AccountingWeb recently posed a direct question to tax firms:Should your highest-paid tax people still be preparing returns, or should that compliance work sit with someone more junior while partners spend their time on the judgement calls that actually need their experience. It is framed as a personal tax question, tagged under tax tips, not as a market event or a regulatory change. But the logic behind the question travels well beyond tax practices and well beyond personal tax compliance. Any professional service that bills for senior time by the hour has the same structural issue: the people who cost the most are sometimes doing work that does not require their judgement, while the decisions that genuinely need it get squeezed into whatever time is left over at the end.
What this means
For anyone running diligence on a deal, the same question deserves to be asked directly. On a sub-$100m transaction the timeline is tight and the budget for advisory hours is tighter still, so it is tempting to let a senior diligence lead spend hours tying out spreadsheets, formatting a report, or chasing the same document request twice, because that work has to get done by someone. The problem is that every hour a senior person spends on it is an hour not spent on the judgement calls that actually decide whether a deal is sound: how reliable the revenue really is, where the quality of earnings story breaks down, what management is not telling you. Firms that let seniority drift into administrative tasks are not being thorough. They are mispricing their own best resource and giving the client less insight for the same fee.
The wider picture
This sits inside a wider shift in professional services toward separating execution from judgement. Technology has taken over much of the mechanical work that used to justify junior headcount: pulling data from source systems, reconciling schedules, drafting first-pass commentary. That shift puts pressure on firms to prove that the time they still bill at senior rates is genuinely senior work, not habit. In due diligence specifically, deal activity in the lower mid-market has not slowed even as deal teams get leaner, so the acquirers and funds doing the work expect advisers to spend their most expensive hours where they count: on judgement, risk, and the handful of issues that genuinely change a valuation or a deal structure. Advisers who cannot explain why a partner's time went where it did are going to find that question asked more often, not less, as budgets tighten and buyers get more selective about who they bring onto a deal team.
How we think about it
We built our diligence practice around that allocation question. On every engagement a partner is involved from scoping through to the final report, not just signing off at the end. The work gets split deliberately: a senior team member owns the areas where judgement drives the outcome, quality of earnings, revenue quality, working capital normalisation, management credibility, while the mechanical steps, data gathering, reconciliation, first-pass analysis, are handled by people who are good at them without needing partner-level cost to do so. That structure means the client gets senior attention where it actually changes the outcome of the deal, and does not pay senior rates for work that does not need a senior person. It also means the report reflects judgement rather than a tidy writeup of numbers someone else already understood.
Where we can help
If you are a PE partner evaluating a portfolio add-on, a founder preparing for a sale process, or a corporate acquirer running your own M&A function, the same test applies to any adviser you bring in: ask where their senior time is actually going. A diligence process staffed correctly moves faster because the judgement calls get made early rather than discovered in the final week, and it wastes less because junior-appropriate work is not billed at partner rates. That combination, speed and focus, is what tighter diligence on a live deal actually looks like, and it is the standard we hold ourselves to on every engagement we take on.
If you are running a live process and want your diligence team's senior time spent on the calls that decide the deal rather than the paperwork around it, Book a consultation.
