Independence and conflicts
Independence is operational, not aspirational. It is documented before an engagement begins, tested against a named materiality bar, and disclosed in writing. The conflicts policy, the equity posture, and the firm's relationship to expert networks are stated here so prospective clients can examine them before signing.
What independence means here
Conflicts are declared at the engagement brief, in writing, before scope is signed. The declaration covers active engagements, prior engagements within the trailing twenty-four months, expert network calls in the same sub-sector, and any personal holdings or advisory roles held by the principal. The materiality test is named, not vague: a conflict is material if a reasonable client, knowing the facts, would either decline the engagement or require the firm to recuse from a defined slice of the work. Material conflicts are refused, full stop. Non-material adjacencies are disclosed and the client decides whether to proceed. The firm does not run a Chinese-wall theatre across two competing clients in the same narrow market; in such cases the second engagement is declined or delayed until the first concludes. Recusal protocols, when a non-material adjacency is accepted, are written into the engagement letter and audited at delivery.
Equity, fees, and disclosures
The firm holds no equity, options, warrants, SAFEs, or revenue-share interests in client companies. There is no paid placement of recommendations, vendors, or platforms in the firm's published briefs; coverage is selected on analytic merit and any pre-existing relationship is footnoted. There is no back-channel routing of expert-network calls, meaning the firm does not accept finder's fees, kickbacks, or referral compensation for connecting clients with experts, vendors, or capital. Fees are disclosed in full at the engagement brief: fixed-fee scopes, time-and-materials caps, and any pass-through costs are named with no contingent or success-fee structures that would tilt analysis toward a preferred outcome.
Expert network participation
The firm's participation in expert networks, including GLG, AlphaSights, and Guidepoint, is disclosed at the engagement brief whenever a roster is currently active. Where the firm itself consults through these networks, that activity is logged and shared on request. Conversations the firm sources through expert networks for a client engagement are recorded as engagement events: billed to the client, attributed in the deliverable, and never repackaged as independent research in a later brief. Conversely, calls the firm conducts for its own published research are funded by the firm and labelled as such; no client-funded call is ever misrepresented as independent research, and no independent call is silently re-billed to a client.
IP and confidentiality
Clients retain full intellectual property in bespoke deliverables: the model, the memo, the deck, the data schema produced for them. The firm retains its methodology, its internal tooling, its evaluation harnesses, and the generic patterns underlying its work. NDA is the default posture and survives engagement close. The firm's published briefs and the open or internal platform code that supports them are developed independently of any single client's commercial interests; no client has editorial control over published work, and no published work cites or quotes a client without explicit written permission. Where a methodology innovation emerges during a client engagement, the generic technique stays with the firm and the client-specific application stays with the client.