Matter review
From a client mandate to the work it actually requires
Describe the matter in plain language. Get back the regulatory stages needed to implement it, in the order the dependencies allow, with the points that need a human decision called out.
The problem
Scoping is where the risk hides
The expensive mistakes in a regulated mandate are rarely a misread rule. They are a workstream nobody scoped until it was on the critical path.
A senior lawyer knows what a token issuance or a custody arrangement entails, and reconstructs it from memory each time. That knowledge is uneven across a team, it is slow to transfer, and it degrades exactly where the field is moving fastest.
The failure is not usually an incorrect answer to a question somebody asked. It is a requirement that was never surfaced, discovered late, when the sequencing options have already closed.
How it works
Four properties that make the output usable
Assembled, not improvised
Stages are drawn from a curated library of regulatory building blocks, each pulled in by the activities your matter actually involves. The same mandate produces the same roadmap. It is not regenerated from scratch, and differently, every time you ask.
Sequence, not a checklist
The roadmap models how stages relate: which are independent, which are shaped by the outcome of an earlier one, and which cannot start until a prior stage resolves. You see the critical path and what is blocking it, rather than a flat list in arbitrary order.
Decisions are surfaced as forks
Some stages are decision points that reshape everything downstream. These are marked as such, with their options set out, so you can take a view, or assume one and re-run, and watch the rest of the roadmap change accordingly.
Every stage names its output
Each stage records the documents it produces, so the roadmap doubles as a document plan and hands off cleanly into drafting rather than stopping at a description of the work.
Coverage
Transactional and contentious
The library spans the phases a regulated matter actually moves through, on both sides of the practice.
On the transactional side that runs from structuring, through authorisation and launch, into ongoing obligations: the shape of a token issuance, a custody arrangement or a market-infrastructure build. On the contentious side it covers assessment, evidence preservation, strategy, proceedings and resolution.
Where a stage turns on something genuinely unsettled, or where the corpus is thin on the point, the roadmap says so rather than presenting the stage as routine. Knowing which parts of a matter are well-trodden and which are not is most of the value of scoping it.
What it is for
A starting point for a lawyer, not a substitute for one
The roadmap is a scoping instrument. It is meant to be argued with: stages removed because they do not apply to your facts, assumptions taken and the path re-run, positions taken that the library does not anticipate. Every stage carries its reasoning and the material behind it so you can interrogate it rather than accept it.
Used well, it does the part that is mechanical and slow, enumerating what a mandate of this shape involves and in what order, and leaves the judgment to the person qualified to exercise it.
Scope a live mandate with us
Bring a matter you are scoping now. The comparison worth making is against the workstream list you would have written yourself.