Chiefly two things: engineering and product time spent writing accurate descriptions, and the confidentiality review that clears them for use. Legal analysis of the assignment and the corporate relationship sits alongside. Ask for an itemized scope so launch pressure does not turn into repeated, unplanned drafting rounds.
Buy fewer, better documents
A short file of specific, dated material costs less to produce and to review than an accumulation of everything the team could find. Agree the list, assign owners, and set one revision round. Ask what a change in the launch scope would cost to reflect in the file.
Confirm official charges at the time of the relevant step rather than budgeting from figures quoted earlier in the year. Add a line for the review that decides whether the knowledge claim holds at all. It is worth commissioning that view before the document programme begins, because its conclusion governs how much material is worth collecting and from whom.
A file assembled first and assessed second frequently contains a great deal of expensive evidence about the wrong thing. Agree what the review covers, what it costs, and what becomes of the engagement if the answer is unfavourable. Hypothetical example: a desalination membrane specialist's employer spends four weeks gathering commissioning records before asking whether tenure and product familiarity alone could carry the claim, and learns at that point that a narrower, differently evidenced argument was always the stronger one available.