To run a conflict check at a law firm, collect every name attached to the matter before you search anything: the prospective client and any former names, adverse parties, their insurers and counsel, employers, witnesses, related businesses and any lawyer already consulted. Search each one against current clients, former clients, open and closed matters, contacts and declined inquiries. Review every hit for whether it is the same person and whether the matters are substantially related. Then save the dated report with the reviewer name before the matter is opened. The search takes seconds. Gathering the names and reviewing the hits is the actual work.
Last updated August 2026.
Most guidance on conflict checks describes the software. That is the easy part, and it is not where firms get into trouble. Conflict problems almost never come from a search engine failing to match a string. They come from a name that was never collected, a check that ran after someone had already heard the facts, or a report nobody kept. This is the procedure, with the parts that actually fail called out.
Step 1: build the name list, and make it longer than feels necessary
The single largest determinant of whether a conflict check works is how complete the name list was. A search is string matching over a database. It cannot find a party nobody wrote down.
Take a routine personal injury inquiry. The obvious name is the caller. The names that matter are the other driver, the other driver's insurance carrier, any passengers in either vehicle, witnesses, the caller's employer if the accident happened at work, the treating providers, the caller's spouse where marital property or loss of consortium could arise, and any lawyer the caller already spoke to. That is eight to twelve entities from one phone call, and a web form asking for name, email, phone and "tell us about your case" will capture exactly one of them.
Commercial matters go wider still. A corporate client brings its parent, its subsidiaries, its major shareholders where relevant, the counterparty, the counterparty's parent, and the counsel on both sides. This is the category where checks most often take hours rather than minutes, and where firms most often discover a conflict late.
| Party type | Why it belongs in the search |
|---|---|
| Prospective client, including former and hyphenated names | A married name change is the most common reason an exact string search returns clean |
| Adverse parties | The core check. Representing someone against a current client is the classic Rule 1.7 problem |
| Insurers and opposing counsel | Frequently a current client of the firm in unrelated work |
| Employers and related businesses | Catches the entity conflict a personal name search misses entirely |
| Witnesses and family members | Lower risk, but the source of surprises in family and estate matters |
| Corporate parents and subsidiaries | A clean search on the subsidiary tells you nothing about the parent |
If you are designing the form that collects this, the useful discipline is to ask for parties by role rather than in a free text box. "Who is on the other side of this?" produces a name. "Tell us what happened" produces a paragraph that nobody will ever search. The same principle applies to the whole of intake, which is why the questions you ask at intake decide more about the firm's risk exposure than most people assume.
Step 2: run the first screen before you hear the facts
Timing is the part most procedures get wrong, and the reason is a rule that attaches duties earlier than people expect.
ABA Model Rule 1.18(a) states: "A person who consults with a lawyer about the possibility of forming a client-lawyer relationship with respect to a matter is a prospective client." Rule 1.18(b) adds that even when no relationship follows, a lawyer who has learned information from that person may not use or reveal it. And Rule 1.18(c) provides that a lawyer who received information that "could be significantly harmful" to the prospective client cannot then act against them in the same or a substantially related matter, with that disqualification imputed to the whole firm unless the exceptions in paragraph (d) are met.
Read that sequence and the practical instruction is obvious. The trigger for disqualification is receiving significantly harmful information. So the cheapest conflict to deal with is the one you find before anybody at the firm has heard any facts. A name-only screen at first contact costs almost nothing and removes most of the exposure.
Which is why the workable pattern is two stages. First, a fast name screen the moment an inquiry arrives, before the substantive conversation. Second, the full search across every party, document contents included, before the engagement letter is sent. Firms that run a single check at file opening are carrying risk between those two points for no benefit.
Step 3: know what your search is actually looking at
Conflict search tools differ more than their marketing suggests, and the differences decide what comes back. Four questions are worth asking your vendor directly.
Does it search document contents or only structured fields? A search over contact and matter names will miss a party who appears only inside a filed document. MyCase, for instance, sells full content search over scanned PDFs and text documents as a way to run a more comprehensive check, and describes its Conflict Check Tracking as searching across cases, contacts and documents.
