Unlocking the Chain of Conflicts
Identifying conflicts of interest in the legal and financial community is a critical and expensive component of a firm’s compliance and risk management strategy. One third of all judgments and settlements between $1 million to $20 million against law firms involve a conflict of interest. Accounting firms are required under Sarbanes-Oxley to track board relationships of their clients. Commercial banks and utilities are specifically prohibited from interlocking board relationships.
An independent focus group evaluated the conflicts checking marketplace and arrived at the following conclusions:
There is one dominant player in the marketplace.
The market leader is not reliable or current and is outrageously priced.
The overall market does not focus on the niche of conflicts checking.
Customers are not happy or thrilled with the quality of any product in the marketplace.
There is an opportunity for a new vendor to add tremendous value in this marketplace given the current issues of accuracy, timeliness and missing content.
The Conflicts Authority Solution
Conflicts Authority will address the legal and financial community’s need to qualify potential new clients while uncovering relationships within corporate entities where a possible conflict may arise. Our online product will be a company and individual solution that integrates the results with the end users’ internal systems. Our product will address the shortcomings in the marketplace concerning ease of use, unique data, accuracy and timeliness. Product design is being driven by customer input and the ability to deliver the “answer” in the fewest keystrokes, menu selections or screen views. We are developing superior indexing systems for updating our data aggregators to address accuracy and timeliness issues. We have identified and captured unique data sets that are not offered by our competitors.
