Guide 6 min read
What Every Professional Should Know Before Hiring an Automation Consultant
Automation advice is easy to find and hard to evaluate. For a regulated practice, the right questions have less to do with features and more to do with incentives, data and what happens when something goes wrong.
1. How are you paid, and by whom?
Some consultants earn referral fees or resale margins from the platforms they recommend. That does not make them dishonest, but it does shape what they suggest. Ask directly whether they receive any commission, and whether licences are billed to you by the provider or marked up through them.
2. Do you start with our process or with a platform?
If the first meeting is a demo, the answer is already clear. A sound engagement starts by observing how work actually flows in your firm and measuring a baseline. Tool choice comes after.
3. Where will our client data live?
You should get a plain answer: which systems hold the data, in which country, who can access it and whether any of it is used to train AI models. For law, accounting and health practices, "it is in the cloud" is not an answer.
4. What happens when a workflow fails?
Every automation fails eventually — an integration changes, a form arrives in an unexpected shape. Ask how failures are detected, who is alerted, whether the workflow pauses or guesses, and how you can switch it off yourself.
5. Which steps will always need a person?
Anything sent to a client, filed with a regulator or moving money should pause for human approval. A consultant who cannot name the approval gates in their design has not thought about your obligations.
6. How will we know it worked?
Ask for a documented baseline before anything is built, and a report of the same measures afterwards. Projections are not results.
7. Who actually does the work?
The person in the sales meeting is not always the person who designs and builds. Ask who will lead, who will build, and who you call when something needs changing six months later.
Worked example: comparing two proposals
A three-lawyer firm received two proposals for intake automation. The first was cheaper and promised a launch in two weeks on a platform the consultant resold. The second started with a two-week review, named the approval gates for engagement letters and conflict checks, and quoted a fixed fee with licences paid directly to the provider.
Running both through the seven questions made the difference visible: the first proposal could not say where client data would be stored or what happened when a conflict check failed. The firm chose the slower, clearer option.
Illustrative example based on common patterns, not a specific client.
Want to ask these questions of us?
A free 30-minute call with Arash is a good place to test every one of them. If a Workflow Diagnostic does not make sense for you yet, you will hear that directly.
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