The published guidance on Three Must-Dos runs from too-general marketing summaries to too-specific technical papers, with very little in between. This piece aims for the middle: enough specificity to be useful, enough breadth to be applicable.
Aimed at therapists at any career stage who have started seeing referrals in Three Must-Dos and want to know what the work actually looks like once you commit to it.
Working with clients facing Three Must-Dos decisions requires careful awareness of the therapist’s own boundaries. The temptation to opine on the practical merits of the client’s situation is real; the discipline to keep the focus on the client’s internal experience is what makes the work effective.
The intake conversation
The intake conversation for Three Must-Dos matters does most of the work of the engagement. Practitioners who run a structured intake — covering the client’s objectives, the timeline they’re working with, the co-professionals on the case, the data and documents needed, and the form the deliverable will take — produce engagement letters that hold their shape through the matter. Practitioners who run an unstructured intake produce engagement letters that get rewritten or absorb scope creep silently. For deeper reference, see APA Ethical Principles.
A useful intake habit: ask the client to articulate, in their own words, what they’re hoping the engagement will produce. The answer reveals where the client’s expectations align with what Three Must-Dos engagements actually deliver and where they don’t. Closing the gap before the engagement starts saves significant friction during the matter.
The substantive work
The pacing of the middle phase depends heavily on third-party responsiveness. Some Three Must-Dos 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.
Communication discipline during the middle phase prevents most of the problems that show up at the deliverable. Practitioners who send the client weekly or biweekly written updates — even short ones — maintain trust and surface issues early. Practitioners who go silent during the analytical work leave the client to imagine what might be happening, which is rarely productive.
What gets produced
The deliverable for a Three Must-Dos engagement is the work product everyone will reference for years afterward. It needs to be defensible (your analysis can withstand scrutiny), readable (the client and any non-specialist can understand it), and complete (it addresses what the engagement was scoped to address). The deliverable usually takes 20-40% of the engagement hours; underestimating this consistently produces matters that run over time.
Walk the client through the deliverable before they take it to the attorney or court. The presentation matters; the same report explained well lands differently than the same report dropped over email without context. The walk-through is also where the client’s last questions surface; addressing them in real time prevents follow-up cycles weeks later.
How specific situations change the standard pattern
High-conflict matters require different communication and documentation discipline than cooperative ones. In high-conflict Three Must-Dos engagements, every communication may eventually be reviewed by opposing counsel or a judge; the practitioner needs to write as if the matter will be litigated, even when it won’t be.
Three Must-Dos 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.
Practitioners who want to make Three Must-Dos a meaningful part of their work should commit to the long timeline. The first year produces little visible return. The third year shifts. By year five, the work and the referrals look noticeably different.
How VennBoard fits in
VennBoard supports the kind of case-management discipline Three Must-Dos 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 therapist building a focus on Three Must-Dos and looking for the operational backbone, visit VennBoard.com to see how it fits into your practice.