The approval matrix: who signs what in the firm (and why almost nobody has it written down)
The question 'who can approve this?' is asked daily in every firm, and the answer usually depends on who is in the office that day.
Ask in any law firm who can approve a 15% discount on a fee proposal, and you will get three different answers depending on whom you ask. Ask who can sign an engagement letter with an unusual liability clause, or authorise a hire, or approve a five-thousand-euro expense, and the answers will multiply. Almost no Spanish firm has a written approval matrix. Almost every firm needs one.
The cost of unwritten authority
The absence of defined authority has a daily cost. Decisions wait for the managing partner who is travelling, or are made by whoever is available and then resented. Juniors learn that the real rule is to know whom to ask, not what is allowed. And the firm accumulates risks nobody consciously accepted: discounts granted by inertia, engagement terms signed without review, commitments made in the firm's name by people without the power to make them.
The paradox is that the larger the firm grows, the more it depends on informal authority - precisely because the founding partners can no longer see everything. The matrix is the tool that converts personal trust into a system.
What a matrix looks like
An approval matrix is a table: decision types in rows, authority levels in columns. Each cell says who decides - alone, with consultation, or with a countersignature. A simple version for a mid-sized firm fits on one page: discounts up to 10% decided by the responsible partner, up to 20% by the practice head, beyond that by the management committee. Engagement letters under standard terms signed by the responsible partner; deviations, reviewed. Expenses, hires, write-offs, conflicts of interest: each with its row and its rule.
The value is not the rigidity but the clarity. The matrix can be as flexible as the firm wants - it can say that the responsible partner decides everything below a threshold - but it must be written, communicated and applied.
The politics of the table
The difficulty is not drafting the table; it is what drafting it reveals. Deciding who can approve what forces conversations about trust, seniority and power that firms prefer to postpone. The managing partner who sponsors the exercise should expect resistance disguised as practical objections: too rigid, too bureaucratic, not how we work.
The counterargument is empirical: firms that implement the matrix do not report more bureaucracy; they report fewer interrupted partners, faster proposals and fewer uncomfortable surprises in the monthly numbers. Delegation with written limits is faster than centralisation with unlimited interruptions.
The exception rule
Every matrix needs one escape valve: how to decide what the table does not cover. The standard solution is a standing rule - anything not covered goes to the management committee within 48 hours - that prevents the exceptional from becoming the excuse for not applying the ordinary.
Implementation in four weeks
A realistic rollout takes a month: week one, list the twenty decisions that generate the most questions; week two, draft the matrix with the management committee; week three, communicate it with real examples; week four, start applying it and note the gaps. The first version will be wrong in the details - the review at three months fixes it. What cannot be fixed is another year of decisions depending on who happened to be in the office.
Related reading: the account plan and the commercial pipeline, the guide on client funds in separate accounts, and the processes section.
