How Conflict searching works

Here's why there is a "matter" conflicts check in ProLaw and the type of firm it might appeal to:

Sometimes more than the parties must be checked. In the case of IP practice areas, the subject matter of a patent or a mark name is often important.

Also, the contacts conflict check is only accurate if you absolutely enter all contacts into Prolaw and add them to the matter. (Just entering them is not enough because you won't have enough information to know if the contact is a current conflict).

Frequently, after a matter is entered the people who actually work on the case "forget" that added parties, particularly adverse parties and clients, need to be checked. So that is a case where contacts are frequently missed. However, with the matter level search, if you include fields to search on such as a pleading caption, name of a mark or adverse mark, subject matter or title of a patent, etc. or other custom tab fields that could contain party or subject matter information (the matter description is a good one), you are less likely to "miss" a potential or real conflict. A missed conflict can result in a lost client and/or the loss of all billing on a case from which you must eject yourself if a conflict turns up after a case has been going on for a while.

So firms for whom the above would be real problems can take advantage of the wealth of information in their matters and not rely on memory. This assumes of course, that matter information is populated.

As to attorneys or even staff running a matter level conflicts check, this depends on the size of the firm. Smaller firms may wish to have this done by the attorney; however, they balk at what this means. The matter status must be "pending" at the time of a conflict check and the user running the conflict check must have a check on "conflict administrator". If so, each time they open ProLaw a list of pending matters appears. (You need not turn on the voting feature for this, but having that open list of pending cases pop up each time would be annoying to some if not most attorneys.) That's why some firms have the attorneys run a "down and dirty" conflicts search in contacts and, barring problems, pass the matter on. Then one person has the responsibility for looking at newly opened matters to run the "extra" matter level check.