Key takeaways

• Fabricated case studies are a misrepresentation risk under most public procurement frameworks, not just a quality risk.
• Real cases contain awkward, specific, unpolished detail that invented ones almost never do, and that absence is usually detectable.
• A short, structured fact-gathering document, filled in from genuine records, beats a polished invention every time.

A strong case study is one of the highest-value pieces of content in almost any tender. It's also one of the easiest things to fake convincingly, and one of the most damaging things to get caught faking.

The Temptation

When a client needs a case study and doesn't have a polished one ready, the pressure to write something plausible is real. Deadlines are tight, the question is worth real marks, and a well-constructed fictional example, built from a genuine understanding of the sector, can read every bit as convincingly as a real one.

We don't do this, on any engagement, for any client, and it's worth explaining why in concrete terms rather than just asserting a principle.

What We Did Instead

On a recent bid, the relevant question asked for an anonymised, real case study demonstrating a specific kind of specialist practice. The client had genuine, live experience that would answer it well, but hadn't yet pulled the specific facts together in a usable form.

Rather than write a plausible composite and hope it passed, we built a simple fact-gathering document: a short set of direct questions covering the situation at referral, how the individual's own preferences were established, what was actually delivered, any challenge met along the way and how it was addressed, and the measurable outcome. We asked the client to complete it from genuine records, however rough, rather than from memory or impression. Only once we had real answers did we write the narrative.

Why This Matters Beyond the Ethics of It

There's an obvious ethical reason not to fabricate evidence in a legal tender submission, most public sector procurement frameworks treat misrepresentation as grounds for exclusion or worse, and that reason is sufficient on its own. But there's a practical one too: fabricated case studies are usually detectable, not because they're badly written, but because they're too clean. Real cases have specific, slightly awkward details that nobody would think to invent: an oddly specific number of sessions before something worked, a detail about a sibling that has nothing to do with the point being made, a piece of feedback that isn't quite as polished as the surrounding prose. Genuine texture is very hard to fake and very easy to spot the absence of, once you know to look.

What This Means in Practice

When a client doesn't have a ready-made case study, the right response is never to write one for them and hope. It's to ask better, more specific questions until a real one exists on paper, then write from that. It takes longer than making something up. It produces a stronger answer every time, because a real, specific case study, however imperfect, beats a smooth invented one against any evaluator paying proper attention.

Designing Questions That Actually Extract Real Detail

The fact-gathering document itself matters more than it might seem. A vague prompt like "tell us about a good outcome" invites exactly the kind of smoothed-over, retrospective summary that loses the texture that makes a case study credible in the first place. Better prompts are narrow and sequential: what was the specific situation before any support began, how was the individual's own preference or view actually established rather than assumed, what specifically was tried, what specifically went wrong along the way and what was done about it, and what changed, measurably, by a stated point in time. Each question should be answerable from a real record, not from memory shaped by hindsight, and the person filling it in should be told explicitly that rough, specific, slightly awkward detail is more useful than a polished summary.

What to Do When the Real Answer Is Thin

Sometimes a client genuinely doesn't have a strong case study available in the time available, and the honest answer to the fact-gathering document comes back thin. The right response is still not invention. It's transparency about the limitation, an explanation of the organisation's relevant capability drawn from real, verifiable experience even if it doesn't take the exact case-study form the question wants, framed explicitly as such rather than dressed up as something it isn't. Most procurement frameworks provide exactly this route for genuine gaps, and taking it honestly is a far safer position than a fabricated example that happens to fit the question perfectly.

Related reading: The Pricing Consistency Check Most Bids Skip Entirely covers the same honesty discipline applied to numbers instead of narratives.