Conflict checks
A conflict check fails in one of two places. Either the name was never typed into your practice management system, or it was typed differently than the way it appears in the file. CaseClerk reads the documents themselves, including scans and email threads, and tells you which party names actually appear and where.
One free trial on 25 pages of your own documents. No card required.
Last updated September 2026
Upload the intake packet, the engagement letter, the exhibits and the correspondence. Then ask which parties, affiliates and counsel appear anywhere in it.
Conflict check software cross-references a prospective client, matter and related parties against what your firm already holds, and flags anyone you have represented, opposed or advised before. Nearly every practice management platform does this against structured records: contact cards, matter names, custom fields and notes. That catches the conflicts somebody already took the trouble to record.
It does not catch the ones sitting inside documents. A subsidiary named only in an exhibit, an opposing party that appears in a scanned PDF, a guarantor mentioned once in an email chain: none of those are in a contact field, so a field search returns clean. CaseClerk covers that second layer. You upload the documents for the matter, ask which parties and affiliates appear, and every answer names the file and page it came from so you can verify it yourself. Plans run $99 to $499 a month, with one free 25 page trial before any card is involved.
Open a vault for the matter
One vault per prospective matter keeps the intake documents separate from everything else you are running.
Upload the intake packet
The client questionnaire, the draft engagement letter, the contracts at issue, corporate structure charts, and the correspondence you were forwarded.
Ask the conflict questions
List every person and entity named in these documents. Which corporate affiliates or parent companies appear. Which law firms or attorneys are named as counsel.
Verify and record
Each answer points at a file. Open it, confirm the hit, then run those names through your practice management system and write the conflicts memo with the citations attached.
These are two layers of the same check, not competitors. A law firm that takes conflicts seriously runs both: the database check tells you who the firm already knows, and the document check tells you who this new matter actually involves.
| What it checks | Practice management conflict check | CaseClerk document search |
|---|---|---|
| Existing clients and matters | Yes, this is what it is built for | No, it does not hold your client list |
| Names typed into contact and matter fields | Yes | Only if those documents are uploaded |
| Names appearing only inside a document | Generally no, fields and notes only | Yes, that is the point of it |
| Text inside scanned or photographed files | Usually not searchable | Yes, 18 formats including images |
| Aliases, d/b/a and misspelled entities | Depends on fuzzy matching support | Asked in plain English, returned with context |
| Shows the sentence around each hit | Rarely, usually a record match | Yes, with the file it came from |
| Produces the conflicts memo record | Yes, logged against the matter | No, you record the result in your system |
| Typical buyer | Every firm, as core infrastructure | Firms with heavy document intake |
Clio's own documentation lists conflict checks on its Essentials, Advanced and Expand subscriptions rather than the entry level plan, so confirm your tier includes it before assuming the check is running. Competitor features and tiers change, so verify on the vendor's own page. Checked September 2026.
Firms taking on corporate work
Corporate matters arrive with parents, subsidiaries, guarantors and special purpose entities that nobody has entered as contacts yet. The names are in the documents before they are in the system.
Lateral hires and book transfers
An incoming attorney brings a box of matters and no clean contact records. Reading the files is the only way to find out who they have been adverse to.
Firms inheriting paper files
Acquired practices and long running matters arrive as scans. If the archive is not searchable text, the conflicts hiding in it are invisible to any database check.
High volume intake practices
Plaintiff side and insurance defense intake moves fast. A check that returns the sentence around each hit clears the false positives faster than a list of name matches.
Solo attorneys without a conflicts clerk
No staff to run the search and no time to read 300 pages before a consultation. One free trial on 25 pages shows whether the approach works on your own file.
Firms answering client security questionnaires
Institutional clients increasingly ask what outside software touches their documents. Confidentiality agreements are available on the Firm plan.
The ABA's Profile of the Profession found conflict checking software is the tool most commonly present in law firms, which means the failures are rarely about firms not owning any. They are about what the search was pointed at.
A conflict check against a practice management database answers one question: has anyone at this firm previously recorded a relationship with this name. That is the right question, and it depends completely on the recording having happened. Intake staff enter the client and the obvious adverse party. They do not enter the client's parent company, the three subsidiaries listed in the corporate chart, the guarantor on the note, or the firm that represented the seller in the transaction two years ago. Those relationships exist in the matter. They are simply not in a field.
