Our clients include compliance departments at large employers. Will your work survive their review?
That is a fair question and the answer is that we build for it up front. Role-based access, a record of who touched what, data kept where you say it is kept, and documentation written for someone else’s reviewer rather than for us. We will sit on the call with your client’s security team if it helps. What we will not do is promise a certification we do not hold — we will tell you exactly what we can evidence.
We bill by the hour. How do we decide whether this is worth the capital?
Count the hours it removes and price them at what you actually charge. Most firms here can name the tasks immediately — chasing documents before a review, rebuilding a pack, retyping figures off a statement. If those add up to less than a few hours a week across the practice, do not spend the money, and we will tell you so. The arithmetic has to work at your rates, not at a national average.
A partner has to see everything before it goes out. Does that defeat the purpose?
No, and we would refuse to build it any other way. The gain is not in removing the partner; it is in what the partner is handed. Reviewing a finished draft assembled from the right documents takes minutes. Building it from scratch takes an afternoon. The review gate — we call it SolaceSentry — is where the draft stops until a named person releases it.
Half our work arrives as a PDF from somebody else’s system. Can you actually do anything with that?
Yes, and it is one of the better arguments for using this technology at all. Statements, policy schedules, supplier acknowledgements and tear sheets get read and the figures placed where you need them, instead of an administrator retyping them. Anything the system cannot read confidently is flagged for a person rather than guessed at, because a wrong number in a review pack is worse than a blank one.
Twenty years of client files sit on our server. Where do they end up?
Where they are now, unless you tell us otherwise. We do not require a migration to work, and we do not take custody of your archive as a condition of the build. Whatever the system does hold is yours, exportable in a standard format whenever you ask, and that is written into the agreement before you commit. Your file history should never be an argument for staying with a supplier.
Do you work with the corporate offices along Meridian, or only smaller firms?
Mostly the firms around them. A company with fifteen hundred staff has an IT department, procurement rules and a vendor list, and we are not the right size to be on it. Our work is with the fifteen- to two-hundred-person practices and studios in the same city — often the ones those corporate offices are hiring for legal, benefits, design or clinical work.
Our design projects change every week. Can a system keep up with that?
It has to, or it will be abandoned by the second project. We build the schedule of finishes as a living record rather than a document that gets versioned. A changed lead time updates every room it touches. A substitution carries the price, the reason and the approval. The point is not to freeze the project — it is that when it moves, everyone is reading the same thing.
What actually happens in the first four weeks?
We watch how the work moves now — who touches a matter or a project, where it waits, what gets retyped. That produces a written map and a fixed price against a defined boundary. You can take that map and do nothing with it, or take it to somebody else. We would rather be turned down at that stage than build the wrong thing carefully.