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A workable engagement has four written parts: the question, the evidence the consultant will be given, the artefact they will hand over, and the date. If any of the four is missing, the engagement cannot be judged as finished or unfinished, which is exactly how small jobs turn into retainers.

Ask for a short paid diagnostic before a long engagement. A week of work that ends with a written problem statement and a recommended next step costs far less than three months spent on the wrong problem, and it tells you how the consultant thinks before you are committed. Australian consultants commonly offer this, and refusal to do so is informative.

Name the people whose time the consultant needs, by role and by hours. Engagements stall because the operations manager was never told they were expected to spend a day a week on it. Put that in the scope, not in an email after the work starts.

Because consulting is unlicensed, the discipline comes from general law rather than from an occupational regulator. A consultant's own claims about their track record, qualifications and likely results are representations made in trade or commerce, and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission enforces the prohibitions on misleading and deceptive conduct in that setting.

Practically, that means you can and should ask for claims in writing. A consultant who says they doubled a client's margin should be willing to put that in the proposal. A consultant who will say it in a meeting but not on paper has told you something.

Professional indemnity insurance is not compulsory for consultants in the way it is for some licensed occupations. If the advice will drive a large commitment, ask whether the consultant carries it, for how much, and whether the policy responds to the kind of work in your scope.

A long, full-time, closely directed consulting arrangement can stop being consulting. The Fair Work Act now directs that whether someone is an employee is worked out by looking at the real substance, practical reality and true nature of the relationship, considering the totality of it and how the contract is performed in practice, not only what the contract says.

The Act also prohibits sham contracting: an employer must not represent to an individual that a contract of employment is a contract for services under which they work as an independent contractor. business.gov.au puts it plainly, that a business incorrectly telling an employee they are a contractor is sham contracting and is illegal, and that having an ABN, sending invoices or working short-term does not by itself make someone a contractor.

For a genuine consultant on a defined project with their own tools, their own clients and control over how the work is done, none of this bites. For a person who has been on your site four days a week for two years doing what your staff do, it may.

Consultants arrive with models, templates and frameworks they have built over years, and they will not hand those over. That is normal. What you need is clear ownership of the output built from your data, and an unrestricted licence to use it inside your business, including after the engagement ends.

Confidentiality should run both ways and should survive termination. If the consultant works with competitors, say so in the contract and agree what is walled off. A consultant who works across an industry is often more useful precisely because of that, but the boundary needs to be written down rather than assumed.

Agree in advance whether the consultant may name you as a client or publish a case study. It is easier to negotiate before the work than after a result you would rather not advertise.