Clearpoint Advisory Group

No agent may access, reference, or surface information from Client A's engagement in any artifact produced for Client B, even if Client A's data would be analytically useful.

Why: Management consulting depends on trust. Clients share sensitive strategic, financial, and operational data under the assumption of strict confidentiality. A single breach ends the relationship and potentially the firm.

Failure mode: Lens pulled competitive benchmarking data from a prior engagement with Haldane Manufacturing into a market analysis being prepared for Orion Supply Chain. Both are in industrial distribution. The Orion deliverable included Haldane's internal margin structure labeled as "industry benchmark." Caught by the lead consultant during review. If delivered, it would have violated our NDA and destroyed both client relationships simultaneously.

Scope: All agents, all engagements.

Every document, email draft, or presentation that will be seen by a client must be reviewed and approved by the assigned consultant before delivery. Zero autonomous client-facing output.

Why: Consulting deliverables carry the firm's reputation. A single poorly reasoned recommendation or factual error in a strategy document can undermine months of trust-building.

Failure mode: Archer auto-sent a proposal follow-up email to a prospect that included a placeholder fee estimate ("$XX,000 -- confirm with partner"). The prospect replied asking about the pricing, and we had to explain the error. Lost the deal.

Scope: All agents producing client-facing content.

Time entries generated by Tock must distinguish between "agent-drafted" and "consultant-performed" work categories. Billing rates apply to consultant time, not agent processing time.

Why: Clients pay for senior consultant judgment. Billing 4 hours at $275/hr for work an agent completed in 12 seconds is fraud-adjacent and will be caught by sophisticated clients who audit invoices.

Failure mode: Tock logged 3.5 hours of "market research" for a deliverable that Lens produced in under a minute with consultant review taking 20 minutes. Client's procurement team flagged the line item. We credited the hours but the trust damage was done.

Scope: Tock, Ledger, all billing workflows.

Lens (client research) and Recon (competitive intel) must operate with separate context windows. Lens has access to client engagement data. Recon has access to public market data and competitive positioning. They never share client-specific intelligence.

Why: The highest-risk information leak vector is the intersection of competitive intelligence and client research. If Recon knows Client A's strategy and is asked to analyze Client A's competitor, it could inadvertently reveal privileged information.

Failure mode: Before the firewall, a single research agent held context from a Meridian Corp strategy engagement while simultaneously running competitive analysis on Meridian's rival. The competitive brief included insights that could only have come from Meridian's internal data. Caught internally, but it triggered the architectural split.

Scope: Lens, Recon.

Archer (proposals) must pull methodology descriptions and case studies exclusively from Vault's approved library. It must not generate novel methodologies or fabricate case study details.

Why: Proposals create contractual expectations. If Archer invents a "proprietary framework" that doesn't exist, we're committed to delivering something we haven't built.

Failure mode: Archer generated a proposal referencing Clearpoint's "4D Transformation Framework" -- which does not exist. The client was excited about it. We had to either build it on the fly or admit the proposal was inaccurate. We built it, at a cost of 40 unplanned hours.

Scope: Archer, Vault.

Brief (meeting prep) must include a "relationship context" section sourced from Accelo activity history and Slack threads. Every client meeting prep includes: last 3 interactions, open action items, any unresolved complaints or concerns, and days since last contact.

Why: Consultants juggling 4-6 active engagements forget context. Walking into a meeting without knowing the client raised a billing concern last week is a relationship risk.

Failure mode: Lead consultant walked into a quarterly review unaware that the client's CFO had emailed about a $12,000 billing discrepancy two days prior. The CFO raised it in the meeting. The consultant was blindsided and the client questioned whether anyone was reading their emails.

Scope: Brief, all client-facing meetings.

Ledger must flag any invoice where the total exceeds the contracted engagement cap or the monthly retainer amount by more than 5%. These invoices require partner approval before sending.

Why: Overbilling erodes trust faster than underdelivering. Clients on fixed-fee or capped engagements track their spend carefully.

Failure mode: Ledger generated and queued an invoice for $47,200 against a $40,000 engagement cap. The overage was legitimate change-order work, but the invoice went out without the change order documentation attached. Client disputed the entire invoice, delaying payment by 6 weeks.

Scope: Ledger, billing workflows.

When a new engagement kicks off, Brief must generate a "context packet" that is distributed to all agents that will touch that engagement. The packet includes: client name, industry, engagement scope, confidentiality tier, key contacts, and any conflict-of-interest flags.

Why: Without a shared context initialization, agents operate with partial information. Lens might research the wrong subsidiary. Archer might reference a case study from a competitor.

Failure mode: New engagement for Barrett Holdings started without a context packet. Lens researched Barrett Industries (different company, similar name). Two days of research wasted. The error wasn't caught until the consultant reviewed the first deliverable draft.

Scope: Brief, all agents touching client engagements.

Tock feeds utilization data to Brief every Monday morning. Brief incorporates utilization into meeting prep: if a consultant is above 85% utilization, flag it in their meeting prep as a capacity risk.

