Why Leveraged Juniors Are a Risk to Your R&D Strategy.
In the R&D advisory industry, the standard operating model is this: a senior partner sells the engagement, and the actual claim preparation is delegated to junior staff or graduates. You pay for the senior’s credibility. Someone else delivers the work. That gap between what is sold and what is delivered is where claims fail.
THE PROBLEM WITH THE LEVERAGED MODEL
You Cannot Delegate Judgment.
An R&D claim is not a form. It is a technical argument — one that must connect your experimental activities to the specific criteria in the legislation, in the exact language regulators use when they audit. That argument requires deep technical understanding of your work and deep knowledge of how the incentive operates.
A graduate preparing their first or fifth claim does not have that knowledge. They have a template. They have instructions from a supervisor who may not understand the technical substance of your business. And they have a quota to meet.
The risks this creates:
Underclaiming
Missing eligible expenditure because the technical work was not understood well enough to identify it
Overclaiming
Including activities that cannot survive scrutiny because no one with real experience reviewed them
Generic descriptions
Producing R&D narratives that describe an industry rather than your specific experimental activities
Audit exposure
Lodging claims that were never tested against the questions the ATO will actually ask
THE PERSONALITY-DRIVEN DELIVERY PROBLEM
Structured Systems, Not Personality-Driven Delivery.
Some boutique RDTI firms are built around a single senior practitioner. When that person is engaged, the quality is high. When the work flows down the chain, the quality is inconsistent — and the client has no visibility into which version they are receiving.
We don’t just tell stories — we engineer narratives grounded in real experimentation and uncertainty, ensuring your technical IP is protected, and your financial incentive is maximised.
THE PATTENS SENIOR STANDARD
Your Claim Is Not a Training Ground.
At Pattens, senior practitioners lead every claim — not to oversee at the end, but from the first conversation. The knowledge applied to your claim has been built through 35 years of practice, through multiple ATO enforcement cycles, and through claims tested at the most senior levels of regulatory scrutiny.
Pattens’ expertise is not an effort that is always visible. It is wisdom applied to your specific conditions.
What the Pattens senior standard means in practice:
Your work is understood technically — not just described generically
The practitioner who assesses your claim is the practitioner who delivers it
The outcome is a claim that holds up — not one that looks acceptable until the ATO asks a question
The calibration applied to your claim reflects your specific business context, not an industry average
WHY THIS MATTERS NOW
The ATO Is Not Reading Your Claim the Way Your Consultant Wrote It.
The ATO reads R&D claims looking for specific technical content: a clear articulation of uncertainty, a description of experimental activities and hypotheses, and evidence that outcomes were not known in advance. When that content is missing — or when it reads like a template rather than a technical understanding of your work — it raises questions.