Top-down approaches to conflicts checks are increasingly a thing of the past at law firms as responsibility for analyzing potential conflicts of interest is shifting away from partners to teams of professional analysts, new research from legal tech company Intapp suggests. 

Like many staff roles in the legal industry, those responsible for conflicts analysis are evolving into a specialized team of professionals, often with four-year degrees or J.D.s, rather than clerical personnel serving at the discretion of practice partners, according to survey authors. A similar evolution can be seen in the upskilling of executive assistants and attorney resource specialists in Big Law.