Accelerating legal client intake

Manual conflict checks delayed new client intake by several days, causing the firm to lose time-sensitive work.

The firm was not short of demand. It was short of a way to say yes quickly, and the clients most worth having were the least willing to wait.

The delay was not caused by the checking itself. It was caused by the search: matter history sat across systems and inboxes, so every check began by reconstructing what the firm already knew.

Because the work was invisible and shared between people, no single person owned the queue. Nothing was late in anyone's view, and the days accumulated anyway.

Make the firm's own history searchable first, and only then consider automation. The constraint was retrieval, not judgement.

Deliberately left in place: partners keep the final conflict decision. Speeding up the search is a workflow change; delegating the call would have been a risk change, and the firm was not being asked to take one.

Built a searchable matter database covering historic and active work, with AI-assisted conflict search surfacing candidate matches and the reasoning behind each one.

Partners review a shortlist rather than a blank search box. Every check is logged, so the queue is now visible and the turnaround measurable.

The bottleneck was retrieval, not decision-making. Automating the decision would have introduced risk without touching the actual constraint.

Work that no one owns is work no one measures. Making the queue visible was as valuable as making it faster.