Peer to Peer Magazine

PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGA ZINE OF ILTA 14 The Washington Post recently published an article about "an innocent error in a conflict check" that left a prominent law firm disqualified and forced to give up a client that paid more that $12 million for one case alone. The law firm inadvertently represented both the plaintiffs and the defendants in the same lawsuit for nearly two months. Law firms have a major gap in industry-standard procedures for various aspects of conflicts of interest. In the United States, the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct serve as a baseline, but we'll need to do more in the future because conflicts can be expensive to manage and detrimental when missed. We recently polled law firms via the Conflicts of Interest Community on LinkedIn. 50 firms responded, and the following observations were identified: 97% Use of Conflicts Software 83% Search Third-Parties 82% Engagement Letter Required To Open a New Client Matter 76% Use of Workflow Tool 74% Perform Corporate Family Tree Search 74% Search Executives 73% Conflicts Attorney Clears Conflicts 70% Checks Against Anti-Money Laundering, Sanctions Databases 67% Run Credit Checks on New Clients 63% Corporate Family Tree Searches for Lateral Hires 57% Maintain Client Relationship Library By implementing standards, law firms will become better at identifying conflicts before they arise, and lawyers can focus more on increasing and maintaining revenue through new and existing business relationships. In fact, the International Organization for Standards has identified the following benefits of standardization: • For businesses, standardization provides cost savings, enhanced customer satisfaction, access to new markets, increased market share and environmental benefits • For society, when products and services conform to standards, consumers can have confidence that they are safe and that the service provider is reliable • For government, standardization can support public policy by referencing standards in regulations It's time for technology and data to be managed better to suit the needs of catching, disclosing, resolving and preventing conflicts. Through standards, staff can become trained and certified, assisting lawyers to prevent disqualification, and ensuring that clients can feel better protected by their legal counsel. BY THE NUMBERS: Adherence to Conf licts Requirements by Ryan Vago of RION Corp. Access the full report at http://rioncorp.blogspot.com.

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