Running a conflict check before accepting a matter

How the Legal pack searches clients, contacts, enquiries and matter parties for conflicts, and why a matter cannot reach Mandate signed first.

By Achekam · 11 October 2026 · 4 min read · For Legal businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya

Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.

A prospective client calls about a dispute with a supplier. Before they tell you the details, you need to know whether the practice already acts for that supplier, acted for it last year, or is advising its director on something else. Listen to too much first and you may have a problem even if you then decline.

That is what a conflict check is for, and why it belongs at the very front of a new matter. In Achekam's Legal pack the check is part of the matter itself, so it is not a step someone remembers only on a good day.

What a conflict check has to cover

A useful check answers three questions before any mandate is signed:

• Have we acted, or are we acting, for anyone on the other side?
• Do we hold confidential information from another client that this matter could touch?
• Is anyone in the practice personally connected with the parties?

The first two are search problems. They need every name the practice has ever recorded, not only today's clients. The third is a question to put to the team. Software can do the searching; only practitioners can answer the rest.

Where the search looks

The Legal pack speaks the practice's language: customers are Clients, records are Matters, quotes are Fee estimates and leads are Enquiries. Each matter carries its parties, so your client, the opposing party and anyone else involved are recorded on it.

The conflict check takes the names on a matter and searches them against every client, every contact, every lead and every party on every other matter. Including enquiries and matter parties is what makes the search worth having. An enquiry from someone you never took on may still have told you something confidential, and an opposing party on an old matter is exactly the name a plain client list would miss.

The more complete the names on the new matter, the better the result. Record the company and its directors, the individual and any trading name, and the other side's legal practitioners if you know them.

A person reads the matches and records the result

The search produces matches. It decides nothing. A practitioner reads each match, works out whether it is a real conflict, a name that only looks similar, or an old connection that does not matter, and records the result on the matter.

That record is what you will want if anyone later asks how the practice satisfied itself it was free to act. In South Africa, the Legal Practice Council's Code of Conduct binds all attorneys, advocates, candidate legal practitioners and law firms, so keep it to hand when you write that record. Write it so a partner reading it a year from now can follow the reasoning: which matches came up, what each turned out to be, and the decision taken.

Expect false alarms. Common surnames, companies with similar names and the same director appearing on unrelated matters will all produce matches. Resist the urge to wave them through in bulk. A one-line note against each ("different person, different identity number" or "same director, unrelated property matter closed last year") is quick to write and shows the match was actually looked at.

Why the mandate cannot be signed first

A matter moves through stages: Intake, Conflict check, Mandate signed, Active, Finalising, and finally Closed or Declined. Some stages carry conditions, and the pack will not move a record into them until those conditions are met.

For a matter the condition is firm: it cannot reach Mandate signed until the conflict-check stage is done and a signature task is complete. Nobody can skip ahead and treat a mandate as signed on a matter whose conflict check is still open. The order a careful practice follows anyway becomes the only order the system allows.

This is one of the ways the pack is shaped for legal work. Every industry pack sets its own words, record types, pipelines and workflows; in the Legal pack, the conflict check sits in the pipeline itself rather than on a separate checklist.

Recording a declined matter

Sometimes the answer is no. The conflict is real, or close enough that the practice prefers not to act. Move the matter to Declined instead of deleting it.

A declined matter is part of your conflict history. Its names remain on record, so if the same person or company approaches the practice again, or turns up later as an opposing party, the earlier contact can be found. Note why the matter was declined, in words that do not themselves disclose anything confidential.

Habits that make the search worth running

• Capture every party name at intake, including directors, trustees and trading names.
• Enter names consistently: a company's registered name, a person's full name.
• Add the opposing party to the matter as soon as you know who it is.
• Never delete an enquiry or a matter you did not take on; decline it.
• Ask the team about personal connections and record the answer with the search result.
• Check again whenever a new party joins the matter.

The conflict check is the step that follows conversion of an enquiry, described in turning an enquiry into a consultation and a matter. Once a matter is active, litigation work has its own workflow, covered in tracking pleadings and discovery on a litigation matter.

Before the pack goes live, agree who in the practice may record a conflict result and the wording they use, so every record reads the same way and can be relied on later.

General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.