The LPQ was designed for the firm’s process, not your advocacy. Its boxes are often too small for your explanation, the requested time window can distort your practice, and some of its questions are genuinely ambiguous. Fill each one in exactly as printed and you’ll frequently undersell yourself — not because you lack the numbers, but because you let the form’s format set the limits.

So this last video is three ways to work past the boxes — because, as I keep saying, you are not limited to them.

The LPQ often won’t give you enough room to explain what a number actually means — why an origination figure understates your role, why a client relationship is stickier than it looks, why a down year was an anomaly.

Don’t cram it in, and don’t leave it out. Use asterisks and addendums, liberally. Flag the number in the box, and attach the explanation the firm needs to understand your business and appreciate your value. A bare number invites the firm’s assumptions. A number with a well-placed asterisk tells your story.

Space isn’t the only place the form boxes you in. Sometimes it’s the time window itself.

Most firms ask for your current year and the prior two or three. But their estimate of your practice — and the comp they eventually offer — factors in whatever data you give them. So think about what those particular years actually show.

Say a downturn, or the loss of a major client, tanked your numbers two years ago and dragged down half of the next year too — leaving you essentially one clean year to present. Those three years make your practice look weaker than it is. If a five- or even seven-year look-back tells a truer, more compelling story — and shows that rough eighteen-month stretch for the anomaly it was — then send that too. You are not limited to the years they asked for. The boxes are a floor on what you can submit, not a ceiling.

And sometimes the problem isn’t the space or the window — it’s that the question itself has more than one answer.

LPQs will often ask for your realization — and realization is not simply one number. Before you answer, ask the firm which they want: realization against your standard rate, or against your effective rate.

Those measure two different things. Standard-rate realization measures your collections against what the firm would want you charging in the market. Effective-rate realization measures what you actually collected on what you actually billed. Both can matter, and they can tell different stories about the same practice. Answering the wrong one — or guessing — can misrepresent you. So don’t guess. Ask which they’re measuring, and answer that.

Notice the thread through all three: the form’s boxes are the firm’s starting point, not your ceiling. Where a box is too small, expand it. Where the standard window distorts you, widen it. Where a question is ambiguous, clarify it before you answer.

And that’s really the whole series in one idea. The LPQ looks like the firm’s paperwork to be endured — but from the first video to this one, it’s been the same thing: your case to be made. What you’ve produced, what will follow you, how you present it, and how you protect yourself while doing it. Handle it that way, and the LPQ stops being a hurdle and becomes the strongest argument for your potential value.

That’s exactly the work I do with partners — building that case, box by box and beyond the boxes. If you’re facing an LPQ, or think you might be, it’s a conversation worth having.