Good legal practice depends on integrity and trust. Documenting the arm-length distance principle in all dealings to ensure that the parties are independent, on equal footing, and that transactions are fair is the way to uphold this. Transparency and openness about assessments of potential conflict situations are complex matters in today's interconnected international business world. Transparency is both about compliance and building long-lasting valuable customer relations, which means that keeping control over this is crucial for safe and profitable business operations.
Proper conflict of interest monitoring depends hugely on having sufficient data available at any given point. By having a counterpart registry, where your clients' counterparts in each case are registered, Legal Plant can monitor and notify about potential conflict of interest situations. Based on these notifications, the case manager can assess the specific instance, and evaluation and possible measures can be recorded to document the resolution of these conflict situations. This is a much safer and more efficient way to handle conflict searches than manual processes and searches in various alternative business systems across the legal practice.
Make it clear
Each register must be clear and legible so that it can be used comfortably. The Legal Plant's counterparts register is no exception here. It is available as a clear table in which the names of companies and individuals appearing in cases conducted by the law firm as a counterpart are collected. Clicking on the selected entry shows the details view, where, in addition to the matters in which the given counterparty is involved, we can also see the details of this entity and contact persons.
In this way, each Legal Plant user can easily and quickly find out about the network of connections between entities within a given law firm.
When it comes to adding counterparts, it is an easy and effortless operation. This can be done in two ways.
The first, most often used, is to add a counterpart when creating a new case. The adding cases wizard allows you to attach one or many counterparts, and integration with brreg.no is a great help here, which allows you to quickly find and connect a company if it is registered in Norway. Naturally, adding a natural person as a counterpart is also possible. It is worth mentioning that Legal Plant allows you to add several entities as counterparts.
The second way is to add a counterpart in the case detail view. Just click in the upper right corner of the appropriate tab and follow the uncomplicated instructions.
As you can see, using the counterparts register is convenient, and its editing is straightforward. These factors increase transparency and eliminate conflicts of interest within a law firm.
