Case Study · Tax & Accounting
Harper Tax Advisory LLC
How a mid-sized US tax advisory replaced three legacy research subscriptions and redirected 2,200 senior hours a year to client advisory work.
The challenge.
Harper Tax Advisory is a 32-person firm in Raleigh and Boston serving high-net-worth individuals, venture-backed founders, and multi-state passthroughs. The work demands fluency across the Internal Revenue Code, Treasury regulations, revenue rulings, private letter rulings, Tax Court memoranda, and 11 different state tax codes.
To cover that surface area the firm carried three separate research subscriptions totalling $312,000 a year. Each had different interfaces, different citation formats, and gaps the others covered — so every senior memo was cross-checked across all three.
Managing partner Lisa Harper described the problem bluntly: “We paid three vendors for the privilege of switching browser tabs all day.”
The solution.
Harper ran a structured evaluation: the same 40 real client questions put to Marco and the two strongest incumbents. Marco returned a complete, cited answer in 38 of 40 queries. The two incumbents combined returned 34.
What made the difference was not coverage — all three platforms had the primary sources — it was reasoning. Marco could chain a federal partnership question into a North Carolina apportionment question into a Massachusetts sourcing question in one conversation, with every citation verified and every intermediate assumption surfaced.
The firm signed in May, onboarded 32 staff in nine business days, and cancelled the two legacy subscriptions at the next renewal. Senior associates stopped writing lookup memos and started writing advisory memos.
Results.
$312K
Annual research spend eliminated
2,200
Senior hours redirected to advisory
6.2x
Faster turnaround on tax memos
3 → 1
Research platforms consolidated
“We didn’t replace a research tool. We replaced the unbillable half of every senior associate’s day. The new Private Client Advisory group exists because Marco gave us the hours to build it.”
Timeline.
Evaluation against two incumbent research platforms on the same 40 sample queries.
Signed a firm-wide contract. Onboarded 32 staff across two offices in nine business days.
Cancelled two of three research subscriptions after the first quarterly renewal window.
Launched a new Private Client Advisory group staffed by three redirected senior associates.
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