How I Work
How I work.
This page describes how engagements are structured, what I take on, and what I decline — so that you can judge the fit before we ever speak.
What this practice is
This is a deliberately small practice, and a part-time one. There are no associates and nothing is delegated; the person you speak with is the person who does the work. That is also the constraint that shapes everything below: capacity is finite, and accepting one engagement means declining another.
Engagements are contracted through ThetaSquared, LLC, which is not a law firm and does not provide legal services. If what you need is legal representation, that is a different relationship, through a different entity — and I will say so in the first conversation.
How engagements are structured
Needs your input — blocking
Fixed fee, hourly, or retainer; deposit practice; what a scoping conversation costs, if anything; how scope changes are handled once work is underway; and how engagements end. This is the section that makes
Assessment and Advisory credible — defined units of work imply defined commercial terms behind them.
Capacity
Needs your input — blocking
How many engagements per year, and how many concurrently. Without this figure the page has no spine: everything below is a claim about selectivity, and selectivity is only meaningful against a number. It also determines what the
Neutral page can say about availability. Note that publishing an annual capacity figure is a statement about your outside commitments, which is part of why the firm-clearance question matters before this page goes live.
What I take
I look for work in which the answer is genuinely unknown at the outset, and in which judgment — rather than process — is what is being engaged: technology without comparables, institutions that do not yet exist, rooms in which the parties hold vetoes rather than authority, and assessments whose sponsors are prepared to hear no.
What I decline
Needs your input — blocking, and the most important gap on the site
Two or three anonymised declined engagements, each with the actual reason. Not categories — specific engagements, described closely enough to be recognisable as real. This is the single passage that does the most work on the entire site: it is why a reader who would have been a difficult client leaves before contacting you, and why a reader who has been burned by a consultant who took work they should have refused picks up the phone. Nothing in the six source documents could supply it; marketing bios record no refusals. Only you have these.
What I will not do at any price
Needs your input — blocking
The bright lines. I have not drafted these even as a starting point, because a list of ethical commitments attributed to a named lawyer has to be that person's actual commitments, in their own terms. Some will be obvious from your professional obligations; the ones worth publishing are the ones that go past them.