Conflict check

Before accepting a new engagement, you can check in Legalsense whether taking it on would create a conflict of interest, for example because your firm already acts for the other party, or because a fee earner has a personal or financial interest in the matter. Legalsense's conflict check searches across your clients, matters, contacts, users, and creditors, so you can see at a glance whether a name you're about to take on already appears somewhere in your firm's records.

Note: Fill in your clients' and contacts' details as completely as possible, including alternative names and VAT numbers. This helps the conflict check work better.

When you need a conflict check

Run a conflict check at each of these moments:

• Before you accept a new client or matter. Check the name of the prospective client and, if you know it, the name of the counterparty, before you create the client or matter in Legalsense.
• When a new party becomes involved in an existing matter. If a new counterparty, contact, or other related party is added to a matter after it started, for example because a co-defendant joins the case, check that party's name too.
• When a new fee earner joins your firm. A fee earner joining from elsewhere may bring a client or matter history with them. Check their previous clients and counterparties against your own client base before they start working on new matters.
• Periodically, for long-running clients or matters. New counterparties and contacts can be added to a matter over time, so it's good practice to repeat the check as a matter progresses, not only at intake.

Perform a conflict check

1. Go to Matters → Conflict check.
2. In the search field, enter (part of) a name or a VAT number.
3. Click Search. Legalsense searches for matching letter combinations to the text you entered.

For example, searching for "Heuvel" returns results in four categories: Clients, Matters, Contacts and Historical data. In this example, there are no results in Users or Creditors.

At a glance, you can see whether there is a conflict of interest.

Legalsense conflict check results page, showing search results grouped into the Clients, Matters, Contacts, Users, Creditors, and Historical data categories.

How the search works

Legalsense doesn't only match names that start with the text you enter. It matches the letter combination anywhere in the field, so searching for "cons" can also surface a client called "Iconstruct BV" or a contact named "Constance de Vries". This is also why filling in fields such as alternative names as completely as possible pays off: the more names and variations Legalsense has on record, the more reliably a real match surfaces.

The search covers five categories, each drawing on different fields:

• Clients: the client's name and alternative names, such as trade names or other names the client is also known by. A match here means the name you searched for is itself a client, or is on record as a trade name of one.
• Matters: the matter's client, its name or description (matter names often include the counterparty's name, for example "advice" or the name of the opposing party), and the contacts related to the matter, such as counterparties. A match on a related contact means the name you searched for appears as a party on an existing matter, even though it isn't a client itself. This is often the most important type of result to review, since it's how you discover that your firm already acts against the party you're about to take on.
• Contacts: the contact's name, together with its kind (for example debtor, contact person, or counterparty) and the matters it's related to. This tells you not just that the name exists among your contacts, but in what capacity and on which matter, so you can judge whether it's actually relevant to the engagement you're checking.
• Users: the names of the users in your Legalsense environment. A match here flags that the name belongs to someone at your own firm, which matters, for example, if a former counterparty's representative has since joined your organization.
• Creditors: the name of any creditor (supplier) your firm books disbursements from, such as a courier or an expert witness. A match here is less about a legal conflict and more a signal that the name is already known to your firm in another capacity.

Because the results are grouped by category, you can quickly judge the nature of any match, whether it's an existing client, a party on another matter, a contact in a particular role, a colleague, or simply a supplier, before deciding whether it amounts to a conflict of interest.

If your firm has historical, pre-Legalsense data loaded, a sixth category, Historical data, can also appear in your results. See Historical data below.

Historical data

If your firm switched to Legalsense from another system, Legalsense typically only imports your recent, active matters, clients, and contacts as regular records. Older matters and clients usually aren't migrated in full. If you still want to be able to check that older history for conflicts, ask Legalsense to load it into a separate historical dataset instead.

Note: Loading historical data isn't a self-service import. Ask your Legalsense contact to set this up, typically as part of onboarding from another system.

Once this data is loaded, a conflict check also searches it, and matching records appear in their own category, Historical data, alongside Clients, Matters, Contacts, Users, and Creditors. Legalsense always includes this category in your results if your firm has any historical data loaded, even if nothing in it matches the current search.

A historical-data match is checked against the matter number, matter name, client name, client number, archive number, description, and the free-text contact fields on the record. This is a simpler, single substring match, rather than the multi-field matching used for your regular clients, matters, and contacts.

Conflict check results page, showing a match in the separate Historical data category.

Click a matching matter number to open the record's detail page. This page shows only the plain, imported information for that record, such as the matter and client numbers and names, dates, supervisors, and contacts, and only the fields that were actually filled in when the record was loaded. Because a historical record isn't linked to a live client or matter, you can't click through from it to a matter's time entries, invoices, or current status. Treat a match here as a lead to follow up on manually, using the descriptive information shown, rather than a live record you can act on directly.

Historical data detail page, showing the plain matter and client information imported for a record.

Export the results to PDF

Click the Export button to download a PDF containing an overview of the conflict check result.

The conflict check report page showing search and export buttons.

The export mirrors what's on screen: for every category with a match, it lists the same records at the same level of detail, for example:

• Clients: number, name, date, account manager, related (parent and child) clients, alternative names, and tags.
• Matters: number, client, matter name, date, supervising user, related contacts and their role, the date of the latest time entry, referrer, and tags.
• Contacts: name, kind, registration, VAT, or ID number, account manager, related matters and the relation to each, an excerpt of any notes, and tags.
• Users: name, status, and last login.
• Creditors: name (only if your firm uses the creditors feature).
• Historical data: matter number, client, matter name, matter date and supervisor, and related contacts, if any are on record.

At the bottom of the PDF, Legalsense adds a line documenting the search itself: the search term you entered, who ran the search, and when. This turns the export into a record you can rely on afterwards, since it shows not only what you found, but also that you looked.

The line at the bottom of an exported conflict check PDF, showing the search term, who ran the search, and when.

Saving a document that confirms you performed the check

A conflict check is only useful as evidence if you can show, later, that you ran it. We recommend the following workflow:

1. Run one or more searches for the engagement, for example on the prospective client's name, the counterparty's name, and a company identifier such as a VAT or registration number. Separate, targeted searches make it easier to show afterwards that you checked everything relevant.
2. Export each search's results to PDF, as described above.
3. Store the PDF as proof that you performed the check. Save it to the client's or matter's own file, for example in a KYC folder alongside other engagement documents, or upload it as a document under the client's or matter's KYC and Compliance section. See the article ↪ KYC & Compliance for how to add and organize documents there.

Keeping the exported PDFs this way gives you a dated, attributable trail of every conflict check you ran for an engagement, alongside your other KYC and compliance documentation.