Our fees

We know that legal and other professional fees are an issue for individuals and businesses alike. We have a principled but pragmatic approach to our rates whereby we aim to achieve the right balance between cost and experience. We recognise and appreciate that certainty and trust with regard to fees is fundamental to any client relationship.

We will be open and honest about fees, and will keep you informed, ensuring your legal budget works hard without compromising the quality of legal advice you receive or the responsiveness of the lawyers you work with. Our fees are always:

Realistic and fair;
Transparent and simple to understand; and
Based on our experience and proportionate to the work in hand.

Hourly rates

Charging by the hour is the traditional way in which lawyers invoice clients. This is useful for highly specialist work and if the scope of the task is uncertain, such as in litigation. There are several ways of offering you hourly rates, including capped fees (charged up to a capped amount) and blended fees (charged as a uniform rate).

Fixed fees

We want to ensure that you receive value for money and that our pricing is easy to understand and transparent. We are increasingly moving away from hourly billing to fixed fee pricing wherever possible. This provides price certainty and the ability to budget more easily. We are completely flexible in our approach and will always recommend the pricing mechanism that provides you with the best value and meets your specific requirements. We can also consider capped fees, where appropriate.

Retainers

We offer both ‘off the shelf’ retainer products which are specific to practice areas as well as tailored retainers (which we have in place for a number of our clients). Our ‘off the shelf’ retainers include YEAR (for employment matters) and ORCA, for a range of commercial matters.

We can also create a tailored retainer to cover those areas of legal advice that you know will arise, year in, year out such as managing costs around commercial contracts. We are happy to adopt a flexible approach to reflect your quieter and busier times of the year. We are used to such fluctuations, allow unused hours to be carried over, and have sufficient resource to support periods of high demand.

Dispute resolution

it is difficult at the outset of a dispute to determine how long it may last, leading to cost uncertainty. Therefore, we can consider several flexible funding arrangements with you, including conditional fees. We also have good relations with insurers who provide ‘after the event’ cover, and we can also advise on third party funding. All these elements can reduce risk and legal spend. See our funding a dispute page for more information.

Billing procedures

We have a flexible approach to billing which can include monthly or interim billing depending on the nature and timescale of the work we are undertaking. We will always give you an estimate before we start work and will keep you informed of your matter’s progress, particularly if anything is going out of scope that might affect the overall cost. We will discuss the invoice before sending it so you will never receive any surprises.

Monitoring and controlling expenditure

All matters are scoped at the outset and the cost agreed in advance whether as a fixed fee or based on the hourly rate. Our fees do not change unless the work goes significantly out of scope and only with your prior agreement. We are transparent on our fees and will send you a breakdown of the time incurred for your records as a matter of course.

Pricing Transparency

As a general principle we do not publish our fee rates for all areas of practice due to the difficulty of doing so without knowing the scope of the work required. However, we are required by the Solicitors Regulation Authority to publish our fee scales for specific areas of work, namely: