Confidential work as evidence: what a consultancy can publish

What does a confidentiality agreement let a firm publish?

Only the agreement can answer that, and reading it is work for the firm and its counsel, not for a page like this one. Agreements differ in what they protect: the client's name, the fact that there was an engagement at all, the client's data, the work product, or all of these. Two agreements that look alike can draw the line in different places.

What this page can do is make the question for counsel specific. Rather than asking whether the firm may publish a case study, bring one case written out field by field and ask which fields the agreement allows. Whatever counsel says, the client sees the text before it goes up. A description with no name in it can still point at a client for anyone who knows the industry, and the client is the one who can tell.

Five kinds of evidence, and whose approval each needs

Not every piece of evidence waits on one client's permission. The method involves no client at all, and a partner's talk involves one only when a single engagement shows through it. A case needs its client's yes. A reference needs the referee's agreement every time a buyer calls.

The rows are not ranked. A method page and three dated anonymized cases can tell an operator more than one named case with a logo and two sentences. What every row needs is the same: facts a reader can weigh, and nothing the firm could not defend if the client read it.

Dates and scope: what lets a reader weigh an anonymized case

Without dates and scope, an anonymized case cannot be weighed. "We helped a manufacturer improve its margins" could describe a two-week workshop or a nine-month program, finished last quarter or eight years ago, and the reader has no way to tell which. With them, the reader can hold the case against their own company, and a sentence that states the dates and the size keeps them when it is quoted. That is what citability comes to for a case.

The outcome row needs the most care. State the kind of outcome and how it was measured, and add a figure only when the client has approved that figure, in writing, in the sentence that will carry it. A number on the page goes wherever the page is quoted, and a client who never agreed to it has every reason to object.

Dates belong in the text first. In the JSON-LD, the case page can be an Article with the partner who led the work as its author, datePublished for when the case was written, and temporalCoverage for the engagement itself, which schema.org defines as the period the content describes. Mark up only what the visible page states, as Google's introduction to structured data asks.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "[Problem] for a [industry] company of [size band], [region]",
  "author": { "@id": "https://www.example.com/people/[partner]#person" },
  "publisher": { "@id": "https://www.example.com/#firm" },
  "datePublished": "[YYYY-MM-DD]",
  "temporalCoverage": "[YYYY-MM]/[YYYY-MM]",
  "about": { "@id": "https://www.example.com/services/[problem]#service" }
}

The client's approval, step by step

Approval is a separate step from counsel's reading, and it comes second. The client approves a text, not an idea, so what they see is exactly what goes up.

1. Write the case in full, every field filled, on the page where it will sit, and mark whether it names the client.
2. Where there is doubt about what the agreement covers, have counsel read the text against it before the client sees it.
3. Send the client the text as it will be published, with the page address, and ask them to approve it or mark what to change.
4. Remove any detail the client asks you to remove, rather than blurring it into something vaguer that still points at them.
5. Keep the written approval with its date, the text it approved and the name of the person who gave it.
6. Publish with the dates in the text. Ask again whenever the text changes, and take the case down if the client withdraws.

A figure needs its own yes. A client happy to be described may still not want their margin or their headcount on another company's website, and approval of the case as first written does not cover a number added later.

Evidence with no client in it: the method, the talks, the articles

The firm's method, written from its general practice rather than from one client's material, is evidence that does not wait on any client. A method page says how a [problem] engagement starts, which questions the first weeks answer, the stages and what the client receives at each, and how long each stage runs in the firm's practice. If an agreement assigns work product to a client, counsel will know whether a framework built during that engagement is the firm's to publish.

On a specialty page, the method sits beside the count of engagements and the cases, as the article on stating a specialty sets out. Publishing figures from the firm's own records is a separate subject, covered in thought leadership a machine can count.

Talks and articles under a partner's name put the partner and the problem on a page the firm did not write: a conference program, a trade association's newsletter, an industry journal, a podcast's episode page. The firm's own site cannot do that for itself. Each is a brand mention of the partner, and of the firm when the host names it. List them on the partner's page with the date, the host and a link, so the partner's author profile and the host's page describe the same person doing the same work.

Mentions and digital PR covers earning those pages honestly, and Google's guide to generative AI search says seeking inauthentic mentions across the web is not as helpful as it might seem. One caution belongs to consulting in particular: a talk that walks through one client's situation is a case, whatever the slides call it, and it needs that client's approval like any case page.

References on request, and the sentence that says they exist

Some evidence is better offered than published. A reference, a former client willing to take a buyer's call, is a check the buyer runs directly, with someone who was there, and it belongs at the stage where an operator is choosing between two firms, not on the homepage. What belongs on the page is the sentence saying it exists: "References from [industry] clients for [problem] engagements are available after a first conversation."

Offer only what a referee has agreed to, ask them before each call, and publish no referee's name without their consent. The sentence tells a reader, and anything that reads the page, that the firm expects to be checked. Whether the answers ever cite a case or a talk is one of the columns in a consultancy's panel record. Before a panel exists, the free visibility check gives a first reading: send a website and an email address, and a person replies within 48 hours with whether Claude names the firm and who it names instead.

The rest of what a consulting firm's site states is on the page for consulting firms. Documenting reference projects covers write-ups in general, including photos and where project pages sit on a site.