At Birchrose Associates, we spend a lot of time talking to risk and compliance teams - both the firms trying to build them and the candidates trying to move into or up within them. One thing has become impossible to ignore in those conversations: Intapp has gone from being a name a handful of firms mentioned to a near-standard requirement on the job specs we're briefed on.
Conflict checking and new client intake used to be seen as a back-office formality - a box-ticking exercise that stood between a fee earner and a signed engagement letter. That view has changed. As law firms on both sides of the Atlantic grow more international, more digitally exposed, and more heavily regulated, conflicts and intake have become genuine risk functions in their own right, with headcount, budget, and board-level attention to match. It's little surprise, then, that a growing number of UK and US firms are turning to Intapp - and specifically Intapp Conflicts and Intapp Intake - to bring these processes up to date. For firms building out or restructuring their risk and compliance teams, and for the professionals who make up those teams, it's a shift worth understanding properly.
Why UK and US firms are turning to Intapp
Intapp's compliance suite is built around a simple idea: the entire client and matter lifecycle, from first enquiry to engagement letter, should run through a single, connected system rather than a patchwork of spreadsheets, email chains, and manual database searches.
For firms weighing up their options, the appeal comes down to a few core capabilities:
Corporate tree visibility. Intapp Conflicts integrates corporate ownership data from trusted third-party sources, so when a search is run, it's checking the full corporate structure of both the prospective and existing client - not just the name on the file
PEP and sanctions screening. Politically exposed person and sanctions data is built into the same search, meaning firms can flag serious red flags before they've invested time in a deeper review
AI-assisted clearance. Rather than manually working through every hit a search produces, analysts can use AI to group and prioritise results, focusing their attention on what actually needs a decision
A connected intake process. When Intapp Conflicts is linked to Intapp Intake, conflict clearance becomes a built-in step of onboarding rather than a separate task - nothing moves to matter opening until conflicts have signed off
Mobile, on-the-go checks. Fee earners can run a preliminary conflicts search from a mobile device while sat with a prospective client, giving them an early read on whether the firm can act before the conversation goes any further
The risk of getting conflict checks wrong
It's worth being blunt about what's actually at stake when a conflict check fails.
Financially, a missed conflict can mean a firm is forced off a matter partway through - losing the fees already invested, and potentially facing a claim for professional negligence if the client suffers loss as a result. Regulatory bodies on both sides of the Atlantic take conflicts seriously, and breaches can trigger investigations, fines, and in serious cases, disciplinary action against individual solicitors or partners.
Reputationally, the damage can be more lasting than the financial hit. A firm found to be acting against a client it should have identified as connected to an existing one - perhaps a subsidiary buried three layers down in a corporate group - raises immediate questions about competence and trustworthiness. In a profession built on client confidence, that's a hard reputation to repair. Word travels fast among GCs and referral sources, and a conflicts failure can quietly close doors that never officially say why they've closed.
The trouble is that these risks are often invisible until it's too late. A conflict check that relies on a person's memory of "who we act for," or a search of a finance system that doesn't show corporate ownership structures, can look thorough right up until the moment it isn't. As the details of a case study on manual conflicts processes make clear, the professionals doing these checks by hand simply aren't able to hold entire corporate trees in their heads - and email chains asking "does anyone have a problem with this client?" put confidential information in front of people who have no business seeing it.
Why manual conflict checks are a thing of the past
For a long time, the default approach was to search a practice or finance management system for name matches, or to email around the partnership and see if anyone raised a hand. Both approaches share the same fundamental weaknesses:
They miss what isn't obvious. A finance system search won't reveal that a prospective client is being sued by the subsidiary of an existing client, unless someone happens to know that subsidiary exists
They overshare. Circulating client and matter details to the whole partnership means sensitive information reaches people who have no legitimate reason to see it - creating its own set of ethical problems
They don't scale. What might work for a 40-partner firm with a handful of new matters a week becomes unworkable at a firm onboarding hundreds of clients across multiple offices and jurisdictions
They leave no usable audit trail. A decision made informally, over email or in a corridor conversation, is hard to reconstruct months or years later - exactly when a firm most needs to show its reasoning
Automation addresses each of these gaps directly. By centralising the search against a single, comprehensive dataset - including corporate structures and sanctions/PEP lists - and creating an automatic, timestamped record of every search and decision, tools like Intapp Conflicts remove the guesswork. Analysts can clear routine conflicts faster because AI narrows down what genuinely needs a human decision, while every clearance still produces a clean audit trail that shows exactly how and why a decision was reached. That record isn't just useful for regulators; it also means that when a similar conflict question comes up again, the firm isn't starting from scratch.
The same logic extends into client intake. Digital, configurable intake forms mean the right information - including what's needed for anti-money laundering checks - is captured consistently every time, rather than depending on whoever happens to be handling that particular file. Once a client is approved, the system can even generate the engagement letter automatically, closing the loop from first enquiry to matter opening without manual handoffs.
Why Intapp experience is now one of the most in-demand lines on a CV
This is the part of the story we see most directly from the recruitment side of the desk: Intapp skills have become a genuinely sought-after asset for risk and compliance professionals in the legal sector, and it's changing who firms want to hire.
As more firms adopt Intapp Conflicts, Intapp Intake, and related products like Intapp Terms and Intapp Walls, they need people who already know how to configure workflows, interpret AI-assisted conflict results, and manage the data integrations that make the system work. We're increasingly briefed on roles - from risk and compliance analysts through to dedicated Intapp implementation consultants and solutions advisory specialists - where direct Intapp experience is listed as a distinct advantage, and in some cases treated as close to essential. It's also opening up a new tier of specialist, technology-facing roles that didn't really exist in legal risk teams a few years ago, sitting somewhere between compliance, IT, and project management.
For firms, this matters in a few practical ways:
Faster onboarding. Candidates who've already worked with Intapp bring a shorter learning curve, meaning risk and compliance teams get up to speed faster and start delivering value sooner - a real consideration when implementation and configuration work is time-pressured
A wider, more competitive talent pool. As Intapp adoption grows across the market, so does the pool of candidates with relevant hands-on experience - but demand for the strongest of them is outpacing supply, which means firms need to move decisively and offer genuinely competitive packages to secure them
A signal to the market. Firms that invest in modern platforms like Intapp are, in effect, also investing in the calibre of risk professional they're able to attract. The best candidates increasingly want to work with tools that make their jobs more interesting and less administrative, not decade-old spreadsheets and email chains - and word of a firm's tech stack travels fast among candidates
For candidates, the message is just as clear: hands-on Intapp experience - whether that's running searches and clearances, configuring intake workflows, or supporting an implementation - is fast becoming a differentiator worth highlighting, and in some cases worth actively seeking out through a move.
The bottom line
Conflict checks and client intake sit right at the front door of a law firm's risk exposure - get them wrong, and the financial and reputational cost can follow a firm for years. Manual, homegrown processes were never really built for the scale or complexity of modern legal practice, and firms are increasingly recognising that. Platforms like Intapp Conflicts and Intapp Intake offer a way to combine speed with genuine regulatory rigour: comprehensive data, AI-assisted review, and an audit trail that stands up to scrutiny.
It's a shift that's reshaping not just how firms manage risk, but who they need to hire to manage it. Whether you're a firm looking to build out a modern risk and compliance function, or a professional looking to make your next move into a team using platforms like Intapp, that's exactly the kind of change Birchrose Associates helps clients and candidates navigate - get in touch with our team to talk through what it means for you.
If you would like to discuss this topic in more detail, you can get in touch with Sam Hyde at Sam.Hyde@birchroseassociates.co.uk .
