Conflict Name Checker

Conflict searching fails on spelling far more often than on judgement. A party recorded as "Hartwell Industries Inc" and later as "Hartwell Industries, Incorporated" is the same entity and will not match on an exact search - and an exact search is what most systems perform.

This checker normalises names, strips corporate suffixes and punctuation, and compares by token overlap and edit distance. It surfaces candidates that an exact search would miss, and it does the whole comparison in your browser so no party name is ever transmitted.

Loading the tool…

How to use the conflict name checker

Paste the names already known to the firm - clients, adverse parties, related entities - one per line.
Paste the names on the new matter, one per line.
Run the check and review every match, including the possible ones.
Download the result to keep as a record alongside your own conflicts procedure.

What people use this for

Screening a new matter before substantive discussion.
Cross-checking a list exported from a practice management system.
Catching spelling and corporate-suffix variants an exact search misses.
Producing a dated record of the names that were compared.

Why client-side matching matters here

Party names on a prospective matter are among the most sensitive information a firm handles. Uploading them to a third-party website to run a text comparison is not a reasonable thing to do, however convenient the tool.

Everything in this checker runs in your browser. The names are never sent anywhere, there is no server-side storage, and closing the tab discards them entirely. That is a design constraint rather than a feature.

What the matching actually does

Names are normalised to lowercase, punctuation is removed and common corporate suffixes are stripped. Matches are then classified: exact after normalisation, strong where one name contains the other or every significant word is shared or the names differ by a small number of characters, and possible where some words are shared.

That catches the variants that matter - punctuation, suffixes, minor misspellings, word order - without producing so many false positives that the output becomes unusable.

What it is not

It is a search aid, not a conflicts clearance. It knows nothing about corporate affiliates, former names, subsidiaries, related parties, beneficial ownership or the substance of any matter, and it cannot tell you whether a conflict exists.

Nor does it replace a firm’s conflicts system or the professional judgement that follows a search. Use it to surface candidates for a human review conducted under your own procedure, and record the result of that review rather than the output of this tool.

Methodology and assumptions

What this calculator does, and what it deliberately does not do.

Names are normalised by lowercasing, removing punctuation and stripping common corporate suffixes before comparison.
Matching uses containment, significant-word overlap and Levenshtein edit distance, classified as exact, strong or possible.
All comparison happens in your browser. No name is transmitted, logged or stored.
The tool performs arithmetic or date counting on the values you enter. It does not interpret a rule, a statute or a contract.
Nothing you type is transmitted or stored - the calculation runs entirely inside your browser.

This website provides general informational and productivity tools and does not provide legal advice or create an attorney-client relationship.

The date and deadline tools count days exactly as you instruct them. They do not interpret court rules, statutes of limitation, filing requirements or any other legal authority, and they do not know the rules of your jurisdiction.

Always verify any date, fee, or calculation against the governing rule, the court calendar and your own professional judgement. If you need legal advice, consult a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction.

Frequently asked questions

Are the names I paste uploaded anywhere?

No. The entire comparison runs in your browser using local JavaScript. Nothing is sent to a server, and closing the tab discards everything.

Does no match mean there is no conflict?

Absolutely not. It means these names do not resemble anything in the list you pasted. A conflict can exist through affiliates, former representations, related parties or information held - none of which this tool can see.

Can this replace our conflicts system?

No. It has no database, no history and no record of prior representations. It is a text-matching aid for a list you supply.

Why does it flag names that are clearly different?

Possible matches are deliberately generous, because a false positive costs thirty seconds and a missed conflict costs considerably more. Review them and dismiss the ones that do not apply.

Related calculators

More clients & intake tools on LegalConflictTools.

Browse all 4 tools →