The current permissions system needs to be revisited.

Aside from the Auto-Assign feature that isn't currently working, there are issues in having to constantly define permissions for the same Clients.

Clients will generally have a few people who are always assigned to their projects.

There could be a group of project managers who work on multiple projects for the same client.

The ability to attach permissions to the Client in the People view, and have them stick for each project created for that client is desperately needed.

This means you:

Create a Client
Assign Permissions for your staff and third parties to that Client, the defaults for each project.

Then you can modify on a case by case basis if the project manager changes.