Two Consultants, One Client, and a Brief Nobody Agreed On

The situation

Tomasz and Ewa met years before any of this started, at a conference neither of them particularly remembers the name of, and found they had complementary skills worth pairing on the right project. Tomasz works as an insurance adjuster by day and takes on independent consulting engagements evaluating operational risk and records processes for small businesses on the side. Ewa is a librarian, and her side work applying archival and records-management principles to messy corporate filing systems turned out to fit neatly alongside what Tomasz offered. Together they had completed three smaller projects before an Ancaster company engaged them jointly to overhaul its claims and records intake process, a project large enough that both of them scaled back their other consulting work to focus on it.

The engagement came through Chamari, the company's operations manager, who ran point on every meeting, signed the engagement letter, and communicated the brief to Tomasz and Ewa in a series of emails and two working sessions early in the project. Chamari was not, however, the company's owner, and as the project progressed it became clear that the requirements Chamari had communicated did not fully match what the owner, who joined only the final review meeting, actually wanted to see. Neither Tomasz nor Ewa had any reason at the time to think Chamari's authority to define the project was anything less than complete.

Tomasz and Ewa built the intake system to the specifications Chamari had given them, documenting every requirement as it was communicated and confirming scope changes in writing along the way, a habit built from earlier projects where undocumented verbal changes had caused friction between consultant and client. When the deliverables were presented at the final review, the owner rejected significant portions of the work, saying it did not reflect what the company needed, while Chamari, present in the same room, said comparatively little in the consultants' defence, a silence that struck both Tomasz and Ewa as strange given how closely the work matched what Chamari had asked for.

The engagement fee, along with the cost of redoing portions of the work the company was now demanding, put the dispute somewhere between one hundred thousand and three hundred fifty thousand dollars. Tomasz and Ewa were left holding an unpaid invoice, a rejected deliverable, and a brief that, on paper, they had followed to the letter, given by someone who was suddenly less willing to say so out loud once the person with real authority over the business had weighed in against it.

What the documents showed

The dispute turned almost entirely on documentation, because three people, not two, had a hand in defining what this project was supposed to deliver, and their accounts of what had been agreed no longer matched once the invoice went unpaid. Chamari's emails and the working session notes were the clearest record of what the consultants had actually been told to build. The owner's expectations, by contrast, existed almost nowhere in writing; they surfaced for the first time, in any documented form, at the final review meeting where the work was rejected outright.

We requested and reviewed the full email chain between Chamari and the consultants, along with Tomasz and Ewa's own project notes, which recorded not just the requirements as given but the dates those requirements were confirmed and any changes made along the way. This record showed a consistent, traceable path from the original engagement letter through each working session to the delivered product, with no material deviation between what was asked for at any stage and what was ultimately built and handed over.

What the documents also showed, working against a simple story, was that the engagement letter itself, signed by Chamari, described the company broadly as the client without specifying whose sign-off constituted final acceptance of deliverables. That gap meant the company could argue, at least on the face of the contract, that Chamari's approval along the way was not necessarily the same as the company's approval, since the owner had ultimate authority over the business's decisions and had never personally signed off on the specifications Chamari had communicated to the consultants throughout.

We also obtained, through a formal request, the company's own internal correspondence between Chamari and the owner during the project, which showed Chamari raising the owner's evolving preferences internally partway through the engagement but never passing those changes on to Tomasz and Ewa. That internal record was decisive. It showed the gap between what the consultants delivered and what the owner wanted was not a failure of the consultants' work against the brief; it was a failure of the brief to travel from the owner to Chamari to the consultants intact, a breakdown that happened entirely inside the client's own organization.

We also compared the rejected deliverable line by line against Chamari's original written specification, item for item, to confirm there was no reading under which the work fell short of what had actually been requested. Every rejected component matched a corresponding requirement in Chamari's brief exactly, which closed off any argument that the consultants had simply misread or under-delivered against what they were told to build.

What we did

1. Assembled a complete chronological record of every requirement, confirmation, and change communicated to Tomasz and Ewa throughout the engagement, cross-referenced against their delivered work product line by line, so we could demonstrate precise compliance with the brief as it had actually been given to them rather than as it was later described, using dated entries the company could not easily dispute since many came from its own operations manager.
2. Reviewed the engagement letter's acceptance language closely to determine whether Chamari's operational authority, as the person who signed the agreement and ran every working session, was sufficient to bind the company to the specifications communicated, since the letter itself was silent on who held final sign-off authority for deliverables, a silence that cut both ways and needed to be addressed head-on rather than argued around.
3. Formally requested the company's internal correspondence between Chamari and the owner during the engagement period, anticipating that any gap between what was communicated to the consultants and what the owner actually wanted would be visible in how the two of them discussed the project between themselves rather than with Tomasz and Ewa present, since people tend to write more candidly to a colleague than to a consultant they may end up disputing later.
4. Identified the internal email in which Chamari flagged the owner's changing preferences without relaying them onward, which became the central piece of evidence showing the rejection stemmed from an internal communication failure at the company, not from any deficiency in the consultants' work against the brief they had been given, and it was a document the company itself had no way to disown.
5. Drafted a demand letter setting out the full documentary chronology, distinguishing clearly between what Tomasz and Ewa had delivered against Chamari's brief and what the owner had wanted but never communicated, and demanding payment of the outstanding invoice in full given that the shortfall was not attributable to the consultants in any way the record could support, a letter written to be handed straight to a judge if it came to that.
6. Proposed a scoped, separately priced addendum to bring the deliverable in line with the owner's actual preferences, framed as new work arising from a late-disclosed requirement rather than a correction to defective work, which reframed the remaining dispute from a liability question into a pricing question and gave the company a face-saving way to move forward without conceding the original work had been wrong.
7. Negotiated directly with the company's counsel over several weeks, using the internal correspondence as leverage to resist any reduction in the original invoice while agreeing on reasonable terms for the additional scope, since litigating a fee dispute to trial would have cost both sides more than the addendum work was worth, and since the internal correspondence gave us a strong position to negotiate from rather than one that needed a courtroom to be tested.

The outcome

The company agreed to pay the original invoice in full, roughly five months after the rejection at the final review meeting, once the internal correspondence made clear where the breakdown had actually occurred. Tomasz and Ewa also completed a smaller, separately paid addendum to adjust the intake system to the owner's stated preferences, which they treated as new work rather than a concession that the original deliverable had been deficient, and priced accordingly rather than absorbing it as free correction.

The company did not formally acknowledge fault in the settlement, which is typical of negotiated resolutions reached before a matter goes to trial, but the payment terms and the structure of the addendum both reflected the documentary record we had built rather than the company's original position at the review meeting. Reaching that outcome without a trial also meant both consultants avoided months of additional unpaid time that a courtroom process would have demanded on top of the unpaid invoice itself, time neither of them could easily spare given their other client commitments running in parallel.

Tomasz and Ewa's working relationship with each other was unaffected by the dispute, since the record showed both of them had followed the same brief consistently throughout, with neither party's contribution singled out as the source of the rejection. Their relationship with the company ended with this project; neither side pursued further work together after the addendum was delivered. Going forward, both consultants now require, as a condition of any joint engagement, a single named point of client-side sign-off with authority to bind the organization, written into the engagement letter itself rather than left to be assumed from someone's job title, a small clause that costs nothing to add and would have prevented this entire dispute from happening in the first place.

What you can learn from this