For advisory & transactional practices

Life sciences counsel

Your clients' entire valuation is unpublished science. These ten questions measure your practice on the two axes that decide it: validated answers, and legal data protection.

Before you start

10 questions, about 4 minutes
Two axes: the need for validated answers, and legal data protection
The result can also be: Kervalt is not a fit yet

1 / 10

Finding which liability cap, royalty structure, and publication clause we gave university spin-offs over the past three years requires searching through every licensing deal we have drafted.

Pattern knowledge is the margin; scattered files are not a knowledge base.

What we are gauging: Whether your pattern knowledge, your edge against the big firms, is retrievable and cited rather than spread across heads and folders.

2 / 10

The playbook behind our work, how we structure a consortium agreement, which positions technology transfer offices accept, what market is for an MTA indemnity, largely travels with the people who hold it.

A firm, or a collection of practitioners sharing a logo.

What we are gauging: How much of the playbook is institutionally recorded. Playbooks carried by people leave with the people.

3 / 10

In an eighteen-month consortium negotiation with twelve partners, finding what one side conceded in month five, and why, usually requires archaeology across mailboxes.

Chronology is leverage; inbox archaeology is bluffing.

What we are gauging: Whether the chronology of long-running dossiers is queryable with sources. In month fourteen, memory is not a position; reconstruction with evidence is.

4 / 10

When a new European regulation (CTR, MDR/IVDR, AI Act, EHDS) lands, identifying every affected client is manual work.

Regulation is your inventory; monitoring is billable advisory.

What we are gauging: Whether regulatory monitoring is systematic and actionable per client. A missed change is missed work in a niche where speed wins the mandate.

5 / 10

Contracts are in English, labour law files in Dutch or French, case law in both: answers today usually require translation first.

The dossier is trilingual; the tooling should be too.

What we are gauging: Whether your tooling answers across the three languages of your practice. Every translation step costs time and nuance.

6 / 10

Recurring researcher questions (diploma exemption, employee inventions, detachment) are answered by email; the answer lives in the mailbox instead of a findable knowledge base.

Every answered question is a product in disguise.

What we are gauging: Whether recurring advisory is built into a knowledge product. Every well-answered question should make the next one faster.

7 / 10

Drafting sentences in a cloud AI sends them physically to infrastructure outside our building, including files delivered under NDA.

Unpublished data is your client's valuation; jurisdiction is the answer an NDA deserves, not terms of service.

What we are gauging: Where drafted sentences physically go. For clients whose valuation is unpublished data, jurisdiction is the answer an NDA deserves, not a terms-of-service promise.

8 / 10

When a client asks about our own GDPR compliance, that answer cannot be given today with the same precision and evidence as the advice we give them.

Your own stack is your best case study.

What we are gauging: Whether your own compliance can be shown with the same precision as the advice you give. Your own stack is your strongest case study.

9 / 10

In public-private partnerships we are often the only counsel seeing both the university's and the company's documents; separating those contexts in our tools today is an organisational agreement, not a demonstrable enforcement.

In a niche this small, everyone is adjacent to everyone; one crossed context is a reputation event.

What we are gauging: Whether the separation between opposing interests is demonstrably enforced. An organisational agreement is not a Chinese wall in a niche this small.

10 / 10

An audit of our own document handling, run like the DPIAs we draft for clients, could not be passed today with the same evidence.

Clients already send security questionnaires to their law firms; the one with the evidence ready turns the audit into the pitch.

What we are gauging: Whether your own document handling would pass the DPIA you draft for clients. Security questionnaires from clients are coming; the firm with evidence turns the audit into the pitch.

Your result

Follow-up

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