← Back to Newsroom

Furnetics Unlimited Ltd. today issued a written procedure formalising the character of the fourth of the five standard design sessions within the Phenotype Renovations™ Design Consultation protocol. Effective for engagements commencing on or after the first of October 2019, Session Four will be conducted under attorney-client privilege, will not be audio- or video-recorded, will not be transcribed, and will not be attended by clinical, design, or administrative staff of the corporation. The procedure applies uniformly across the four commercial Morphic templates and to bespoke Morphic X engagements. It does not alter the character of Sessions One, Two, Three, or Five, which continue on the record.

The Design Consultation protocol is the five-session client-designer sequence included in the base Phenotype Renovations™ package, described on the service line's options schedule and administered at the corporation's Ulaanbaatar client services office. The five sessions have run in materially the same order since the v2 pipeline re-architecture of 2015: an intake and objectives session, a template and options review, a somatic and cosmetic specifications workshop, a fourth session historically designated for confidential discussion, and a closing sign-off and readiness review. Session Four has, in practice, been conducted without a recording device in the room since the earliest days of the Cambridge protocol. Today's procedure places what has long been the practice on a written footing and extends privilege to it under the doctrine ordinarily available to counsel-attended communications.

The change, in outline

• Attendance. Session Four is attended by the client, by the client's own counsel of choice if any, and by a single member of the corporation's Office of the General Counsel acting in the role of session counsel. No clinical, design, laboratory, or administrative member of the corporation attends; no third-party observer attends. Interpreters, where required, are engaged through the Office of the General Counsel under the same terms of confidentiality that bind session counsel.
• Record. The session is not audio-recorded, not video-recorded, not transcribed contemporaneously, and not reconstructed from memory afterwards. Session counsel takes no notes save a bare register of attendance and elapsed time. No document produced during the session is retained by the corporation; any writing produced in the room is offered to the client at its close and, if declined, is destroyed at the client's direction.
• Privilege. The session is conducted for the purpose of obtaining and rendering legal advice on the design and its consequences, and is intended to attract attorney-client privilege and the attorney work-product doctrine to the extent recognised in the client's home jurisdiction and in Mongolia. The corporation will resist third-party requests for content of the session on the client's behalf and will not waive privilege without written instruction from the client.
• Downstream isolation. Nothing said in Session Four is transmitted, in any form, to the clinical or design teams executing the client's engagement. Where a design decision is taken during Session Four that requires action by those teams, the decision is conveyed to them through a written instrument prepared by session counsel and countersigned by the client, containing only what the teams require in order to act.

“There are topics that clients uniformly prefer to discuss without record, and there are consequences to holding those discussions elsewhere — on the record, or not at all — that neither the client nor the corporation would find serviceable. Session Four is where those topics are raised, and we have chosen to conduct it in the manner in which conversations with counsel are ordinarily conducted, so that the record reflects what the record is meant to reflect, and no more.”

— Priya Ravindran, Deputy General Counsel

What the procedure does not say

The written procedure identifies neither the subject-matter of Session Four nor the categories of topic that clients typically raise within it. It has never been the corporation's practice to catalogue that subject-matter, and today's procedure is not the occasion to begin. The corporation notes only that the topics have been sufficiently consistent across the seventeen years since the first Phenotype Renovations procedure was administered in October 2002 to warrant a standing session dedicated to them, and sufficiently sensitive to warrant the arrangements described above. Enquiries seeking further characterisation of the session's contents will be acknowledged and not answered.

Session Four is not a session in which the client's design is materially altered. Substantive design decisions are taken in Sessions Two and Three and confirmed in Session Five. Session Four is, in the corporation's phrase, the session in which the client says the thing the client came to say.

Effect on existing engagements

For engagements commencing on or after the first of October 2019, the procedure applies of its own force and requires no action by the client. For engagements already in progress on that date, existing clients will receive individual written notice, through counsel where the client is so represented, offering conversion of any not-yet-conducted Session Four to the new procedure at no charge and without effect on the engagement's schedule. Sessions conducted before the first of October 2019 remain governed by their original terms; the corporation makes no representation as to the privilege status of communications made under the prior arrangement and does not propose to revisit it retrospectively.

The procedure has no effect on the pricing schedule for the base Phenotype Renovations package or on any deluxe option. It has no effect on the intake sequence for Genetic Maintain™, Genotype Renovations™, or Genetic Select™, whose consultation protocols are structured differently and are not the subject of today's release. The corporation will consider parallel written procedures for those service lines on a service-line-by-service-line basis as their engagement patterns require.

Oversight

The written procedure was drafted by the Office of the General Counsel over the course of the second quarter of 2019, in consultation with the Chief Medical Officer's clinical protocol authority and with external counsel in three jurisdictions in which Phenotype Renovations clients most frequently reside. It was notified to the Independent Ethics Board under the standing procedure for consultation-protocol modifications not affecting the classification of a procedure class. The Board recorded no objection and confirmed that the modification does not require a further review beyond the notification entered in its 2019 third-quarter minute.

The procedure will be reviewed on an annual cycle by the Office of the General Counsel jointly with the Chief Medical Officer. The corporation does not anticipate revisiting the character of Session Four in the ordinary course; the review is directed to the mechanics of its administration.

“The clinical work at Furnetics rests on a foundation of client trust that predates every apparatus we use and every jurisdiction we operate in. Writing this procedure down does not create that trust; it declines to erode it. That is the whole of the ambition, and it seemed to us worth the effort of drafting.”

— Dr. Kenji Arai, Chief Medical Officer

Enquiries from institutional partners, regulators, and represented clients may be directed to the Office of the General Counsel, 15 Sükhbaatar Square, Ulaanbaatar. Enquiries seeking further characterisation of the subject-matter of Session Four, or seeking access to any record of a session so conducted, will be acknowledged and not answered.

— ends —