Completing a Conflict Check Report

In this article:

• Accessing the Conflict Check Report 
• Running the Report
• Recording Your Findings 
• Considerations for the Conflict Check Report

A conflict check investigates possible legal conflicts of interest between a firm's potential and existing clients — an important first step before onboarding a new client. The Conflict Check Report is set up solely to simplify this process, allowing you to use keywords to search all matters, documents, file notes, and emails within Actionstep. This article walks you through where to find the Conflict Check Report, and how to use it. 

Accessing the Conflict Check Report 

Navigate to Reports > Matter Reports > General > Conflict Check. If you don't see this report in the list, ask your administrator to set your report permissions.

Running the Report

Enter a name, or part of a name, and run the report. To search for multiple names at once, enter OR between search terms (for example: John Smith OR Jane Doe) — this will find results where either name is present. Searching multiple names separated by a comma (John Smith, Jane Doe) will only bring up results where both names are present. 

Other terms you can use to refine your search: 

Recording Your Findings 

You have a number of options to record the fact that you have completed a conflict check and the findings. 

You can:

1. Create a file note and record all notes to do with the conflict check.  For ease, you can also tag it pre-engagement so you can find it easily in the future.
2. You may have received an automated task as part of an Engagement step that you can now mark as complete and record your findings.
3. Or, if you have a field within the Engagement fields on your matter home page you can record this information there.  If this field does not exist please see more on adding a custom data field.

Considerations for the Conflict Check Report

Please keep the following in mind as you run a Conflict Check report in Actionstep: 

Partial Names

The Conflict Check report will not pull results for search terms that are coordinating conjunctions — AND, NOT, OR, which can be used to refine searches, but also BUT, FOR, IF, NOR, SO, and YET. 

EXAMPLE: 
If you are searching for Andrew Butler with the partial search terms And* But*, the Conflict Check will come up empty. In cases like these, add one extra letter to each partial name, such as Andr* Butl*. 

Permissions

Permissions will still apply to the results you see in the Conflict Check. For example, if you do not have permission to see a matter then you will not see it as a result in any conflict check. The same applies to any documents or emails on a matter you do not have access to. 

Document Contents

Actionstep's Conflict Check will search the content of all the documents in your system, but the following limitations should be kept in mind:

• Actionstep will monitor the first 2MB of data within a document. Files that have text content larger than this will be mostly but not fully checked by our Advanced Search. More than 99.9% of documents stored with Actionstep will have text content that is more than 2MB. 
• Documents that will be searched must be text-based. Image and video files will not have their content searched (though names, metadata, etc. will be). Scanned documents will likely be treated as images regardless of what format they are stored in.
• Documents that are stored in a document integration (such as NetDocuments, Box, Google Drive, and Dropbox) will not be included in a Conflict Check. 

Contacts

Only the First Name and Last Name of the contact will be searched. This does not include the Preferred Name or Alias fields. If you would like the search to contain these fields please submit a product feature request to Actionstep Support.

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