Some clients keep a line open to us. It runs to a few days a month, used when something comes up and left alone when it doesn’t.
Counsel is the retainer arrangement. It means you can call us before a decision rather than after. You might want to think through an investment in AI, read a vendor’s proposal before signing it, check a technical claim before it goes in front of the board, or look at a model that has started behaving oddly. None of these things takes very long, but they tend to matter, and they go better with someone who already knows how your organisation works.
It’s not a help desk. When a question grows into real project work, we say so, and you’re free to give that work to somebody else.
A board is a week away from signing a platform agreement that promises a forty per cent cost reduction. Reading the appendices takes one afternoon, and it turns out that the benchmark behind the headline number was designed by the vendor, run on the vendor’s own data, and never measured against anything resembling the client’s workload. The platform may still be worth buying, but the decision is now being made on real information.
Exemplum · hypothetical
If there’s a decision on your desk that would benefit from an outside view, describe it. We’ll tell you whether a retainer makes sense or whether a single conversation would cover it.