comprehensive new business intake and matter lifecycle management application.

Stikeman Elliott is one of Canada’s leading business law firms.  The firm is recognized as a Canadian leader in each of its core practice areas – corporate finance, M&A, banking, corporate commercial, real estate, tax, insolvency, structured finance, competition, infrastructure, communications, intellectual property, employment and business litigation- and is regularly retained by domestic and international companies in a wide range of industries including financial services, insurance, technology, telecommunication, transportation, manufacturing, mining, energy, infrastructure and retail.

Stikeman Elliott and Frayman teams focused on delivering the firm a modern business intake application that is specifically tailored to meet the needs of the firm.  The system also seamlessly integrates with the firm’s Aderant CMS and InterAction systems to automate lookups and eliminate rekeying of data during the business intake process.  In addition, the system provides a multilingual interface in both French and English delivering localized versions of the user interface, notifications, labels, values and more, all based on office affiliation. In the coming months, Compliguard Flow will automate anti-money-laundering (AML) and Know-Your-Client (KYC) workflows as part of the client/matter opening process to ensure full compliance with regulatory requirements.

“As a firm with offices in various Canadian provinces and in other countries, we have complex business requirements both from a regulatory and process perspective.” said  Mary Dagg, Director of Finance at Stikeman Elliott LLP. “Frayman Group’s Compliguard Flow was up to the task and delivered a state-of-the-art intake environment that is tailored to meet our needs.”

“Working with the Stikeman Elliott project management team, we achieved our goal of delivering a business intake application that satisfies the firm’s business and technology needs, while allowing the firm to function at a higher level of efficiency,” said Yelena Chervinsky, VP, Risk Management Consulting at Frayman Group.

Compliguard Flow is part of Frayman Group’s end-to-end risk management platform, which includes:

• Compliguard Flow – legal industry’s fastest design-to-production new business workflow application
• Compliguard Analyze – second generation conflicts management application designed to deliver smart automation, mobility and accountability to the mission-critical conflicts management process
• Compliguard Protect – information governance, ethical walls, confidentiality management and unusual activity monitoring application
• Compliguard Hold – non-intrusive legal hold process management for law firms

The Compliguard platform is built on the latest Microsoft technology, requiring nothing but a web browser on the client desktop to operate.

Follow Frayman Group on Twitter (@thefraymangroup) and Facebook.

About Frayman Group

Frayman Group, a leading provider of software and services for law firms, combines industry expertise with innovative technology to help customers automate business processes, mitigate risk, manage compliance and improve competitiveness. The company is headquartered in New York City.  For more information, visit www.fraymangroup.com.

Press Contact:

Alp Hug
The Frayman Group Inc.
+1 718-648-7700
press@fraymangroup.com

# # #

New York — (August 27, 2012) – Frayman Group, a leading provider of new business intake, conflicts and compliance software for law firms, today announced that the prestigious AM LAW 100 firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP has selected Frayman Group’s Compliguard platform as its business intake workflow, conflicts management and ethical walls solution.

Founded in 1945, Seyfarth Shaw has more than 800 attorneys in the U.S. and in London.  The firm offers a national platform and an international gateway to serve its clients’ changing business and legal needs in litigation, employment, corporate, real estate and employee benefits.

Seyfarth Shaw will integrate the Compliguard solution with the firm’s Elite Enterprise Practice Management System, LegalKEY Records Management, and Autonomy Document Management systems.

Seyfarth is a LegalKEY Conflicts Management user and will be migrating to Compliguard Analyze to take advantage of its advanced features such as Automated Conflicts Attendant™, seamless integration with D&B corporate tree data, and the best-of-breed clearance capabilities which will allow the firm to capture all conflicts clearance decisions for audit and compliance purposes.

“We chose to partner with Frayman Group because of their stellar reputation in the market, deep domain expertise and the maturity of the Compliguard platform,” said Andrew D. Jurczyk, Chief Information Officer at Seyfarth Shaw. “We will leverage the Compliguard platform to address our internal mandate for Lean Six Sigma business process improvement to streamline business intake and improve speed and accuracy of our conflicts searches.  We expect Compliguard to improve our risk department’s productivity while decreasing our exposure to risk and improving attorney and client satisfaction.”

“We are very pleased to add Seyfarth Shaw into the growing community of Frayman Group’s AM LAW 100 clients”, said Yuri Frayman, President & CEO of Frayman Group. “We are looking forward to working with the firm to help improve its business intake, conflicts and information governance practices; delivering automation while ensuring compliance.”

