Every handoff is a knowledge fire.
When the account lead changes — promoted, reassigned, or gone — the client relationship doesn't transfer. The new lead spends the first month asking the same questions the previous lead already answered. The client notices. They start to wonder if your firm actually knows them, or if they're just a file in a CRM.
Onboarding a new team member to a long-standing client account takes weeks. They have to read through years of email threads, sit in on calls just to absorb context, and hope someone senior has time to brief them properly. The client pays for this ramp-up in subtler ways — slower work, missed nuances, decisions that don't account for history.
The firm's real expertise — the patterns you've seen across dozens of similar engagements, the approaches that worked, the mistakes to avoid — lives in senior partners' heads and never gets transferred. Every junior engagement starts from scratch. Every pitch relies on people remembering what they learned on a previous account. The firm isn't scaling its knowledge; it's constantly rebuilding it.