Our Terms
Our Terms
Version: 010 Applicable from: 30 January 2026
1. Our agreement with you – These terms, together with any engagement letter or proposal email to you, form our agreement with you to provide legal services. These terms apply to each matter we work on with you, unless we expressly agree otherwise. If there is a conflict between these terms and any engagement letter/any other agreements between us, these terms will prevail, unless or to the extent that any engagement letter or proposal email expressly overrides them.
2. Changes to these terms – We can change these terms in response to legal, regulatory and technological changes and we may increase our hourly rates as explained in paragraph 12.1(b). If we do so, we’ll notify you and you can contact us to terminate your instructions before the changes take effect.
3. Consumers may have a right to cancel – If you are an individual who is not instructing us in connection with your business, you may have a legal right to cancel our agreement with you and receive a refund of any sums you have paid us in advance. You are likely to have these rights if we take instructions from you outside of our offices or at a distance, for example online or over the telephone. Your right to cancel expires 14 days after our agreement is made and if you request us to start work during that period you will have to pay us for any work we do up until you cancel. Work which we start at your request during the cancellation period cannot be cancelled once completed, even if the cancellation period is still running.
4. Matters outside the scope of your instructions – We only advise on matters within the scope of your instructions, as set out in any engagement letter or proposal email. Unless our engagement letter or proposal email clearly says otherwise, we will not advise you on the financial or tax aspects of any matter, on your wider tax or financial interests, on the law of jurisdictions outside of England & Wales, or on accounting issues, even if a relevant issue arises during the course of our work together. You may wish to seek separate specialist advice on any such issues.
5. Only you can rely on our advice – Our advice is intended solely for you. We do not accept or assume responsibility to anyone other than the clients identified in any engagement letter or proposal email. Unless we agree otherwise in writing, you must not share our advice with anyone else.
6. Third party service providers – We may instruct third parties (such as barristers, expert witnesses, enquiry agents and/or lawyers in foreign jurisdictions) to provide services to you. Where appropriate we may instruct these third parties as your agent, so that you contract with them directly. However the third parties are instructed, you are responsible for the sums charged by third parties and their services are provided to you on their terms. We use reasonable skill and care in selecting and appointing third parties and provided that we do so, we are not responsible for the services the third parties provide.
7. We’re not responsible for delays outside our control – If our services to you are delayed by an event outside our control, we will contact you as soon as reasonable possible to let you know, and do what we can to reduce the delay. As long as we do this, we won’t compensate you for the delay, but you always have rights to terminate your instructions, see paragraph 18.1.
8. You agree to –
(a) Provide us with clear, timely and consistent instructions. You must also respond fully, frankly and quickly to our requests for information, and co-operate with us and those we instruct on your behalf. The information you give us must be full and accurate, to the best of your knowledge and belief. We don’t verify the information you give us, unless we have expressly agreed to do so.
(b) Tell us straight away if your contact details change.
(c) Take reasonable steps to properly secure your communications with us. This includes protecting the email and computer systems used for your matter. This is important to protect your rights and funds.
(d) Respect our regulatory restrictions. If we tell you that we can’t do something for you because doing it would breach our legal, professional or regulatory duties then you must respect this.
(e) Pay money on account and our invoices. You must provide us with any required sums on account (see paragraph 14) and pay our invoices in accordance with these terms (see paragraph 15).
(f) Verify any change of our payment details received by email. If you are told about any change of our bank details by email, then even if it appears to come from our firm, you must call us on 02037780605 immediately to check the email is genuine.
9. Risks of email correspondence. For convenience and speed, we will correspond with you by email and rely on communications coming from your email account. However, email is inherently insecure. We are not responsible for loss or damage caused by email use, provided we have taken reasonable security measures, including against viruses or similar harmful items. Our filtering software may prevent us receiving emails from you or in relation to your matter and we are not responsible to you for delays or losses resulting from this.
10. Who we can give advice to and whose instructions we can act on. We may give advice and information to, and act on instructions from, any of the individuals to whom our engagement letter or proposal email is addressed without the need to copy such advice to, or to confirm such instructions with, the other(s). You can let us know in writing that we are authorised to deal with someone else on your behalf in this way. For organisations, rather than individuals, we can but are not required to ask for a formal resolution confirming who can instruct us.
