Terms
The research is student work. The decision it feeds is yours.
These terms say what a brief is, what it is not, what nobody warrants, who owns one, and what working with the desk does not create. They are written in plain English on purpose. A term you cannot read protects nobody.
Status
This page is a draft.
It has not been read by Williams College or by a lawyer. It was written by the students who run Ubuntu Advisory Group, in the words they would use on a call, and it sets out what they intend to be held to.
It is up here in that state on purpose. What the desk will and will not stand behind is more use to you before you bring a question than after, and a page marked draft is more honest than a page borrowing the confidence of a template. When it has been reviewed, this notice comes down and the date of that review goes up in its place.
Nothing on this page is a substitute for advice from your own lawyer about your own situation.
Draft, not reviewed · 5 September 2026
Scope
What these terms cover.
Three things. Everything the desk sends you falls inside one of them.
- A brief
- Any written research the desk delivers, together with its evidence log and the page listing what could not be established.
- A call
- Anything said on the scoping call, and the messages and working notes that go back and forth while a project runs.
- This site
- Every page here, including the news page and anything the group publishes under its own name.
The object
What a brief is.
A brief answers one question in writing. Behind the answer sits an evidence log where every source carries a grade of A, B or C, and a last page listing what the team could not establish.
Undergraduates do the work. Before a central figure goes in, a second researcher has to reach it without being shown the first route, and where the two routes land apart both of them go into the brief.
Nobody outside the student team reads a brief before the company that asked for it does. No professor reads one, and nothing on this site should be read as saying otherwise.
That is the whole of the check. It is a real one, and it is not an audit.
Limits
What a brief is not.
Each row below is a different profession. None of them is this one.
- Legal advice
- A brief can tell you which register a licence sits in, what the application asks for and what it costs. It cannot tell you that you comply.
- Investment advice
- No recommendation to buy or sell anything, and no valuation of any company.
- Diligence
- Not the diligence a fund is required by its own agreements to carry out itself.
- Assurance
- No audit, no certification, and no assurance of any kind over somebody else's numbers.
- A filing
- Not a regulatory filing, not a clearance, and not a document that stands in for one.
- A forecast
- Where a brief carries a projection it carries the assumptions underneath it, and those assumptions are the desk's reading rather than a fact about the future. Nothing in a brief promises that a market will behave the way the brief describes it.
Warranty
Nothing in a brief is warranted.
The desk does not warrant that a figure, a finding or a recommendation is complete, current on the day you read it, or free of error. A brief is offered as it stands.
Two things limit it whatever anybody intends. Sources move: a register is amended, a fee schedule is reissued, and a regulator that governs by circular can change a rule without publishing a new one. And a grade describes a source, not a conclusion. Grade A says the desk read the primary document itself. It does not say the argument built on top of that document is right.
Where the evidence would not carry a claim, the claim is not in the brief. It is on the last page, under what could not be established. Read that page first if the number matters.
The decision
The decision, and everything that follows from it, is yours.
Read a brief the way you read any other input to a call you are the one making. Test what carries weight. Open the documents in the evidence log yourself: they are cited so that you can.
Ubuntu Advisory Group, the students who work on it, and Williams College accept no liability for a decision taken on the strength of a brief, of a call, or of anything on this site, and none for any loss that follows from one.
That sentence is doing legal work, so here it is in the register the rest of the site uses. The desk did the research. The call is yours, and the consequence sits with whoever made it.
Ownership
A brief belongs to whoever asked for it.
The company or the fund that brought the question owns the brief. The desk does not publish client work, does not sell it on, and does not reuse it for somebody else's question.
What stays with the desk is the method: how a question was scoped, which registers were opened, how a figure was reached a second time. A student may describe that in an application or an interview, without the findings and without the name. The findings are not theirs to describe.
Where the group publishes something under its own name, with no client behind it, that work is the group's. Quote it with the name and the date attached.
What the desk does with your material while a project runs, who sees it, and what happens to it afterwards are set out under how we work.
This site
Not everything on this site is the desk's.
- The desk's own material
- The writing, the drawings, the coverage map and the code on these pages belong to the group. Quote a page with the name and the date on it. Do not republish one whole.
- Other publishers
- The news page carries a publisher's headline, its masthead, the date, and the summary the publisher itself puts in its feed, with a link straight back to the original. It does not reproduce their article and it does not load their photographs. The reporting stays theirs. Where the desk adds a note under an item, the note is the desk's view and the reporting above it is not.
- Firm names
- Firms named on this site own their own names. They are set in type here to state where former members went, and for no other reason. None is affiliated with the group, none has endorsed it, and none has any part in the work.
- Links out
- Where a page here sends you to a register, a regulator or a statistics office, the link goes to the same document the desk opened. The desk does not run any of those bodies and cannot keep their pages current, so a link is not a warranty about what sits behind it.
Relationship
Working with the desk creates no advisory relationship.
A paid firm owes you duties that arrive with the invoice. The desk provides free research, and those duties do not attach. Working with the desk does not make it your adviser, your consultant, your agent or your fiduciary, and nothing said on a call or written in a brief creates the kind of professional relationship a licensed firm would owe you.
It does not turn your company into somebody's case study either. Nothing about a company that brings a question appears on this site unless that company has approved it.
If you need something in writing for your own situation, ask on the first call. The desk says what it can sign.
Questions
If a term here is a problem, raise it before the work starts.
The desk would rather lose a project over a term than find the disagreement halfway through one. The first call runs twenty minutes and this is a legitimate thing to spend some of it on.