Enclosure (1) to COMDTINST 5801.4E
In addition, if the relationship of clients to matters and cases is established, the legal assistance
attorney can easily review the nature of the matters any particular entity is involved with to establish
whether or not a conflict exists. Someone must examine the information presented by Law Manager to
determine if a conflict does in fact exist. Further, Law Manager will only display the information
inputted to it. To make conflict checking work, people (entities) need to be entered and their roles in
cases defined.
a. Conflict checking is accomplished using the Entity Notebook. The general procedures are as
follows:
1. Law Manager should be running on the desktop (this should be the normal practice
by Legal Techs and other support staff who do client intake).
2. If not already open, select and open the Entity Notebook; this will bring up the
main entity detail screen and the Explorer tab.
3. Enter the name of any potential conflict, be it spouse, landlord, lessee, etc., in the
name fields; select Find (the binoculars in the toolbar).
4. The results will be displayed by indicating if the potential client is already in the
database (the entity main screen will return filled out). Anyone already in the
database and related to the potential client will be indicated in the Explorer tab
below.
5. By using the Explorer tab, relationships can be examined for possible conflicts.
Matters can also be examined to see if the particular person, or anyone he or she is
related to, has been seen in the legal office and for what matters they were seen.
6. The Military Justice notebook must also be searched to determine if any potential
clients or their potentially conflicted persons are a party to any military justice
case belonging to the attorney or office.
6. Reports and Queries.
a. Queries. Queries are searches of the database. They permit the user to specify the way in which
LM displays information on their computer. This can greatly streamline the process of data
entry. Users can store multiple queries for different purposes. For example, a legal assistance
paralegal may use one query to view all cases and the documents related to them and another to
speed timekeeping. A legal assistance manager may have a query that shows all the cases, listed
by attorney (i.e., "owner") for the office and another query set up for just their cases. The
effective use of saved queries can greatly reduce the time spent looking for information and
entering data.
b. Reports. Law Manager information that can be formatted in a desired way and outputted, either
by printing or exporting to another format (text, spreadsheet, etc.). A set of standard reports for
legal assistance has been created by the Coast Guard Director of Legal Assistance with the help
of the Office of Legal Policy and Program Development (G-LPD). Requests for assistance in
creating custom reports should be directed to Commandant (G-LPD) IT. The Law Manager
reporting tool is somewhat limited in the types of reports it can produce. The System
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