Working with KNR
How the Engagement Works
Before you call anyone
What actually happens after you contact us?
A 30-minute call at no charge, a conflicts check, then a written scope and engagement letter before any substantive work begins. From that point a named attorney owns your matter and is your single point of contact, no matter how many jurisdictions or local teams the work touches.
U.S. corporate buyers are careful about process for good reason: engaging counsel across borders raises questions about responsibility, coordination, and cost that a website usually leaves unanswered until someone is already on a call. This page answers them beforehand.
The engagement lifecycle
From first call
to reporting
First conversation
A 30-minute call to understand the business decision behind the legal question — what you are trying to do, on what timeline, and what has already been decided. No engagement letter, no charge, no obligation.
Conflicts check
Before we can take substantive instructions we clear conflicts against the parties involved. This is why the first call stays at the level of the situation rather than the confidential details of it.
Scope and engagement letter
We define what is in scope, who does what, how you will be billed, and what the deliverables are. Nothing starts before that is in writing and you have agreed to it.
Execution
A named attorney owns your matter and is your single point of contact regardless of how many jurisdictions or local teams the work touches. You do not coordinate the network; we do.
Reporting
Status, risk, and spend reported on an agreed cadence in a format your General Counsel can forward without rewriting it. Escalation is defined at the start, not improvised during an incident.
Working with your existing firm
Lead counsel
or local counsel
Lead counsel or local counsel
Both arrangements are normal. On some matters KNR leads and brings in your existing U.S. firm where U.S. law governs; on others your U.S. firm leads the transaction and we handle the Mexican and Latin American components. The arrangement is agreed in writing at the start.
Defined responsibility
Multi-jurisdiction matters fail at the seams. We define at the outset which firm owns which workstream, which deliverables cross between them, and who is accountable when a question sits between two legal systems.
Communication
Working in the Houston time zone means same-day responsiveness for U.S. teams rather than a next-morning cycle. Where your U.S. firm is involved, we default to shared visibility rather than parallel reporting.
Billing
Each firm bills its own scope under its own engagement. Where we coordinate local counsel in other jurisdictions, you see what that work costs rather than an undifferentiated regional invoice.
How engagements are structured
Six ways to
engage us
Fixed-fee diagnostic
A bounded first step: we assess a specific question — a structure, an exposure, a target — and deliver a written read for a fixed fee. Common when the internal decision is whether to proceed at all.
Project-based
A defined deliverable with a defined price: an incorporation, a due diligence, an IMMEX certification, a labor restructuring. Scope and fee are agreed before work begins.
Phased market entry
Entry work broken into the stages of the legal runway, each priced separately, so you can stop, pause, or change direction between stages without having committed to the whole path.
Monthly retainer
Ongoing counsel for a live operation: a predictable monthly scope covering routine contracts, corporate housekeeping, labor questions, and regulatory change.
Embedded counsel
A defined allocation of attorney time functioning as an extension of your legal department, including regional oversight and reporting into your General Counsel.
Expert engagement coordination
For litigation support, we coordinate the expert engagement and its terms, separately from any substantive legal work on the underlying matter.
Common questions
Working with us,
answered
The process questions U.S. legal and procurement teams ask before the first call. Anything not answered here is fair game on that call.
The first call is 30 minutes, free, and deliberately kept at the level of your situation rather than its confidential details — because we cannot take substantive instructions before clearing conflicts. The output is a plain read on whether the problem is one we can help with, what the legal path looks like, and roughly what it would involve. If we are not the right firm for it, we say so on that call.
The contracting structure depends on the nature of the work and is confirmed in the engagement letter before anything begins, together with which entity bills you and which attorneys are responsible. If the specific structure matters to your procurement or compliance process — as it often does for a U.S. corporate client — raise it on the first call and we will address it directly rather than after the fact.
Either as lead counsel bringing them in for U.S.-law questions, or as their local counsel for the Mexican and Latin American components of a matter they lead. Both are routine. What matters more than the label is that responsibility for each workstream is assigned in writing at the start, because multi-jurisdiction matters fail at the seams between advisers rather than inside them.
By engagement model rather than by a published rate card: fixed-fee diagnostics, project-based work, phased market-entry stages, monthly retainers, embedded counsel, and expert engagement coordination. Which one fits depends on whether the work is bounded or ongoing. What is constant is that the scope and the fee are agreed in writing before work starts, and that where we coordinate local counsel in other jurisdictions you see what that work costs separately.
Know how it works?
Start With
The 30 Minutes
No engagement letter, no charge, no obligation. Tell us the situation and we'll tell you plainly whether we're the right firm for it.