Have you heard?

We recently read in a legal ethics article that conflict of interest claims were down slightly to just 5 percent of all malpractice claims because computerized conflict checks, combined with standardized conflict resolution procedures, resulted in some improvements in this area.

View the full article here:

http://www.therecorder.com/id=1202740408791/How-High-Is-Your-Legal-Malpractice-Risk?cmp=share_email

Please contact us with questions, and be sure to ask for a demo!

Thank you,
RION Corp.

Conflicts in the Universe of Practice Management

I often think of things from a different perspective.

For example, when we look at the conflicts software on the market today we might say a majority of the programs are offered by practice management firms. It's offered as an add-in or a module in order to assist with the workflow of accepting new business.

The tools offered are adequate for the purpose of accepting business, but are the results the best they could be for the purpose of mitigating the risk of accepting new business? Is it saving the most amount of time and effort for attorneys and the conflicts team? Is it providing highly automated, easy to produce and consume reports? Does it fit in with your firm's practices, or do you find yourself using "work arounds" and manual processes to make it function within your firm?

Conflicts of Interest Checks deserve a laser focus. The financial risk associated with an errant conflicts check is enormous, and we must consider that includes the risk of losing additional clients due to a simple clerical error in our field.

A conflicts-specific workbench that suits the needs of a conflicts checking process should be its own well designed, well defined, organized planet within the universe of the broader practice management platform.

RION Corp. is in the process of selecting beta test candidates. If you are interested in learning more, please find my contact information below. Thanks, and I look forward to speaking with you soon!

Cori Blackburn
224.277.3855
cori.blackburn@rioncorp.com

Malpractice Insurance & CoI Avoidance

It is a good idea for all law firms of all sizes to have malpractice insurance, and we all know that comes at a price. In 2002 the ABA published a paper called "Controlling Legal Malpractice Insurance Cost and Availability in a Changing Marketplace".

It focuses on eight parts of the firm, that with a few focused efforts can drive down the cost of your malpractice insurance.

1. Docket & Calendar Control
2. Mail Handling
3. Conflict of Interest Avoidance
4. Serving as Corporate Director/Officer
5. File Opening Procedure
6. Fees & Billing Practices
7. Work Product Control/PeerReview
8. Client Selection

We see the third focus area is Conflicts of Interest Avoidance. Since this is our wheelhouse, we should take responsibility and actively participate in lowering malpractice costs.

Here's the CliffsNotes of what's recommended in this article:

• Be familiar with the Model & Code for Conflicts of Interest
• Keep current with recent case law regarding Conflicts of Interest for the latest interpretations.
• Even a robust and sophisticated Conflicts Checking system can only be as high quality as the information that's entered into it.
• The commitment to the Conflicts Checking System, Policies & Procedures must be firm-wide.
• Continuing education for Conflicts Avoidance should have an established and important place.
• Have a written policy & guidelines around Conflicts Avoidance with procedures and system use outlined, and stick to it.
• Firm members should not enter into business until firm management has approved.

How does your malpractice policy affect your CoI program or vice versa?  Please share in the comments section below.

Cori Blackburn
cori.blackburn@rioncorp.com
224-277-3855

Conflicts-Centric Highlights from ILTA's 2014 Tech Survey!

In looking at ILTA's 2014 Technology Survey, we noticed some statistics that might be important to conflicts professionals. Note that the respondents to this survey are on the IT side of the house; but because acting as the liaison between IT and legal is part of the job, these results may be interesting to you:

·      A surprising number of firms reported that they do not use any software for conflict-of-interest management (citing the following responses: it is not applicable, we do not track it, or we do it manually). Note that responses from three firms with >700 attorneys are not available.

·      Firms are facing an increasingly competitive market, and leadership is taking note that cutting cost is no longer the most effective measure for increasing profitability – meaning everyone must learn to do more with less. “…the ratio of staff to attorneys continue(s) to fall, which puts pressure on available resources.”

·      A majority of firms with <350 attorneys have no business intake program to speak of.

·      An overwhelming majority of firms with >350 attorneys are MOST concerned with security and risk management. While the IT perspective for risk management is a broad focus, the degree of accuracy and precision related to the processes in conflicts of interest and business intake can contribute to managing risk.

·      Alternatively the overwhelming majority of firms with <350 attorneys are MOST concerned with managing change. This is counterintuitive because most believe the smaller the firm, the more agile and flexible they should be. I think this speaks to the need for centralized IT when a firm reaches a certain size - but it's also encouraging to anyone with ideas related to doing more with less in a larger firm.

The 2014 Technology Survey reports the input of 454 firms representing more than 106,000 attorneys and 217,000 total users.

Here is the link to the report:  http://www.iltanet.org/Downloads/2014-Tech-Survey.pdf

RION Corp. has a survey which is open at this time, and we are looking to include data from the perspective of conflicts analysts. We encourage your participation if your career intersects with this portion of business intake at law firms: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/D2H2FZV

And a big thank you from me to anyone who has participated in the survey already!!

Cori Blackburn

Executive VP of Marketing & Sales

RION Corp.

cori.blackburn@rioncorp.com

Conflicts Intake vs Conflicts Research vs Conflicts Resolution

There is a clear distinction between intake, research & analysis, and resolution of conflicts.  Determining first if all the information you have is accurate and complete is critical in the conflicts clearance process.  Once you can confirm that all information is clear and complete, you can begin your research and analysis of the parties, practice area, and matter description.  What are some of the questions you should ask yourself when performing an intake of your conflict check request?

