Jimenez Julien

ConflictCheck started with a phone call I could not stop thinking about. A friend who runs a two attorney practice in the Midwest described taking a family law matter, working it for five weeks, and then learning at a status conference that she had met the opposing party once, in her own conference room, three years earlier. Nothing improper happened. She withdrew, refunded the retainer, wrote the awkward letter, and absorbed the loss. What struck me was her explanation of how it happened: the consult had never become a matter, so it existed nowhere except in a calendar entry with a first name on it.

I build small, narrow software for people who run businesses without a back office. Most of my work sits in that gap between a spreadsheet that has outgrown itself and enterprise software written for a department that a two person practice does not have. Conflict screening is the sharpest example of that gap I have found. Large firms employ conflicts analysts and buy systems priced accordingly. Solo attorneys carry the same ethical duties under Rules 1.7, 1.9 and 1.18, face the same disqualification motions and the same grievance exposure, and do the check themselves between a hearing and a school pickup.

So I spent 2024 and 2025 talking to attorneys instead of writing code. I sat with a family law solo in Ohio while she took intake calls. I read the screening logs a construction defect firm in Oklahoma had kept on paper since 2011. I asked a malpractice underwriter what documentation actually changes the conversation at renewal, and the answer was blunt: a dated record showing what was searched, what came back and who decided. Not a policy document. Not an intention. A record with a date on it.

That is what the product is organized around. The structured intake form exists because the questions that catch conflicts are the ones you stop asking when you are tired. The automatic search exists because the human failure mode is not laziness, it is confident recall. And the dated screening record exists because a check nobody can prove is worth very little when a motion to disqualify arrives eighteen months later. Everything else in ConflictCheck is in service of those three pieces, and I say no to features that pull attention away from them.

I am not an attorney and ConflictCheck does not give legal advice. Whether a hit is disqualifying, waivable or irrelevant is a professional judgment that belongs to the lawyer of record, and the product is written to hand you the file rather than a verdict. What I am accountable for is narrower and entirely mine: that the search finds what is in your data, that the record is accurate and cannot be quietly altered, that your client names never leave your account, and that a person answers when you write.