Prestigious firm achieves exponential efficiency gains with iManage solutions

For over 140 years, this esteemed law firm of more than 2,000 lawyers in over two dozen offices across North America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East has provided legal services across an expansive number of practice areas to its global customers.

The business challenge

One search, 40,000 results

The firm’s risk team is responsible for identifying and clearing potential conflicts of interest. This function is crucial in helping to eliminate the risk of taking on work that violates rules of conduct, or that presents a business conflict for the firm.

It was not unusual for a single name to turn up many thousands of search results requiring analysis. Additionally, the sheer volume of names required to be searched in a given day, month, or year at this large firm required a significant amount of time, effort, and people to keep up with demand.

“We might have 10 client numbers for the same client and 4,000 affiliate names on each of those 10,” said the firm’s Senior Director of Risk. “If you ran a conflicts search against a name, you’d automatically be dealing with 40,000 results that needed to be analyzed.”

A chance to revamp daunting manual processes

As part of its commitment to taking "Know Your Client" requirements seriously, the firm worked hard to effectively manage multiple relationships globally within a corporate family. However, populating the conflicts database with corporate family tree affiliations and managing those on an ongoing basis was daunting: it was a time-consuming task wholly dependent on manual data entry.

“If the firm was considering doing business with a corporate entity that had 727 different subs and affiliates, we would have to manually enter each and every one of those affiliates into the database,” said the firm’s Senior Director of Risk. “Not only that, we would be creating those entries based on information we went out and found on our own — so it might not be 100 percent up to date or fully comprehensive, depending on whatever source we retrieved the information from.”

To make matters more difficult, the firm’s existing system did not provide any way to easily filter or cull down large result sets or combine results into one consolidated report. The firm saw all of these limitations as an opportunity to revamp not just its technologies but also its processes.

Business outcomes

Human resources can work on higher-value functions

Since going live with Conflicts Manager, the firm has seen immediate and impactful results. Information that was once “scattered” across various text fields and other places in the legacy system has become fully rationalized, immediately supporting more effective and efficient analysis.

The management of corporate affiliations and the firm’s relationships within those corporate families has gone from manual to highly automated. Corporate Intelligence — a sister application to Conflicts Manager – pulls company and corporate family tree data from external data service providers and automatically refreshes the data. This effectively eliminates the tedious manual data entry around corporate family trees and dramatically reduces the amount of information requiring analysis on all searches.

“If I need to put in a corporate entity with 727 different affiliates, I just click a button, and it immediately adds all of them, with robust, up-to-date information,” said the firm’s Senior Director of Risk.

Simplification of search construction while simultaneously extending search capabilities empowered the firm to retool the operational staffing model, putting analysts into the analysis seat earlier in the process, and removing the need to review high volumes of less relevant results. This new process has the added benefit of allowing the firm to repurpose the human resources who were previously in charge of solely running searches, enabling them to work on higher-value functions

Enormous time savings

The consolidation of searches into a single search and the resulting clearance structure (including a streamlined conflicts report) have dramatically reduced the time it takes to clear conflicts.

Additionally, using the software’s interactive clearance functionality has moved analysis from paper reports to online “slice & dice,” putting more information into the hands of the analysts while reducing overall time spent.
And re-running a specific conflicts search at a later date is significantly faster with Conflicts Manager than with the systems the firm previously had in place.

“I have a conflicts search that I’m required to do on a bi-monthly basis for a particular client to adhere to our obligations of independence for that client,” said the firm’s Senior Director of Risk. “Conflicts Manager automatically tells me what’s changed since the last time I ran the search — so, for example, I can focus on 3 new entries rather than all 10,000 hits that come up. The time savings are enormous: this search used to take days, and now it takes seconds.”

iManage is making life easier for the team

Adding to the overall increased efficiency, Conflicts Manager is seamlessly integrated with iManage Business Intake Manager — which the firm deployed to help transform and automate its business intake processes —  as well as with ten other post-intake processes.

“When a request comes to the conflicts team, the conflicts application is right there inside the intake form,” said the firm’s Senior Director of Risk. “We don’t have to use two separate applications anymore — there’s no jumping around from one product to another. That seamless integration across touchpoints is just one more way iManage is making life easier for the team.”