MARCHMONT VANE PARTNERS
Division 02 / Attestation & Continuity//0201.E整合性

Priced against what a contradiction costs when someone else finds it first.

Three engagement types, one qualification question, and the arithmetic that sets the retainer against the alternative.

Who this is for

Reconciliation is a function of how many independently operated divisions publish under one name, not of company size on its own.

Profile Fit
Group with 3 or more divisions publishing independently under a common brand or shared reporting line Primary
Group preparing a cross-divisional campaign or joint filing for the first time Primary
Single-entity company with one publishing function Not applicable; no cross-reference exists to check
Group where all divisions already share one drafting desk Marginal; most conflicts are prevented upstream of this engagement
Group under active regulatory or press inquiry into a specific prior statement Declined for the statement in question. The finding would be discoverable, and this firm does not accept engagements scoped to avoid discovery

The last row is a standing policy, not a case-by-case judgement. A prospective client raising it at the qualification call is told the same thing every other prospective client is told.

Engagement types

Type Cycle Fee Deliverable
Pre-Publication Reconciliation Single document or campaign, before release Fixed, quoted against document count Clearance memo, or a routed finding with a proposed amendment
Standing Retainer Weekly, continuous 38,000 EUR per month Weekly findings log, priority scheduling, quarterly confidence review
Full-Group Attestation Annual Fixed, scoped to divisions and document volume at kickoff Opinion issued to the parent, addressed to the board

A Full-Group Attestation draws on the current findings log of every division already under a Standing Retainer rather than reopening their registers from first pass, which shortens the annual cycle in proportion to how many divisions are already covered. Nine of the group’s twelve principal publishing divisions currently are; the remaining three are discussed under Onboarding.

The arithmetic

The Standing Retainer runs 38,000 EUR a month. Over a year that is 38,000 multiplied by 12, or 456,000 EUR.

The alternative to a retainer is not a lower fee; it is discovery by someone outside the group. The average cost of remediating a single externally discovered contradiction through the group’s standard pathway is estimated at 1,150,000 EUR, built from three components: 450,000 EUR in external counsel, 500,000 EUR for the customary Ashcombe Partners reputational engagement, and 200,000 EUR for the Kessler Roe placement that follows where a named officer becomes necessary. 450,000 plus 500,000 plus 200,000 is 1,150,000.

Dividing the retainer by the remediation cost, 456,000 divided by 1,150,000, gives 0.4. That is the number of externally discovered contradictions the retainer needs to prevent in a year to pay for itself. Inverted, one divided by 0.4 is 2.5: the retainer pays for itself if it prevents one such event every two and a half years. No division retained under the Standing Instruction has produced an externally discovered contradiction since onboarding.

What this arithmetic does not claim. It does not claim the underlying account is sound. It claims only that an account discovered to disagree with itself costs more to fix from outside than from inside, and prices accordingly.</div>

Onboarding

A division not currently under standing instruction, whether newly formed or newly consolidated into the group, is brought on in five steps.

  1. Qualification call. Thirty minutes, against the fit table above. Held within three working days of first contact.
  2. Inventory intake. The division supplies every document published in the trailing twelve months, in the categories set out under Method. Divisions with a shared drafting desk supply less; divisions with none supply more.
  3. First-pass register. Claims are extracted and graded against the confidence tiers. This is the pass that produces the division’s opening findings count, and it is ordinarily the largest count the division will see, because nothing has yet been cross-referenced against another division’s record.
  4. Cross-reference against the group. The division’s claims are checked against the current register for every other division already under instruction. New findings from this step are logged and routed under the standard Pass Five rule.
  5. First reconciliation cycle. The division enters the weekly or monthly cycle applicable to its engagement type, and its opening findings are worked to closure on the same terms as any other finding.

Onboarding is included in year one of a Standing Retainer and is not charged separately. A Pre-Publication Reconciliation client that later converts to a retainer has its onboarding credited against the conversion.

Terms

Engagement letters are issued on acceptance and specify scope, cycle, fee and the escalation path for a finding that cannot be closed within the reporting period. Fees are reviewed annually and are not indexed to the number of findings raised in the prior period; a division should not be able to lower its fee by publishing less, and this firm does not price it that way.

Enquiries. Write with the number of publishing divisions, the document types currently in circulation, and whether the group has been through a cross-divisional campaign before. Hire this firm to avoid the fate of the divisions currently carrying an open finding.</div>

Fee Schedule / Full TiersAccess: 690.00 + NDA
The schedule sets out the fixed fee bands for Pre-Publication Reconciliation by document type and volume, the Standing Retainer tiers above the standard rate, and the Full-Group Attestation scoping table used at kickoff.
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