When providing consultancy services to clients, it is necessary to identify and contractually provide for the payment milestones. Are you to be paid periodically, or against pre-defined milestones? Pricing is addressed in detail elsewhere, but you must always make sure that the contract ensures you get paid when you have budgeted to be paid.

Are you providing specified skill-sets or specified individuals? This becomes a key issue when you have more than one client with priority work to be done. Are you contractually able to take your best qualified individual for a particular task away from the client to whom he is currently providing services?

Are you providing man-time or specified deliverables? Although this is dealt with in more detail in Projects , it always important in consultancy arrangements to be very clear what the client expectations are. In addition, are the consultants working under the control of the client, or under your control? This is vital to establish because if you are contracted to deliver a specified development , but are also contractually bound to follow the instructions given by the client, you may fail to deliver the development because of erroneous client instructions and be liable for such failure.

Who will own the Intellectual Property Rights in the consultancy work? Are you intending to derive commercial benefit from the work? Most clients will expect to own the intellectual property rights in consultancy work, but if the work is going to produce something from which you could derive future financial benefit, then this should be a point of negotiation in the agreement - client ownership of IPR should come at a price!