Matter intake and conflict screening

Purpose

Give a legal team a consistent, evidence-based first view of a prospective matter and possible conflicts before opening it.

Scope

Prospective matters, parties, affiliates, officers, witnesses, and existing matter records. Excluded: final conflict waiver decisions, legal advice, and client acceptance.

Data basis

• Matter request, parties list, client and matter records, organization relationships, and firm intake policy.
• The fixed records, tables, or folders in the skill scope that hold the relevant history or schema.

Result

An intake memo, conflict report, and proposed matter record with aliases, relationships, hits, and open questions.

Quality criteria

• Every named party and material alias is represented in the screening table.
• Potential matches cite the existing matter or record row.
• The report distinguishes exact, probable, and weak matches.
• Unresolved relationships and missing party identities are explicit.
• The intake memo does not assert clearance when the evidence is incomplete.

Instructions

Normalize names without discarding the original spelling. Search parent, subsidiary, trade-name, director, and known affiliate relationships when records provide them. Treat a possible match as a review item rather than silently clearing it. Separate factual screening results from the legal interpretation of whether a conflict exists. Preserve the source and date of each record match.

Adapt before use

Keep the source trail close to every conclusion and preserve the difference between a source fact, a calculated value, an assumption, and a recommendation. Use stable identifiers across the document and sheet so a reviewer can move from a summary statement to the underlying row and source. Prefer a complete, transparent partial result over a confident answer built on missing evidence.

• Add the firm conflict policy, matter schema, and match-escalation rules.
• Define which relationship types must be screened for each practice group.
• Specify the minimum intake fields required before a matter can be opened.
• Set the roles that review potential conflicts.