Compliguard is an end-to-end risk management platform, which includes:

• Compliguard Flow – legal industry’s fastest design-to-production new business workflow application
• Compliguard Analyze – second generation conflicts management application designed to deliver smart automation, mobility and accountability to the mission-critical conflicts management process
• Compliguard Protect – information governance, confidentiality management and unusual activity monitoring application
• Compliguard Hold – non-intrusive legal hold process management for law firms

The Compliguard platform is built on the latest Microsoft technology, requiring nothing but a web browser on the client desktop to operate.

Follow Frayman Group on Twitter (@thefraymangroup) and Facebook.

About Frayman Group

Frayman Group, a leading provider of software and services for law firms, combines industry expertise with innovative technology to help customers automate business processes, mitigate risk, manage compliance and improve competitiveness. The company is headquartered in New York City.  For more information, visit www.fraymangroup.com.

Press Contact:

Alp Hug
The Frayman Group
+1 718.648.7700
press@fraymangroup.com

# # #

New York — (15, 2012) – Frayman Group, a leading provider of new business intake, conflicts and risk management software for law firms, today announced that Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP (“Katten”) is now in production with Compliguard Flow, the legal industry’s most comprehensive new business intake and matter lifecycle management application.

Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP is a full-service law firm with 600 lawyers in offices across the United States and in Shanghai and an affiliate in London. The Firm’s core areas of practice are corporate, financial services, litigation, real estate, commercial finance, intellectual property and trusts and estates. Among the Firm’s clients are a wide range of public and private companies, including a third of the Fortune 100.

Frayman Group’s risk management consulting team worked closely with Katten to build a business intake workflow environment based on the firm’s specific requirements, automating numerous processes, each with their unique approval mechanisms and algorithms, as well as integrations with Microsoft Biztalk and LegalKEY.

“The success of a project of this size and magnitude requires deep domain expertise, strong project management skills and great coordination between the vendor and the firm,” said a Katten representative. “Frayman Group delivered on product, people and expertise, and allowed us to capture and implement our requirements into our new state of the art business intake environment.”

Katten’s new business intake environment is very feature-rich, with special emphasis on automation and mobility.  The Firm can now access advanced business intake functionality on mobile devices including approvals and response tracking.

“With Katten’s new business intake implementation, we were able to raise the bar for what a law firm should have in place for matter intake and lifecycle management,” said Yelena Chervinsky, VP of Risk Management Consulting at Frayman Group.  “We are looking forward to helping the firm expand on this functionality in the future.”

Compliguard Flow is part of Frayman Group’s end-to-end risk management platform, which includes:

• Compliguard Flow – legal industry’s fastest design-to-production new business workflow application
• Compliguard Analyze – second generation conflicts management application designed to deliver smart automation, mobility and accountability to the mission-critical conflicts management process
• Compliguard Protect – information governance, ethical walls, confidentiality management and unusual activity monitoring application
• Compliguard Hold – non-intrusive legal hold process management for law firms

The Compliguard platform is built on the latest Microsoft technology, requiring nothing but a web browser on the client desktop to operate.

Follow Frayman Group on Twitter (@thefraymangroup) and Facebook.

About Frayman Group

Frayman Group, a leading provider of software and services for law firms, combines industry expertise with innovative technology to help customers automate business processes, mitigate risk, manage compliance and improve competitiveness. The company is headquartered in New York City.  For more information, visit www.fraymangroup.com.

Press Contact:
Alp Hug
The Frayman Group
+1 718-648-7700
press@fraymangroup.com

# # #

New York – (May 1st, 2012) – Frayman Group (www.fraymangroup.com), a leading provider of new business intake and risk management software for law firms, today announced Compliguard.Cloud, its Cloud-based risk management platform designed to provide rich business intake, conflicts and matter lifecycle management functionality for law firms.

Law firm IT departments are reevaluating their significant investments in data centers and associated resources managing on-premise applications.  Compared to the traditional software application provisioning lifecycle, cloud-based applications dramatically reduce timelines for software availability, and eliminate requirements for in-house IT resources to manage the hardware and application infrastructure.

“Law firms do not want to be in the business of managing data centers and application infrastructure, “ said Yuri Frayman, President & CEO at Frayman Group.  “With the latest advances in public cloud offerings, coupled with the reliability, speed and security of the Internet infrastructure, the time is right to deliver a cloud-based application platform for law firms.”

