Business Challenge

A legal fraternity in the US spent enormous efforts managing conflict-of-interest among their legal staff. They had to maintain data related to both defendants and plaintiffs for each case they worked upon. Further, they had multiple heterogeneous application systems maintaining this data, which further complicated things. They had to dig through various data sources in order to figure out the conflict-of-interest risks before taking up new cases.

They had the following challenges as part of their conflict-of-interest verification process:

• They had numerous partners bringing in new cases to the organization and hence manual verification of COI had become a bottleneck.
• Manual search and extraction of information from different application systems was laborious and erroneous.
• Losing the trained resources to perform this task was leading to delays in initiating the cases and more efforts were spent in retraining the new resources.
• The traditional approach of the COI process was untenable in serving the clients on a global footing.
• Erroneous data would lead to breached conflict rules.
• Their zero tolerance on breaching conflict rules imposed stronger and stricter workflow policies which in turn increased the response time to customers and lead to loss of business.
• Breaching conflict rules would lead to consequences ranging from regulatory discipline to sometimes disqualification, thereby depriving organization's reputation. It also attracted damages sought by the client that resulted in a higher cost of operations.

Business Objectives

The main business objective for automating their COI process was to ensure that their existing zero tolerance on breaching conflict rules remained intact. They needed seamless automation without any changes to their existing infrastructure. Overall, these were the objectives set at the top level:

• Reduce operational risks by ensuring zero breaches on the COI process
• Decrease response time to their customers
• Detailed COI verification report generation
• Minimize operational cost
• Improve staff productivity by reducing monotonous tasks thereby allowing them to work on business-centric tasks such as documentation reviews

Solution

IntelliBuddies was selected as the automation platform to implement the COI process automation needs of the organization. IntelliBuddies worked seamlessly with their existing infrastructure and provided a zero-invasion automation solution. IntelliBuddies provided automation solutions on the following manual tasks:

• IntelliBuddies automated the conflict process, significantly reducing manual effort and improving accuracy.
• Incorporating their existing application systems and extracting necessary information and data from those systems to ensure thorough verification.
• Extracting the details about Plaintiffs and Defendant by searching across the systems and consolidating the data for verification purposes.
• Verifying the extracted data based on the preset rules defined by the organization to rule out conflicts.
• Preparing detailed verification reports in the form of spreadsheets and associating them with respective new cases in their Case Management system.

Competitive Analysis

• IntelliBuddies supported multiple triggering mechanisms such as file system, database, and email, which allowed end-users to initiate the process with ease.
• IntelliBuddies bots support writing the rules in C# code which makes it more powerful and easier to define the rules.
• IntelliBuddies had seamless integration capabilities with different Database systems, which reduced design time thereby ensuring the faster realization of ROI for customers.