11. We can adjust to your communications needs. As a firm, we wish to support and promote equality and diversity. If it would assist you for our services to be delivered in a different way, please let us know and we will investigate how we can help.
12. How we calculate our fees. Our fees for our services in your legal matter are calculated either on the basis of time spent, or on a fixed or capped basis, and may be staged, and will be set out in any engagement letter or proposal email that we may send you; typically as follows:
12.1 Fees on a time spent basis. If our fees are calculated on a time spent basis:
(a) Six-minute units. We calculate the time spent by us in six-minute units (an hour is broken down into ten units, each of six minutes) and charge it at the hourly rate for the person doing the work, with the time for any task being rounded up to the closest six minutes.
(b) Increases in hourly rates. We may increase our hourly rates, for example at the start of a new year. We may also increase our rates if your instructions change, for example if the matter we are working on for you becomes more urgent. We give you advance notice of any increases.
(c) Estimates are not binding. Any estimate of our charges (fees, disbursements and expenses) for dealing with your matter or reaching a certain stage in it, as well as estimates or automated quotes provided on our website, are not binding. We may update estimates as a matter progresses, and you must pay all our charges even if they exceed any estimate.
12.2 Fixed and capped fees. If we have agreed a fixed or capped fee with you:
(a) Changes in assumptions. If the assumptions on which the fixed or capped fee are based (as set out in any engagement letter or proposal email) change or prove incorrect we may increase our fixed or capped fee, or switch to charging you on a time-spent basis. If we switch to charging on a time-spent basis, we will provide you with an estimate of our fees to complete the matter.
(b) What we can charge if you terminate your instructions (or we stop acting for you). If you terminate your instructions (other than because we are at fault) we can charge you the full fixed fee unless you are an individual who is not instructing us in connection with your business (a consumer) in which case we will charge you on a time spent basis for the work we have done prior to termination, if this is less. The same rules apply if we stop acting for you for a reason set out in paragraph 18.
13. Disbursements, expenses and VAT. All hourly rates, estimates, fixed, capped or staged fees we quote to you are exclusive of the following, which you must pay in addition:
13.1 Disbursements. We may instruct third parties (such as barristers, expert witnesses, enquiry agents and process servers etc.) to provide services to you or we may pay official fees or carry out searches for you. You will be responsible for associated fees, charges and costs (disbursements). Any engagement letter or proposal email will include an estimate of disbursements.
13.2 Expenses. In addition to our fees, we charge you our expenses which may include the costs of travel, accommodation, document production (scanning, photocopying, binding), payment transfers and similar.
13.3 VAT. VAT on our fees and, where applicable, on disbursements and expenses, unless expressly stated otherwise. VAT is currently chargeable at 20%.
14. Payments on account. We normally hold some money on account from you as security against non-payment of our charges (fees, disbursements and expenses) until a matter is concluded. We can require you to pay an appropriate amount on account before we start work and to top it up from time to time. We are not obliged to use such money to pay our bills, but we can do so.
15. Our invoices
15.1 When we invoice you. We invoice you regularly, either before or on completion of your matter or at the intervals indicated in any engagement letter or proposal email. We may raise interim statute invoices. Statute invoices are final for the period they cover and your rights to challenge them are time limited. All statute invoices (whether interim or final) will be marked accordingly.
15.2 We can invoice disbursements and expenses at any time. We can invoice you for disbursements and expenses for any period at any time, even after we have invoiced our fees for that period.
15.3 Payment is due on receipt and we charge interest on late payments. Our bills are payable when you receive them. We charge interest on unpaid bills at a rate of 8% above the Bank of England’s base rate.
15.4 You are responsible for our charges, even if you have third party funding. Even if someone else has agreed or been ordered to pay our charges (fees, disbursements and expenses), or you expect this to happen, you are still ultimately responsible for paying us. This includes where you are claiming back part or all of our charges from an opponent in litigation.
15.5 Multiple clients are jointly and severally liable for our bills. If we are instructed by more than one person, then we can require any of those persons to pay our bills in full (this is called joint and several liability).