With Compliguard.Cloud, Frayman Group becomes the first vendor to provide a comprehensive SaaS cloud strategy for law firms to license and manage business intake, conflicts and matter lifecycle management applications.

“Law firms want to maximize the value they get out of their software investments, while minimizing the cost associated with managing and maintaining these applications,” said Mohit Thawani, SVP Products at Frayman Group.  “Compliguard.Cloud will help firms satisfy both of these requirements by delivering a rich, secure, reliable application and eliminating any overhead associated with deploying, configuring and managing these applications.”

With Compliguard.Cloud, law firms get:

• True SaaS Platform: High availability, secure, reliable rich Internet application platform
• True Mobility: Compliguard.Cloud is accessible from desktops, laptops, and mobile devices including smartphones and tablets
• Significantly reduced cost and implementation time: There is no need to commission and buy server hardware, install operating system environments, and databases.  All hardware and software is already configured and maintained in the Cloud.
• Instant-On: Ability for law firms to go live within days leveraging standard Compliguard templates, while also providing the ability to customize to each individual law firm’s needs.
• Application Integration: Integration with on-premise and hosted applications leveraging Web Services APIs.
• Automatic Maintenance: No more time-consuming software upgrades with dedicated resources and downtimes.  Compliguard.Cloud is always on the latest available version of the application.

Compliguard.Cloud leverages the latest available cloud infrastructure to satisfy the most stringent requirements of the most demanding law firm environments.   Specifically, Compliguard.Cloud features:

• SSAE 16 Type 2 and SOC 2 certified data center
• Strong passwords, access control, audit trails, and data encryption
• VeriSign secure, 128-bit RSA encryption (SSL) for secure transfer of data
• 256 bit AES encryption of data at rest
• 24/7/365 monitoring of application services
• 99.95% uptime, higher than most on-premise applications
• Rich Internet Application based on Silverlight and HTML5 user interfaces, with optimized network traffic

Compliguard.Cloud is expected to be available in Q4 2012, starting with Compliguard Flow and Compliguard Analyze.  Pricing is on a subscription basis, based on the number of attorneys at a firm.

For more information, please visit http://compliguard.com.

About Frayman Group

Frayman Group, a leading provider of software and services for law firms, combines industry expertise with innovative technology to help customers automate business processes, mitigate risk, manage compliance and improve competitiveness. The company is headquartered in New York City.  For more information, visit www.fraymangroup.com.

###

New York — (December 8, 2011) – Frayman Group (www.fraymangroup.com), a leading provider of new business intake and risk management software for law firms, today announced further strengthening of its executive team with the appointment of Ms. Meg Block as Senior Vice President of Risk Management Consulting.  Ms. Block will be joining Frayman Group in January 2012.

With over twenty-five years of experience consulting to the legal community, Ms. Block specializes in business process reviews and the design of enterprise-wide risk management programs. Ms. Block has long been recognized as a thought leader in the areas of new business intake and conflicts of interest, and speaks and writes frequently on these topics.

For the past eighteen years, Ms. Block has been a Managing Director with HBR Consulting LLC, previously known as Baker Robbins & Company and Hildebrandt Baker Robbins.

Ms. Block will be heading up Frayman Group’s risk management practice and continue to deliver value to the legal community by providing in-depth risk management process reviews and tailored system designs.  Ms. Block will also be forming a consortium of risk management leaders in the legal industry to explore the dynamic challenges of managing information securely and effectively.

“Meg is a great addition to our team as she brings a tremendous amount of business intake, conflicts and risk domain expertise and best practices,” said Yuri Frayman, President & CEO at Frayman Group. “We are looking forward to extending our consulting practice under Meg’s guidance, and leveraging her deep domain expertise to further enrich our risk management platform.”

“I am very excited to join Frayman Group,” said Meg Block. “The combination of my expertise and Frayman’s business intake workflow, conflicts and confidentiality management solutions will set the standard for how to define and deliver to a law firm’s risk management requirements, maximizing its return on investment.”

About Frayman Group

Frayman Group, a leading provider of software and services for law firms, combines industry expertise with innovative technology to help customers automate business processes, mitigate risk, manage compliance and improve competitiveness. The company is headquartered in New York City.  For more information, visit www.fraymangroup.com.

Press Contact:

Alp Hug
The Frayman Group
+1 (718) 648-7700
press@fraymangroup.com

# # #