The CAS Judgment Audit
Free Tool
The CAS Judgment Audit.
Sequoia Capital says tax advisory is 80-90% intelligence work — rule-following, not judgment. This structured prompt walks you through your actual work week and forces a classification on every activity. Most practitioners discover their real moat is thinner than they expected.
Find Your Real Moat
Most of what you call judgment is rules you forgot you learned.
In the article that brought you here, I argued that most of what CAS practitioners call "professional judgment" is actually pattern recognition operating below conscious awareness. Internalized rules that feel like instinct.
Transaction categorization on an ambiguous expense. Entity structure for a new client. Materiality thresholds. Revenue recognition. Each one follows a framework you've internalized so deeply it feels like instinct. But internalized rules are still rules — and rules are exactly what AI learns.
This audit helps you find out where the line sits in your practice. Copy the prompt below, paste it into ChatGPT or Claude, and answer the questions it asks. You'll get your personal intelligence-to-judgment ratio — and you'll know exactly where your real moat lives.
How It Works
Three phases. One clear number.
The audit walks you through a structured classification of your actual work week — not the job description version.
Phase 1: Context
Describe your role, your typical week, and the client relationship where you feel most valuable. The AI maps your activities in detail.
Phase 2: Classification
Every activity gets classified as intelligence (rule-following, however complex) or genuine judgment (decisions under uncertainty where your experience is the primary input). The AI challenges your assumptions — respectfully but honestly.
Phase 3: The Reveal
Your personal intelligence/judgment ratio. Your actual judgment hours per week. A comparison to Sequoia's benchmark. Where your moat actually is — and how much capacity you're about to get back.
The Audit Prompt
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After You Run It
What to do with your number.
If your judgment ratio came back lower than expected — welcome to the club. Most practitioners who run this discover their genuine judgment layer is somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of their week.
Encode one rule this week
Pick one activity you classified as intelligence — something you do on autopilot that follows a pattern you could document. Write the decision framework down. Build the SOP. That's the first step toward handing it to AI.
Protect your judgment hours
Look at the activities that came back as genuine judgment. Are you giving them your best time and attention, or are they squeezed between intelligence work that could be automated? Start treating your judgment hours as the most valuable block on your calendar.
Your Move
Find out where your real moat lives.
Budget 20 to 30 minutes. Paste the prompt into Claude or ChatGPT. Answer the questions honestly. You'll know exactly what percentage of your week is genuine judgment — and how much capacity you're about to get back.