15.6 How to complain about our bills. To complain about an invoice, please follow our complaints procedure (see paragraph 21). You can also ask the court to assess our bill of costs under Part III of the Solicitors Act 1974, subject to certain time limits and conditions.
15.7 How We Apply Your Payments. When you make a payment towards an outstanding bill, we may at our absolute discretion apply it first to any interest and costs that have become due, and only then to the outstanding main amount of our fees.
15.8 We can offset any monies we owe to you against our bills. We may set off any sums we owe to you or hold on your behalf against any unpaid invoices or other sums due to us from you, whether arising in relation to the same matter or any other matter on which we act or have acted for you. We will notify you if we exercise this right of set‑off. This right applies in addition to any lien we may have over your documents, funds or other property.
16. How we hold your money and pay you interest on it
16.1 Where we hold your money and associated risks. We may hold money on your behalf in our client account in Metro Bank plc. We are not responsible for any loss resulting from the failure of any bank. Our client account is in England and Wales and is covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS). The FSCS only covers a maximum of £85,000 held by you in Metro Bank plc, whether within our client account or otherwise and eligibility conditions apply. For more information visit the FSCS website www.fscs.org.uk.
16.2 Interest on money we hold for you. We pay you interest on your money held in our client account as follows:
(a) The rate of interest paid to us by Metro Bank plc and accrues on cleared funds only. Interest is compounded quarterly.
(b) We pay interest at the end of a matter, unless an interim payment is appropriate because we have held your money for an unusually long period of time.
(c) We do not pay interest in certain situations, including where the interest accrued is less than £50 and on money held to pay disbursements. For more information on when we pay interest, you can contact the partner responsible for your matter.
16.3 Residual client balances. When any matter we are working on for you ends, we will take reasonable steps to return any related leftover money in our client account that is properly due to you (residual money). Having taken reasonable steps, if we haven’t been able to return it after 6 months, we are entitled to donate it to charity without further notice to you, as permitted by the Solicitors Regulation Authority Standards and Regulations. You may be able to reclaim any donated money later, subject to any legal time limits that may apply.
17. How we limit our liability to you.
17.1 Liabilities not excluded. Nothing in these terms limits any liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or any liability that cannot legally be limited. Where you are an individual who is not instructing us in connection with your business (a consumer) and the matter is contentious (it involves a dispute with a third party), we do not exclude our liability to you for our negligence.
17.2 Exclusion of indirect and consequential loss (business customers only). Subject to paragraph 17.1, if you are a business, we will not be liable to you, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), for breach of statutory duty or otherwise, arising under or in connection with this agreement for any indirect or consequential loss.
17.3 Losses we are not liable for. Subject to paragraph 17.1, we will not be liable to you, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), for breach of statutory duty or otherwise, arising under or in connection with this agreement for any loss arising as a result of:
(a) our complying with our legal and regulatory duties, such as delays or disclosures arising in the context of compliance with anti-money laundering or crime prevention legislation or regulation;
(b) errors or defects in third party services instructed by us on your behalf or used by us in the provision of services to you, provided we use reasonable skill and care in selecting and appointing those third parties (see paragraph 6);
(c) circumstances beyond our reasonable control (see paragraph 7);
(d) loss or damage caused by email use, provided we have taken reasonable security measures (see paragraph 9); or
(e) failure of any bank (see paragraph 16.1).
17.4 Limits on our liability where other advisers are also responsible (business customers only). Subject to paragraph 17.1, our liability to you shall be reduced to the extent we can prove that you would have been able to recover a contribution pursuant to the Civil Liability (Contribution) Act 1978 from another adviser on the same matter. That contribution shall be assessed on the basis that the advisers contracted with you on broadly the same terms as we have, did not exclude or limit their liability to you, and were able to pay the sums due to you in full.
