What does partner review check before advice leaves the firm?

What is review for?

Reproducibility. If a second reader, with the same sources, cannot follow the draft to the same conclusion, the draft is not ready, however good the conclusion may be. Review is not a vote on whether the partner agrees. It is a check that the reasoning is visible.

What does the reviewer look for first?

Identification. Client, matter number, period, scope and reviewer, stated on the draft. It sounds clerical. It is the fastest way to catch the most expensive mistakes: a figure from the wrong period, a conclusion that drifted outside the signed scope, a draft that nobody was actually responsible for reviewing.

How is source text kept apart from interpretation?

By writing them as different sentences. "Tax Advisory Memo TA-26-04, section 2, gives 1,250,000 for tax years beginning in 2026" is source text. "The draft therefore needs a replacement figure and citation" is interpretation. "Rohan still needs to confirm qualification and the period" is an open item. When Elena Marsh wrote her research note for the Halden Foods matter, she wrote it in exactly that shape, and it is the shape I want to see in every draft.

The relevant line and section stay alongside the draft, not in a separate file. The reviewer should be able to read the draft and the source side by side.

What about the questions nobody has answered yet?

They are written down with an owner and a next step. On the Halden matter the open question is qualification and the tax-year start date; the owner is Rohan Mehta; the next step is his review before the memo leaves the team. On the Orrin Marine review the open item is the named staffing confirmation; the owner is June Okafor. Recording an open question is not a weakness in the draft. Substituting a confident guess for it would be.

Who approves what?

The engagement partner approves client-facing conclusions. Practice operations confirms commercial terms and capacity. Those are different approvals and they are not interchangeable. A technically perfect memo with an unconfirmed deposit is not released, and a confirmed deposit does not make a memo correct.

Two things review does not approve: work outside a signed scope, and an unapproved staffing request treated as an instruction to begin. A reviewer who finds either sends the draft back to the letter.

What is preserved at release?

The approved version. The review comments. And the source in force when the advice was issued, in the version that was in force on that day. Years later, when a client asks why the firm said what it said, the answer is in those three items. If the source has since changed, the retained record still shows what governed at the time.

How is a correction written?

By naming the changed statement and its replacement. "The earlier draft cited Tax Advisory Memo TA-25-02 and the figure 1,160,000; the current source is TA-26-04, section 2, and the figure is 1,250,000." A correction never implies that the earlier statement did not exist, and never presents the two as competing current rules. The client learns what changed, why, and what the current position is.

Does prior approval carry to the next matter?

No. Reusing research in a new matter requires a fresh period check and a fresh visibility check. An approval given on Halden is an approval of Halden's draft, for Halden's period, inside Halden's lane. The next matter gets its own.

What makes review fast?

A draft that was written to be reviewed. When the client, matter number, period and scope are on the first page, when source text and interpretation are different sentences, when the cited line sits beside the draft and the open items are listed with their owners, review is a reading exercise and a short one. When they are not, review becomes an investigation, and investigations are where the time goes.

So the fastest route through review is not to write less. It is to write in the shape the reviewer needs. Elena's research note for the Halden matter is a good example of that shape: source, section, interpretation, open items, each in its own place. A reviewer can follow it in a few minutes and knows exactly what remains for Rohan before release. That is what reproducible looks like in practice.

Q&A

The questions associates ask most about partner review are answered below.

Last updated 1 October 2026.