Board Pitfalls for Life Sciences Consulting Firms

Before accepting a new engagement, screen it against active and recent client relationships for direct competitive overlap, not just an informal gut check from whoever's selling the engagement. Document the screening decision, even a straightforward one, so there's a record showing the firm actively considered the conflict rather than simply not noticing it. This record matters enormously if a client later questions whether the firm's advice to a competitor was informed by confidential work done for them.

Some conflicts are manageable with a formal information barrier between the teams serving each client, but only if the barrier is real: separate staffing, no shared internal discussion of client-specific strategy, and a documented protocol both teams actually follow. A board that approves an information barrier as a one-time decision without checking whether it's actually being maintained is creating a false sense of protection that can collapse under scrutiny if a client ever challenges it.

Consulting work that touches scientific publication, contributing to a client's own paper, or the firm's own thought leadership drawing on client-adjacent work, can generate authorship and attribution disputes that carry real professional reputational stakes for the individuals involved. Route these disputes through the same governance process as any other material firm decision rather than letting them get resolved informally between the individuals involved, since an informal resolution rarely produces a record the firm can point to later if the dispute resurfaces.

Individual client confidentiality agreements are typically managed matter by matter, but the board should periodically review the firm's aggregate exposure, how many active engagements touch highly sensitive competitive information, whether staffing has kept pace with the volume of sensitive work, and whether information barrier protocols are scaling with that volume rather than becoming harder to maintain as the firm grows.

If a client alleges a confidentiality breach or a mishandled conflict, decide in advance who has authority to respond on the firm's behalf, typically the managing partner with outside counsel review, before any actual incident forces an improvised answer under pressure. Document this escalation path in the same governance record that holds other major firm decisions, not as a separate document that's easy to lose track of.

Imagine two of the firm's consultants, staffed on projects for competing biotech clients, both attend the same scientific conference and end up on a panel together. Neither did anything wrong, but the situation still deserves a brief, documented check-in beforehand: does either engagement's confidentiality terms restrict public appearances discussing adjacent science, and has each consultant been reminded not to discuss client-specific work even informally in that setting. This kind of low-probability, easy-to-miss scenario is exactly what a periodic aggregate confidentiality review is meant to catch before it becomes a real problem rather than a hypothetical one.

Before consultants on competing engagements appear together publicly, do the following:

• Check whether either engagement's confidentiality terms restrict public appearances that discuss adjacent science.
• Document a brief check-in before the event, even though neither consultant has done anything wrong.
• Decide in advance who speaks for the firm if a client later alleges a confidentiality breach.

A five-person consultancy can maintain an information barrier through simple team separation and trust; a fifty-person firm covering several therapeutic areas needs something closer to a formal protocol, documented access restrictions on shared systems, a designated conflicts officer, and periodic audits confirming the barrier is holding, not just a verbal agreement between the individuals originally staffed on each side. Revisit whether your current information barrier practice actually matches your current firm size rather than assuming a process built for five people still works unchanged at fifty.

A useful trigger for this review is any quarter where the firm adds a new therapeutic area or a new type of client, since that's usually when the existing barrier practice, sized for the firm's prior scope, first gets genuinely tested under real conditions rather than in theory, and gaps that looked purely hypothetical on paper suddenly become concrete, specific problems someone has to solve that same week.