17.5 Caps on our liability. We may agree with you a liability cap for any given matter. This will ordinarily be agreed in any engagement letter or proposal email before beginning work on the relevant matter. We will not cap our liability below the minimum amount of the professional indemnity insurance cover solicitors must have in place to insure against mistakes, currently £2 million. Where a liability cap is agreed, it will apply to our aggregate liability to both you and to any other client for whom we are instructed in that matter. Subject to paragraph 17.1, the cap will apply whether the liability arose in contract, tort (including negligence), for breach of statutory duty or otherwise and whether it arises under or in connection with this agreement.
17.6 No claims against our staff. Services are provided by our team for and on behalf of our law firm. Our team do not assume any personal responsibility to our clients in relation to work carried out under these terms and any personal liability of any member of staff is therefore excluded. Any claims against our firm should be brought against the firm as a partnership. You agree not to bring any claim (including in negligence) against any employee or member of our staff including principals (that is partners, members or directors) as individuals in their personal capacity in connection with any loss or damage suffered in connection with our services. If you do bring a claim against any of our staff, they can rely on our agreement, including its limitations of liability.
18. How you and we can terminate our agreement
18.1 You and we can terminate this agreement. You may terminate your instructions to us at any time by telling us in writing. We can also stop acting for you, if we have reasonable grounds to do so, for example because you have broken our agreement by not giving us timely instructions or paying our invoices on time. We can also stop acting for you if the solicitor-client relationship of trust and confidence has broken down, if we discover a conflict of interest, if to proceed would otherwise be contrary to legal or regulatory duties, if the risk profile for your case has significantly changed or if you experience an insolvency event. We will write to you explaining our decision, giving you as much notice as possible.
18.2 Payments on termination. If you terminate your instructions or we stop acting for you, you must pay our charges (fees, disbursements and expenses) incurred up to the point of termination, as well as any charges we incur after termination, for example in transferring your file to another adviser or removing ourselves from the court record.
18.3 We can retain your documents or other property until you pay. If you do not pay our invoices on time, we can retain documents, deeds, money and other items that we hold relating to any matter we are working on for you, until you have done so (subject to such information that may be available to you under data protection laws). This is called exercising a lien over the relevant items.
19. How you can use our advice and how we handle your documents
19.1 Intellectual property rights. We retain all intellectual property rights in the advice which we provide and the documents which we prepare, but permit you to make use of such work for the purposes of the particular matter for which we provided it to you only.
19.2 Treatment of your documents on completion. When your matter completes or we stop acting for you, unless you request the return of any documents you have supplied to us, we will retain them for as long as we deem necessary for legal and regulatory reasons and then destroy them.
20. Our legal status, how we are regulated and our insurance
20.1 Our legal status and VAT details. We are a limited liability partnership (LLP) registered in England and Wales with registered number OC433058. Our registered office is at Unit 7 Hove Business Centre, Fonthill Road, Hove, East Sussex, United Kingdom, BN3 6HA. Please check our website for a full list of our members. Our VAT number is GB378813944.
20.2 How we are regulated. We are a firm of solicitors authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) and our legal services under this agreement are regulated by the SRA. Our SRA number is 814394. You can find out more about the SRA and view the professional rules which apply to us on the SRA website.
20.3 Our ability to provide financial services. We are not authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority. However, solicitors are able to provide certain financial services incidental to their legal work while regulated by the SRA.
20.4 How we are insured. As required by our professional rules, we maintain professional indemnity insurance to protect clients in the unlikely event of a mistake being made in a case. Contact details and details of the territorial coverage for our professional indemnity insurers are available on request from the individual handling your case.
20.5 SRA Compensation Fund. The SRA Compensation Fund provides certain protection if a solicitor fails to pay money owed to a client or is dishonest. We do not anticipate any such problems arising in your matter but if you would like to learn more about the SRA Compensation Fund you can do so on the SRA website at www.sra.org.uk/consumers/compensation-fund.
21. Complaints and other concerns
21.1 Complaints Procedure. We have very high standards which we are determined to maintain. If you are unhappy with any aspect of our service, please contact Barry Cullen, our complaints handling partner. Any complaint will be fully investigated free of charge. At the conclusion of any internal complaints handling procedure you may also have the right to complain to the Legal Ombudsman, full details of this, their address and our complaints procedure is set out on our website here: https://www.reclaw.co.uk/complaints.
