Walk into any state bar conference and watch the conversations at the breaks. The practitioners who clearly know each other are usually the ones who have built reputations in specific areas. Identify Your Target is a specific area that compounds well.
For mediators who have decided they want to do more of this work and are looking for an honest map of the territory rather than a marketing piece.
The mediator handling Identify Your Target-heavy matters needs to know when to pause negotiations and recommend specialist consultation. Some Identify Your Target questions exceed what can be productively negotiated without independent expert input; mediators who push past those limits produce agreements that don’t hold up under later scrutiny.
The intake conversation
The right intake length for a Identify Your Target matter is usually 60 to 90 minutes, conducted in person or by video. Shorter intakes miss the depth required for the engagement to be properly scoped; longer intakes overwhelm the client. Many practitioners follow up the intake conversation with a written summary the client confirms before the engagement letter is sent.
Document the intake. Either contemporaneous notes you keep in the file or a follow-up summary email to the client. Identify Your Target engagements involve enough small decisions across long timelines that working from memory six months in produces errors.
The body of the engagement
The middle phase of a Identify Your Target engagement is mostly about data gathering, analysis, and coordination. The data gathering involves requesting documents from the client and (often) from third parties through subpoenas or formal requests. The analysis involves working through what the documents reveal. The coordination involves keeping the attorney and other co-professionals informed.
The pacing of the middle phase depends heavily on third-party responsiveness. Some Identify Your Target engagements can complete the middle phase in 30 days; others stretch to four months because a critical document custodian is slow to respond. Practitioners who actively chase third-party documents — rather than waiting for them — keep matters moving meaningfully faster than passive practitioners.
The deliverable
Most Identify Your Target deliverables follow a consistent format that practitioners refine over multiple matters. An executive summary at the top. Background and scope. Methodology. Findings. Conclusions and recommendations. Appendices with supporting documentation. Practitioners who maintain a template they refine engagement by engagement produce stronger deliverables faster than those who reinvent the format each time.
Review the deliverable with a peer before it goes out, especially in your first dozen Identify Your Target matters. A senior practitioner or a peer who has done similar work will catch things you didn’t notice — both substantive issues in the analysis and presentation issues that affect how the deliverable lands. For deeper reference, see ABA Family Law Section resources.
Common variations across matters
Pro bono or reduced-fee Identify Your Target engagements present a specific risk: the temptation to deliver less rigorous work than the practitioner would for a paying client. Pro bono cases that go wrong because of insufficient analytical rigor damage practitioner reputation more than paying cases that go wrong, because the quality gap is visible.
Identify Your Target engagements vary along a few predictable dimensions: client sophistication (institutional client vs. unsophisticated individual), case complexity (single straightforward question vs. multiple intertwined issues), opposing-side cooperation (cooperative vs. adversarial), and timeline pressure (negotiated timeline vs. court-imposed deadlines). Each dimension affects how the standard engagement pattern needs to adjust.
None of this is shortcut work. The practitioners who own Identify Your Target in their markets earned their position the slow way — consistent attendance at the same conferences, careful case work compounding over years, relationships built deliberately.
How VennBoard fits in
VennBoard supports the kind of case-management discipline Identify Your Target engagements benefit from: organized case files, integrated communication with co-professionals, deliverable versioning, and the kind of operational consistency that makes the difference between burning out at twenty matters and running a sustainable practice at fifty.
If you’re a mediator building a focus on Identify Your Target and looking for the operational backbone, visit VennBoard.com to see how it fits into your practice.