Two engagement types, the qualification question, and the arithmetic that sets the retainer against a single defended point of share price.
| Profile | Fit |
|---|---|
| Listed company with active analyst coverage and a scheduled disclosure cycle | Primary |
| Company inside a quiet period ahead of an offering, listing or merger | Primary |
| Company under sustained attention from a specific outlet or beat reporter | Primary |
| Company whose spokesperson function already sits under one approved drafting desk | Marginal; most questions are already screened upstream of this engagement |
| Privately held company, no securities-law materiality standard to invoke | Declined; the Tribunal has no standard to apply |
| Company under active regulatory investigation into the specific matter a question concerns | Declined for that matter |
The last row is a standing policy, not a case-by-case judgement. A prospective client raising it at the qualification call is told the same thing every other prospective client is told: this firm does not accept engagements scoped to keep a matter already under investigation out of the record.
| Type | Cycle | Fee | Deliverable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Materiality Determination | Single filing, any time | 2,000 USD | Finding: cleared, deferred, or below evidentiary threshold |
| Materiality Determination with Discrepancy Notice | Single filing, pre-publication only | 3,500 USD | Finding plus a formal notice issued to the outlet or analyst |
| Standing Retainer | Continuous | 40,000 USD per month | Unlimited Pre-Clearance screening, priority Tribunal scheduling, quarterly rubric review |
A Discrepancy Notice adds 1,500 USD to the base filing fee, 2,000 plus 1,500 is 3,500, because a notice requires the finding to be re-verified against the outlet’s actual publication timeline immediately before issuance, a separate step from the filing itself. The Standing Retainer buys continuous screening capacity and priority scheduling, not a lower per-filing rate; every filing, retainer or not, is billed at the same 2,000 USD.
The Standing Retainer runs 40,000 USD a month, 480,000 USD a year.
The reference client carries a market capitalisation of 3,500,000,000 USD. One percentage point of a single session’s movement in that client’s share price is worth 3,500,000,000 multiplied by 0.01, or 35,000,000 USD. Dividing the retainer by that figure, 480,000 divided by 35,000,000, gives 0.0137, or 1.4 per cent. Inverted, 35,000,000 divided by 480,000 is 72.9: a single percentage point, defended once, is worth just over seventy-two years of retainer at the current rate.
The reference client also files an average of 22 Materiality Determinations a year, roughly two a month across earnings-adjacent press cycles and periodic analyst notes. 22 multiplied by 2,000 is 44,000 USD, bringing total annual client value to 480,000 plus 44,000, or 524,000 USD.
Addressable market. Roughly 1,800 listed companies carry market capitalisation above 2,000,000,000 USD with the kind of active analyst and press coverage this practice is priced against. At an average annual client value of 524,000 USD and 6 per cent penetration, that is 1,800 multiplied by 524,000 multiplied by 0.06, or 56,592,000 USD.</div>
Onboarding is included in year one of a Standing Retainer and is not charged separately.
Engagement letters are issued on acceptance and specify scope, fee and the escalation path for a filing that cannot be resolved before a stated deadline. Fees are reviewed annually and are not indexed to filing volume in the prior period; a client should not be able to lower its rate by filing less, and this firm does not price it that way.
Fenwick Trask shares a registered office with Whitfield & Vance, the group’s consumer claimant practice, under a facilities agreement entered in 1991, the year of that firm’s own founding combination. The two practices maintain a standing of-counsel appointment and a reciprocal-referral protocol dating from the same agreement, neither amended since. A matter that begins as a Materiality Determination and develops into a claim concerning the client’s own scoring, credit or employment-screening practices is referred under that arrangement; a matter that begins on Whitfield & Vance’s side and surfaces a public company’s disclosure obligation is referred back.
Enquiries. Write with the client’s market capitalisation, current analyst coverage, and whether a specific outlet or reporter is already active. Retain this firm before the question arrives unscreened, not after the story runs. A finding issued in time changes what happens next; a finding issued afterward is a different engagement, and priced as one.</div>