The second failure is spelling. Exact match search treats Acme Holdings LLC, Acme Holding Co and ACME Hldgs as three unrelated strings. Fuzzy matching helps, and it produces its own problem: loosen the threshold enough to catch real variants and you generate a list of near matches somebody has to clear one by one. That is the tradeoff behind the question firms actually ask, which is how to catch the real conflicts without drowning in false ones.
Document level search attacks both failures from the other side. Instead of asking whether a name you already have appears in your database, it asks which names appear in this matter at all. The output is a list you can then run through the database check you already own.
False positives are not a model problem, they are a context problem. A name match on its own tells you nothing: Smith appears in a file because Smith is the adverse party, or because Smith is the notary, the court reporter, the treating physician or the paralegal who signed the certificate of service. A system that returns only the matched string forces a human to open each document and work out which it was.
Three things cut that work down:
None of this replaces the judgment call. Whether a former representation is substantially related under your state's version of Model Rule 1.9 is a question for an attorney, and it always will be. The software's job is to make sure the attorney is looking at the complete list of names before making that call.
CaseClerk is priced on the pages you review each month rather than per user or per check. Solo is $99 a month and covers 2,500 pages, Professional is $249 for 10,000 pages, and Firm is $499 for 30,000 pages with confidentiality agreements available. Annual billing costs six months rather than twelve. Before any of that, one free trial runs 25 pages of your own documents with no card, which is enough to put a real intake packet through it and see whether the answers hold up.
Be clear about what you are buying. This is not a replacement for a conflicts database, and any vendor that tells you otherwise is selling you a gap. Your practice management system holds the record of who the firm has represented, logs the check against the matter, and produces the audit trail your malpractice carrier expects. Keep it. What document search adds is the list of names to run through it, pulled from the files instead of from whoever had time to do data entry.
If your intake is low volume and every matter arrives with two named parties you already typed in, you probably do not need this layer. If matters arrive as a 400 page PDF with a corporate structure chart buried on page 212, you are currently running conflict checks against a fraction of the parties involved.
Conflict check software cross-references a prospective client and the related parties in a new matter against the clients, matters and adverse parties a firm already holds, and flags anything that could create a conflict of interest. Most tools search structured records such as contact cards, matter names and notes. Document level tools instead read the files themselves to find party names that were never entered as records.
No, and it should not. Your practice management system holds the record of who your firm has represented and logs each check against the matter, which is what your carrier and your state bar expect to see. CaseClerk covers the other half: finding the party names inside the matter documents so you know what to run through that system in the first place.
Accuracy depends less on the platform than on whether it returns context with each hit. A tool that reports only a name match forces a person to open every document to see whether the match mattered. Tools that return the surrounding sentence, and let you ask by role rather than by string, clear false positives far faster. Ask any vendor to demonstrate on your own documents before buying.
Exact-match field search treats each spelling as a separate string and misses variants. Asking in plain English for every entity related to a party returns the d/b/a, the former name, the subsidiary and the misspelling together, because the question is about the entity rather than the characters. You still confirm each one against the source document before recording it.
Yes. CaseClerk reads 18 file formats including scanned PDFs, TIFF, JPEG, PNG and HEIC, so a party named only in a signed scan or a photographed page is found rather than skipped. If a specific page is too degraded to read, the answer says so rather than returning a confident blank.
Practice management platforms bundle conflict checking into a per user subscription, and standalone conflicts tools are typically sold per user or per check. CaseClerk is priced on pages reviewed: $99 a month for 2,500 pages, $249 for 10,000, and $499 for 30,000, with annual billing charged at six months. One free 25 page trial runs before any card is involved.
The rules require the check, not the software. ABA Model Rules 1.7, 1.9 and 1.10 oblige a lawyer to identify conflicts with current and former clients and across the firm, and most states adopt versions of them. No rule specifies a tool, but firms are expected to have a system reliable enough to catch conflicts consistently, which is why nearly all of them use software.
Yes. Create an account and the first 25 pages run free with no card, on up to five of your own files. Upload a real intake packet, ask it to list every person and entity named, and check the answers against the documents. That is a more useful test than any demo built on a vendor's sample file.
Upload an intake packet and ask who is actually named in it. One free trial on 25 pages of your own documents, no card required.
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