PRODUCT LAUNCH  ·  LEGALFAB

Introducing Onboard: The Intelligent Front Door for the Modern Law Firm

LegalFab today announced the launch of Onboard — client and matter onboarding, conflicts and AML, rebuilt on a resolved knowledge graph of the firm.

Every matter starts with onboarding. And yet, for decades, no one has truly rebuilt it. Onboard changes that — replacing a fragmented sequence of manual checks with a single, continuously informed layer that tells a firm whether it can act, whether it should act, and whether that remains true as circumstances change.

Onboard is available now at legalfab.ai.

The Problem: Compliance Isn’t Underresourced — It’s Underinformed

Most law firms aren’t struggling with onboarding, conflicts and AML because they lack people, policy, or process. They’re struggling because the teams responsible for high-stakes decisions are working from information that is incomplete, outdated, and fragmented.

For decades, onboarding has been treated as a sequence of disconnected checks: fill in the form, search the names, run KYC, approve the matter, file the evidence — then repeat much of it the next time a name reappears, because nothing carries over. Every stage checks a single moment in time. None of them talk to each other.

That model breaks down in four predictable ways:

• The data is never the full picture. A conflict check is only as good as what it’s checked against. Named parties get resolved, but historical matter relationships and beneficial ownership chains often go unchecked entirely — a search only covers what someone thought to ask.
• Periodic isn’t protective. AML risk doesn’t wait for the next review cycle. Ownership changes, sanctions lists update, and adverse media breaks between reviews — not during them. Point-in-time monitoring is always looking at yesterday.
• Systems are silos, not a system. Client history sits in the PMS. Relationships sit in the CRM. Risk signals live somewhere else entirely. Regulatory exposure grows in the gaps between systems that were never built to talk to each other.
• The decision is bigger than the information behind it. Compliance teams are asked to make high-stakes calls — clear, block, escalate — on whatever picture happens to be available. That’s not a people problem, a policy problem, or a process problem. It’s an information problem, and no amount of extra process fixes a gap in the underlying picture.

The Solution: A Continuously Resolved Understanding of the Firm

Onboard fixes the information layer. Rather than clearing a matter once, it maintains a continuously resolved understanding of every client, party, relationship and risk — combining the firm’s own knowledge with external intelligence and open-source data — and keeps that understanding current as the world changes.

How it works

• One intelligent intake. Clients and instructions come in through whatever channel the firm already uses — web, email, portal, or existing systems — and are validated and risk-surfaced before a matter can open.
• Every party resolved into one identity. Onboard resolves each person and organisation into a single connected identity across the systems the firm already runs. A name is not an identity — and a conflict lives in a relationship, not in a search result or a spelling variation.
• KYC and AML that never go stale. Ownership, control, sanctions status and adverse media are monitored continuously. A change in any of them triggers review automatically, rather than waiting for the next scheduled refresh.
• Conflicts checked against the relationship graph. Every new matter is checked against resolved relationships — not name matches — with ethical walls and confidentiality obligations enforced across the firm’s connected environment. Onboard tests whether a barrier could actually hold before a firm relies on one.
• A defensible record that builds itself. Every decision, exception and source is captured automatically as the work happens — not reconstructed afterwards.
• A person clears every gate. Onboard prepares the decision — reading the matter, resolving every party, running the rules, and showing its reasoning. A partner or risk lead makes the call. Every determination — clear, allow-with-conditions, or block — is scoped, time-bound, and set to re-run automatically the moment a relevant fact changes.

The Business Benefits

By replacing fragmented, point-in-time checks with a continuously informed compliance layer, Onboard delivers measurable change for law firms:

• Faster instruction to clearance. Matters move from instruction to clearance in minutes, not days — removing a routine bottleneck between winning the work and starting it.
• Fewer missed conflicts. Conflict checking stops being a name-search exercise. Because every party is resolved into a single identity and checked against a relationship graph, conflicts that would previously slip through spelling variations, related entities, or historical matters are surfaced.
• KYC and AML that stay current, automatically. Client due diligence no longer goes stale the day after it’s completed. Ownership changes, sanctions updates and adverse media are caught as they happen, reducing regulatory and reputational exposure between reviews.
• A defensible, audit-ready record with no extra effort. Every decision, exception and source is captured as it happens, giving the firm a sourced, replayable evidence pack for every matter — without compliance teams having to reconstruct the trail after the fact.
• Compliance teams empowered, not replaced. Onboard doesn’t remove human judgment from the process — it removes the information gap that made high-stakes decisions harder than they needed to be. A person still clears every gate; they simply do it with a complete picture.
• Coverage tuned to every practice. The same governed layer applies the right triage across Corporate/M&A, Banking & Finance, Disputes, Insurance, Real Estate, Employment, Private Client, IP/Technology and cross-border matters — so every practice group benefits from the same intelligence layer.
• Built for regulatory alignment. Onboard is aligned with the SRA regime and the direction of travel toward FCA supervision of legal-sector AML, and is ISO 27001 certified and SOC 2 Type II aligned.

The Firm Always Knows

Onboard gives every firm a continuous answer to four questions: whom it is acting for, whom they are connected to, what the outside world says about them, and whether it can act. And it keeps knowing.

Onboard by LegalFab.

Intake · Conflicts · AML — resolved, continuous, audit-ready.

→ legalfab.ai

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