Also I used to work at a consultancy. The unwritten rule was that clients would not try to hire any of the consultants directly Here (East Coast, US)

Also I used to work at a consultancy. The unwritten rule was that clients would not try to hire any of the consultants directly Here (East Coast, US) this is almost always a written rule in the consultancy contract, because otherwise it is a very common case. Usually I think it's like, "if you hire one of our consultants you owe us $xx,xxx" or something. While I am just about always pro-worker, I accept this as a necessity. Otherwise consultants get "poached" non-stop, because they've basically already "auditioned" for the client and the client gets an extended amount of time to figure out which ones would be great to poach. Makes it just about impossible to run a consultancy otherwise.