21.2 Alternative dispute resolution. Alternative dispute resolution bodies can deal with complaints about legal services. If we agree to use such a scheme, we will inform you when notifying you of our final response to your complaint.
21.3 Reporting professional misconduct to the SRA. The Legal Ombudsman deals with concerns about the level of service which a client has received. Clients can report suspected professional misconduct to the SRA. Examples of professional misconduct include dishonesty, taking or losing your money or treating you unfairly because of your age, a disability or other characteristic. You can find out how to do this at www.sra.org.uk/consumers/problems.
22. Confidentiality
22.1 When we may use and disclose your confidential information. We will keep confidential information we obtain through our services confidential, but we reserve the right to use and disclose it where reasonably needed to:
(a) deliver those services, which may include storing confidential information on our computers, in our email and in the cloud, or provide it to third parties instructed to assist on your matter (by us on your behalf) for example external contractors, barristers or experts;
(b) comply with the law, including by performing necessary checks on new cases and as part of ongoing monitoring (including client due diligence, anti-money laundering and financial/economic crime prevention checks, and conflicts of interest checks against a list of current and former clients), reporting suspicious activity to the National Crime Agency if we suspect money laundering, and responding to freedom of information requests;
(c) comply with requests by regulators and other competent authorities, such as audits or investigations by the SRA;
(d) make any notification, report or response to the Legal Ombudsman or to our professional indemnity insurers, in the unlikely event of there being any concern (either on your part or ours) about the standard of services we have provided to you; and
(e) make appropriate due diligence checks in relation to any potential sale, acquisition, merger or other reorganisation of our business, for example to ensure that any potential client conflicts of interest or other client care concerns that may arise out of the transaction can be appropriately managed.
23. Data protection, Privacy Policy and the Data Protection Act 2018. We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. Our Privacy Policy is set out on our website here: https://www.reclaw.co.uk/privacy. That policy, together with these terms and any other documents referred to in it, sets out the basis on which any personal data we collect from you, or that you provide to us, will be processed by us. Please read the policy carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data and how we will treat it.
24. Anti-money laundering and financial/economic crime prevention procedures.
24.1 How we verify your identity and check your credit rating. As a firm of solicitors, we must comply with different legal and regulatory requirements aimed at preventing crime. You agree to co-operate with us in order to verify your identity, your business structure, organisation history and sources of income, wealth and funds, and other matters relevant to discharging our legal and professional duties in this respect. This may include attending our offices with identification and other documentation for verification, but could also involve disclosure of more personal information such as bank statements and evidence of income. If it is not possible to attend our offices, lawful alternatives will be considered with you. We may check your credit rating.
24.2 Reports to the National Crime Agency. If we have to report information about you or your matter to the National Crime Agency we may be prevented by law from informing you of this fact. If this happens we can stop work on your matter and withhold your money without notice or explanation to you, until the issue is resolved.
24.3 We do not accept cash. Strict limits apply to how we operate our client account (used to hold money on a client’s behalf in connection with a legal transaction). We do not accept cash. We cannot offer a banking facility and there are limits on how funds can be paid into and out of our client account.
25. Other important terms
25.1 Nobody else has any rights under this contract, except our staff. This contract is between you and us. Other than our staff (see paragraph 9.6), nobody else has rights under it or can enforce it. Neither of us will need to ask anybody else to sign-off on ending or changing it.
25.2 If a court invalidates some of this contract, the rest of it will still apply. If a court or other authority decides that some of these terms are unlawful, the rest will continue to apply.
25.3 These terms are governed by English law and you can bring claims against us in the English courts. These terms are governed by English law and you can bring claims against us in the English courts. If you are a consumer and live in Scotland, you can bring claims in either the Scottish or the English courts. If you are a consumer live in Northern Ireland, you can bring claims in either the Northern Irish or the English courts.1. Our agreement with you – These terms, together with any engagement letter or proposal email to you, form our agreement with you to provide legal services. These terms apply to each matter we work on with you, unless we expressly agree otherwise. If there is a conflict between these terms and any engagement letter/any other agreements between us, these terms will prevail, unless or to the extent that any engagement letter or proposal email expressly overrides them.