Practice Management · 8 min read
Conflict checks: the clerk's job nobody talks about
Conflict checks are the most consequential thing a clerk does and the most under-resourced. Here's what a 2026-ready check actually looks like.
When a brief lands, the clerk's first job is to check that counsel can take it. Conflict of interest, professional embarrassment, prior consultations with the other side — any of these can sink the engagement before it starts. Miss one and counsel returns the brief; a regular instructing solicitor takes their work elsewhere.
And yet the conflict check is the most under-resourced thing a clerk does. In most practices it's a list of parties memorised by the senior clerk, supplemented by a spreadsheet maintained when there's time. "We'd know" is the usual phrase.
What goes wrong
Three failure modes recur:
- Indirect conflicts. Counsel acted for the parent company two years ago; the brief is against a subsidiary. Nobody remembers.
- Old consultations. A potential client booked a consultation, didn't proceed, and is now on the other side. The information given in that consultation creates the conflict — but the consultation never made it into a matter file.
- Name variants. "AIB" and "Allied Irish Banks plc" and "AIB Group plc" and "Allied Irish Banks Holdings (Ireland) Designated Activity Company" all match. Without entity normalisation, the spreadsheet misses three of them.
What a 2026-ready check looks like
A modern conflict check has three layers. First, an entity-normalised parties list — every name canonicalised, every alias linked. Second, a relationship graph — parent / subsidiary / director / litigation-history. Third, an interaction log — every consultation, every prior brief, every email, every diary entry, indexed and searchable.
When a new brief arrives, the system checks it against all three layers in under a second, and surfaces matches with the supporting evidence ("Counsel attended a consultation in 2024 with a director of the brief's defendant — see attendance note"). The clerk makes the final call. The system makes sure the clerk has every relevant fact.
The price of getting it right
An indirect conflict at the wrong moment can mean a returned brief, a complaint to the Bar of Ireland, and a permanent loss of the instructing solicitor's confidence. Those costs sit far above the cost of a system that would have caught it.
Conflict checking is the highest-leverage thing a clerk does. It's the thing most worth automating.