Professional conflict checks: from name search to decision record
How lawyers, accountants, notaries and advisors can record current-client, former-client, adverse-party and own-interest conflicts.
Executive summary
Conflict checks should produce a decision, not only a search result.Related parties, former clients and confidential-information risk matter.Ethical walls and consent need evidence and sign-off.Conflict checks are often treated as a quick name search. That misses the point. A professional conflict workflow should identify the matter, parties, related entities, former clients, adverse interests, confidential-information risk and any consent or ethical-wall decision.
The output should be a decision record: cleared, declined, consent required, accepted with conditions or ethical wall active, with named reviewers and evidence.
For multi-disciplinary offices, conflict checking becomes stronger when it can reuse entity graphs, UBO links, addresses, account numbers and relationship data already captured for AML and client onboarding.
Who this applies to
This guide is for professional-service offices that need to avoid acting where conflicts or confidentiality risks make a mandate unsafe.
- Law firms and multi-disciplinary practices
- Accountants, auditors and tax advisors
- Notaries with related-party matters
- Offices with repeated family, property or company structures
- Teams needing matter-level conflict evidence
Legal and supervisory context
Professional conflicts are often governed by professional duties rather than AML law, but the operational pattern is similar: identify relationships, evaluate risk, decide, record and control access.
Because Sceau already stores parties, UBOs, addresses, accounts and related matters, conflict checks can use structured relationship evidence instead of only name matching.
What the office must actually do
The office should turn the obligation into a repeatable workflow with named owners, deadlines, evidence and reviewable decisions.
- Open a conflict matter.
- Add client, adverse and related parties.
- Run name and relationship checks.
- Assess former-client and confidential-information risk.
- Record consent, ethical wall or decline decision.
- Restrict assignments where needed.
What good evidence looks like
The decision record should show the parties checked, relationships found, reviewer, rationale, conditions and controls.
Common mistakes supervisors find
- Treating conflicts as a single name search.
- Not checking former clients or related entities.
- Accepting a matter with conditions but no controls.
- Failing to restrict team access after an ethical wall.
Practical checklist
- Define matter.
- Add parties.
- Run relationship check.
- Review conflicts.
- Record consent or conditions.
- Set ethical wall.
- Sign off and monitor.
- Creates conflict matters and party records.
- Reuses network-risk relationships.
- Records consent, waiver and ethical-wall controls.
- Routes high-impact outcomes to authorised reviewers.
FAQ
Is a clean name search enough?
No. It is only one signal. Former-client, adverse-party, relationship and confidential-information risks also matter.
Can conflicts be cleared?
Some can be cleared with reasoning, consent or controls; others require declining the mandate.
Why connect conflicts to the graph?
Shared UBOs, addresses, accounts or counterparties can reveal relationships that names alone miss.
Official references
From knowledge to compliance
Reading is a start. Sceau turns these obligations into a workflow that runs itself and proves itself.
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