Does it handle fuzzy and phonetic matching? Exact string matching fails on the everyday cases: a misspelled surname, a middle initial present in one record and absent in another, an entity recorded once as Acme Inc and once as Acme Incorporated.
Does the search scope include leads and declined inquiries? This is the one that catches firms out. If your system only holds signed matters, the people you turned away are invisible, and under Rule 1.18 those are precisely the people you may owe duties to.
Does it produce a report you can retrieve in three years? A search that returns results on screen and stores nothing gives you the check without the evidence you ran it.
Firms with material stored outside the practice management system, in old shared drives, archived mailboxes or scanned paper files, have a harder version of this problem, because a conflict search that only covers the current platform is searching a fraction of the firm's actual memory. Being able to search across everything the firm has ever stored, rather than only the records that made it into the matter database, is the difference between a check that is thorough and one that is merely quick.
Step 4: review the hits like a lawyer, not like an administrator
The software surfaces candidates. It does not decide anything. Someone has to answer three questions about each hit.
Is it the same person or entity? Common surnames generate noise, and the answer usually needs a second identifier such as an address, a date of birth or a matter reference.
Are the matters the same or substantially related? This is a legal judgment, not a clerical one. Two matters can involve the same party and be entirely unrelated, and the analysis differs depending on whether the person is a current client under Rule 1.7, a former client under Rule 1.9, or a prospective client under Rule 1.18.
If a conflict exists, is it waivable, and by whom? Some conflicts can be cured with informed consent confirmed in writing. Some cannot. Rule 1.10 governs when one lawyer's conflict is imputed to everyone else in the firm, and whether screening can prevent that.
The practical rule: an administrator can run the search and assemble the report. A lawyer has to clear it. Firms that let the search result itself function as the decision have automated the wrong half.
Step 5: keep the report, not just the outcome
Save the full output, the date, the exact search terms used, and the name of the person who reviewed and cleared it. Three years later, "we always run conflict checks" carries almost no weight and a retrievable dated report carries a great deal.
Then make the report a gate rather than a task. If your platform allows a matter to be opened without a completed conflict report attached, someone will eventually open one on a busy afternoon when a partner is pushing. If it does not allow that, the procedure enforces itself and nobody has to be the person who says no. This is worth testing specifically in any software demo, because most tools present the conflict search as something you can run rather than something the workflow requires.
Where conflict checks break in practice
The names were never collected. By far the most common failure, and the least visible one, because the search returns clean and everyone moves on. The fix is upstream, in what intake asks.
Declined inquiries left no record. A firm that opens a file only when someone signs has no trace of the people it turned away. Those inquiries need a record too.
Entity names entered inconsistently. A company recorded three different ways is a company your search will miss at least twice. Decide once how Inc, LLC and trading names are handled, and write it down.
The check ran after the consultation. By then the firm may already have received the information that creates the disqualification.
Nobody owns it. When the check is everyone's job it is nobody's job. Name a role, not a person, so it survives staff turnover.
Where the software you buy fits
Conflict searching is sold as a feature inside practice management rather than as a standalone product, and it is priced higher in the stack than most buyers expect. Read on 13 August 2026, MyCase lists Conflict Check Tracking only on its top plan, MyCase Advanced, at $150 per user per month or $130 annual, against a $60 entry plan. Clio confirms conflict checks run in both Clio Manage and Clio Grow but states only that the feature is available to select plans, without naming them. PracticePanther does not name a conflict check anywhere on its published feature matrix. The full comparison, with what each vendor publishes and on which tier, is on our conflict check software page.
Two things follow for anyone choosing software. Price the tier that actually includes conflict checking rather than the advertised entry price, because in this category the gap is routinely double or more. And remember that a general purpose CRM has no native concept of a conflict at all, which is one of the things that break when a firm runs Salesforce as its CRM.
The part worth repeating, because it is the part software will not solve for you: the search is only as good as the record it searches. Get the intake right and an ordinary conflict tool works well. Get the intake wrong and the best conflict search on the market will confidently return nothing.
See how Consultations runs intake for your field on the use cases page.