• Do I have the complete legal name of this entity or individual?
• Is this party a current / active client?
• Do we have an engagement letter for this client / attorney?
• Are we already adverse to this counterparty?
• If a known conflict exists, do we have consent?
• If this matter is a transaction, who is the opposing party (purchaser, seller, etc.)?
• If this is a dispute, is this a contentious or litigation matter? Do I have the correct description of this matter?
• Is this third party potentially adverse?
• How long will it take to search this party’s corporate family, officers, directors, or individual for sanctions or financial compliance?

Once these questions have been addressed, then you can determine a course of action. When you begin to perform research on an entity or individual, you will come across some more questions.  Depending on your policy and procedures, you may or may not need to run a full search of the entire corporate family tree, or a limited search, or no search at all. You may or may not need to run a credit check, or search sanctions or law enforcement databases.  You may simply be able to clear the matter yourself in minutes, or you may need to run a thorough examination into all of the parties and, if conflicts exist, obtain all the consent you can, and / or move it forward for review by an attorney or committee.

Conflicts resolution can be tricky and requires in some firms an attorney to resolve potential conflicts, and implement ethical walls.  How does your firm approach this process?  We invite you to share in the comments section below.

Ryan Vago
Founder & President
RION Corp.

Bridging the Gap Between IT and Legal

If you are reading this I'm willing to bet your career is in IT, law, or somewhere in between; and it is likely your job involves working with both of these groups. If you don't find yourself somewhere in the mix of the aforementioned groups, then you might just be a big nerd, like me. I have a legal background with tech experience and have spent many years working in roles that served as a liaison between legal and IT teams. I have always worked with legal technology, and because it fascinates me, I have a nice big "nerd" badge.

One thing that has really helped my career is embracing the fact that it is difficult to bridge the gap between lawyers and information technology professionals; as both groups tend to be a little stubborn. In this article, I will discuss three key points that have helped me build a bridge to lessen the gap between the two and ease the process of working together:

• First, know your audience. Don’t talk to a Senior Partner at a law firm or General Counsel at a corporation and expect them to know or care about the details of your error message. Keep your communications clear and concise with whomever you speak to (this advice is generally ubiquitous) and let them know you are working to solve the issue with the greatest expedience.  Lawyers do not like it when you: a) "talk down," for example, by explaining a very rudimentary feature in Microsoft that everyone knows about (such as: what “read-only” means); or b) use IT jargon. If you're talking to an attorney about “unhandled exceptions,” “resource contention,” “I/O," etc., which they probably don't understand, they will tune you out. DO be clear with your IT staff about technical jargon, but if you are in a role where you have both legal and technical experience, you are not likely responsible for running SQL scripts or checking the event handler for application errors / warnings / etc.  Communicate with IT as the end-user, and if necessary, insist that you get on the call with your IT staff and your vendor’s technical support staff to troubleshoot and escalate issues as need be.  

• Second, be prepared. This involves making sure that you have researched and tested the issues and / or problems you are working on prior to making your recommendation to your legal and IT teams.  Be sure to run a thorough QA of the results of your work before you send it on to the legal team, and test / troubleshoot / resolve what you can on your end before escalating issues to your IT Support Team. Before contacting anyone from Legal or IT - ask yourself "what questions are they going to ask me?" Make sure you have answers (or status on things you don't know the answer to yet).

• Third, do what you can to be pro-active. Let's say you're aware that your file server is running low on space, or your indexing service may have been disrupted because of that unscheduled but absolutely necessary mid-day server reboot, take some time each afternoon before you leave the office and each morning when you return to do a full system check to be sure that you have covered your bases.  Finally, document EVERYTHING and make sure all interested parties are being updated in a timely manner and before they'd think to ask you.

These key points will help you become a trusted advisor within both groups at your organization, as well as expert liaison in between IT and legal groups. If you have additional ideas that you've learned along the way please share them in the comments - I look forward to discussing this topic with you!

Ryan Vago
Founder & President
RION Corp.

Welcome to RION Corp!

Hello out there to all our fans, friends, and family that are supporting us through our first few months as a business! We are very excited to get to know our clients and help them in working towards Enlightened Efficiency within the realm of legal conflicts analysis through the launch of our signature conflicts analysis platform: RION.

RION stands for Real-time Intake Optimization for New-business, and it is based on a need that was seen by our CEO for an automated family tree model to be developed for use by Conflicts Analysts around the world. He has worked as a conflicts analyst for many years, and thought to himself "there must be an easier way to do this, I can't believe it's not more automated." 

RION will drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to make a decision on weather or not a law firm can accept business - and we hope to make lives easier for conflicts analysts who are in the office slaving away; as well as attorneys who are out in the field, as this system will be available on any mobile device. This means that analysts can do more work in less time, and attorneys can take on new business faster than ever before - all while detached from their office.

Our tagline is "Enlightened Efficiency". This means that we will continue to seek out innovations that will revolutionize the legal industry by helping analysts, lawyers, and staff to put their data to better use. Our tools and products will always aim to drive productivity, cost effectiveness, and profitability.

Because we will be constructing several systems over the coming months and years, we embrace the opportunity to create a community around Enlightened Efficiency. We will be working in parallel with our software development efforts to establish a virtual tribe of conflicts analysts, legal experts, software developers, data geeks, and other interested parties. We envision this tribe will have an open virtual forum to discuss ideas, and we hope it will help us mold the future of the RION platform as we grow and expand.

We invite you to stay tuned!! Here's what's next:

We have a web demo coming up on April 15th, at 12:00pm (CST). Please contact ryan.vago@rioncorp.com for a calendar invitation!

We are accepting applications from interested beta-testers for thirty-day trial of RION, which will begin shortly after the demo.

The beta-test will be followed by a paid proof of concept period (soft launch) in the May-August timeframe, and then the ability to transition into a twelve month contract will become available.

Special discounts for early adopters may apply when it's time to sign contracts, so please inquire and make sure to mention you heard about it on our blog!

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Website: www.rioncorp.com