Why: Overloaded consultants cut corners. If Brief knows a consultant is stretched, it can flag the risk before the consultant walks into a client meeting and overpromises on timelines.

Failure mode: Senior consultant at 94% utilization committed to a 2-week deliverable turnaround in a client meeting. The deliverable took 5 weeks. Client escalated to the managing partner.

Scope: Tock, Brief.

Recon's competitive intelligence outputs must be tagged with source provenance: PUBLIC (press releases, filings, published reports), INFERRED (analysis derived from public data), or PROPRIETARY (from paid databases). Proprietary-sourced intel must not appear in client deliverables without license verification.

Why: Sharing proprietary database content in client deliverables can violate data licensing agreements and expose the firm to legal liability.

Failure mode: Recon included IBISWorld industry data verbatim in a client-facing market sizing report. The client published excerpts in their board materials. IBISWorld flagged the unauthorized redistribution. We settled for $8,500.

Scope: Recon, all deliverable workflows.

Proposal drafts from Archer should be 60-70% complete, not 95%. Leave strategic positioning, pricing rationale, and the executive summary for the consultant to write.

Why: Over-polished agent drafts create a false sense of completion. Consultants rubber-stamp instead of thinking critically. The best proposals have the consultant's genuine strategic voice in the sections that matter most.

Failure mode: Archer produced a near-perfect 28-page proposal. The partner skimmed it, approved it, and sent it. The pricing section included a 15% discount that Archer inferred from a prior similar engagement but that was not appropriate for this client's scope. Cost us $31,500 in margin.

Scope: Archer.

Vault's knowledge base must be refreshed quarterly. Methodologies, case studies, and templates older than 18 months must be flagged for review and either updated or archived.

Why: Stale methodologies in proposals and deliverables make the firm look dated. Clients in fast-moving industries notice when frameworks reference pre-pandemic market conditions.

Failure mode: Archer pulled a "Digital Transformation Readiness Assessment" template from Vault that referenced 2023 technology benchmarks. The client's CTO pointed out the benchmarks were 3 years old during the proposal review call.

Scope: Vault, Archer.

For engagements involving direct competitors, assign different consultant teams and ensure no agent holds context for both engagements simultaneously. Rotate agent context between engagements, never run them in parallel.

Why: Even with firewalls, simultaneous context is the highest-risk vector for information leakage. Sequential processing with context clearing is safer than parallel processing with access controls.

Failure mode: This is the architectural response to the Haldane/Orion incident (C001). No second incident has occurred since implementing sequential processing.

Scope: All agents, all competing-client engagements.

When an agent produces an output that contains information from the wrong engagement, treat it as a critical incident. Full audit: which agent, which data, how it crossed the boundary, and architectural fix. Not just a correction.

Why: Information barrier breaches in consulting are existential. A pattern of near-misses means the architecture is fundamentally flawed, not that you got unlucky.

Failure mode: After the Haldane/Orion incident, we initially just "corrected the document." The same class of leak happened again 3 weeks later with different clients. Only after treating it as a structural failure and redesigning the agent architecture (splitting Lens and Recon, implementing sequential processing) did the problem stop.

Scope: All agents, incident response.

Agent-generated content that sounds authoritative but is fabricated (hallucinated frameworks, invented statistics, nonexistent case studies) must be caught before client delivery. Every deliverable draft must be checked against Vault's source library.

Why: Consultants trust agent output more as they get comfortable. The fabrication rate is low enough to create a false sense of reliability but high enough to cause real damage when it slips through.

Failure mode: Beyond the "4D Transformation Framework" incident (C005), Lens cited a "McKinsey 2025 Industry Report" that does not exist in a market analysis. The consultant included it in the deliverable. The client's team tried to find the report and couldn't. Credibility damaged.

Scope: All agents producing analytical content.

Strategic recommendations in deliverables must be written by the consultant, not the agent. Agents provide data, structure, and draft analysis. The "so what" and "we recommend" sections are human-only.

Why: Clients are paying for experienced human judgment. Agent-generated recommendations lack the nuanced understanding of client politics, organizational readiness, and implementation feasibility that comes from years of consulting experience.

Failure mode: Lens drafted a recommendation to "consolidate the client's 3 distribution centers into 1 regional hub." Analytically sound based on the data. Politically catastrophic because the CEO's brother manages one of the centers slated for closure. The consultant caught it, but only because she knew the client's internal dynamics.

Scope: All deliverable-producing agents.

Pricing decisions, discount approvals, and scope change negotiations are exclusively human decisions. No agent may suggest, imply, or commit to pricing in any client-facing communication.

Why: Pricing in consulting is relationship-dependent, not formula-dependent. The same scope of work might be priced at $75K for a new client and $55K for a long-term relationship with expansion potential. Agents cannot evaluate these trade-offs.

Failure mode: Archer included a "preferred client discount of 10%" in a renewal proposal because the client had been with us for 3 years. The partner had intended to increase rates by 5% given the expanded scope. The client saw the discount language and anchored to it. We lost $18,000 in annual margin.

Scope: Archer, Ledger, all client-facing agents. ---