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Probative vs writing it in-house
This is what you are almost certainly doing now, and it is the option worth taking most seriously, because in-house has one advantage nothing else can buy.
What in-house does better
Your people know the project. They were there. They know which parts were genuinely hard, which client relationship nearly came apart and which quiet decision in month two is the reason the thing worked. That knowledge is real and no external party arrives with it.
What it actually costs
The mistake is treating in-house as free. A submission written properly by a senior person takes somewhere between twenty and forty hours across three weeks, most of it spent chasing other people rather than writing.
| Hours | At $120/hr internal cost | |
|---|---|---|
| Finding and reading the material | 6–10 | $720–1,200 |
| Chasing project teams for facts | 8–14 | $960–1,680 |
| Writing and rewriting | 6–12 | $720–1,440 |
| Review and submission | 2–4 | $240–480 |
| One entry | 22–40 | $2,640–4,800 |
Internal cost rate is illustrative. Use your own charge-out rate and the number gets larger, not smaller.
The part that does not show up in the hours
It is not the time. It is that the work is done under deadline pressure by someone whose actual job is something else, which means the case gets chosen quickly rather than carefully, and the evidence that would have won it never gets found.
The entry gets written the night before it closes, in firm after firm.
What changes
Probative does the reading and decides the case from the evidence. Your people are still involved, but their involvement is six specific questions rather than three weeks of interruption, and each question comes with the reason it is being asked.
You still review every word. That part should never leave your firm.
Start with two answers.
Send an award you are actually entering and whatever project material you already have. You get two complete answers, the case we would make, the questions we would send your team and the claims that one more fact would unlock.
Credited in full if you go ahead. If you read it and walk away, you owe nothing further.