You can sign it and hope, or pay an hourly firm to read it and find out the cost afterwards. A contract review here is a fixed £249 +VAT, agreed in writing before anybody opens the document.
Not out of laziness. At £200 to £350 +VAT an hour, asking a commercial solicitor to read twelve pages is an open cheque, and the document needs signing this week. So it gets signed, and the liability clause becomes a problem two years later.
A fixed fee removes the reason not to look. You know the number before we start, and the number is the whole job.
Every comment attached to the clause it is about.
Standard terms separated from the ones worth arguing about.
The clauses that would hurt most, first.
So your reply to the other side writes itself.
These four carry the money. None of them looks frightening on the page.
Whether your exposure is capped, at what, and whether the cap carves out the things most likely to go wrong. An uncapped indemnity in a £20,000 contract is a £20,000 contract with unlimited downside.
Who can walk away, on what notice, and what happens to work already done and money already spent. A contract you cannot get out of is a different product from the one you thought you were buying.
When you get paid, as opposed to when you invoice, what triggers the obligation, and whether late payment carries any consequence. This is the clause that turns into a debt problem eighteen months later.
Which law applies, where a dispute is heard, whether you have to mediate first, and what the other side has to prove. It is the clause you find yourself relying on once a deal has gone wrong.
What the contract is and who sent it. Use the form at the top of this page.
A fixed price against a written scope. Nothing starts, and nothing is chargeable, until you say yes.
Your document with comments, the summary and suggested wording, counted from the day you send the contract.
The meter runs while they read, and the total arrives after the work.
Fine for a document you write yourself. It cannot read the one the other side sent you.
Read in full by a person, marked up, and back to you within five working days.
Start my contract review →The £249 is a contract of ordinary length and complexity — a normal commercial agreement between two businesses: client, supplier, reseller and partnership agreements. It is a starting price because a ten-page supplier agreement and a sixty-page framework contract are both “a contract review”, and charging the same for both would overcharge one of you.
The length and complexity of the document; the number of parties; selling to consumers, which brings statutory cancellation rights and the unfair terms rules into play; a schedule of several related documents; and anything already in dispute, which is not fixed-fee work at all. If yours is one of those, you get a figure before we start.
What you will not get is a redrafted contract presented as legally approved. We explain what a clause does and why it matters; we do not supply operative drafting you rely on without advice on your circumstances.
Reviewing and explaining a contract is not a reserved legal activity, which is why it can be priced like ordinary work. Work carried out by AD Solicitors carries the full SRA framework, including the compensation fund and the Legal Ombudsman. Work we carry out ourselves does not. If your contract is already in dispute, or the review turns up something that needs an authorised firm, it goes to AD Solicitors (SRA no. 8011228) and you are told that at the scoping stage, before you have spent anything. See preparing for a dispute if you are already past that point.
Buzz Legal handles contracts, terms of trade, employment paperwork and dispute preparation. Court work, and the other activities reserved by law, are carried out by AD Solicitors, authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (no. 8011228). How this works, in full. For advice on your own situation, send us the contract.
A fixed £249 +VAT for a commercial contract of ordinary length and complexity, agreed in writing before anything starts. That price covers the whole job: at the £200 to £350 +VAT an hour commonly quoted for this kind of work, £249 buys roughly an hour of a solicitor's time, which is long enough to read your contract but not to tell you what to do about it. If your document is materially bigger than ordinary — a long framework agreement, several linked documents, or consumer-facing terms — we say so and re-quote before starting, so it never appears on the invoice as a surprise.
Somebody reads the contract you have been asked to sign, in full, and tells you what it means for you in practice. You get a marked-up copy of your own document, a written summary separating the standard terms from the ones worth arguing about, and suggested wording for the clauses to push back on. Every contract has imperfections. The job is to find the few clauses that would cost you money if the relationship goes wrong, and to tell you which of them the other side is likely to move on.
Yes. It helps most when something has started to go wrong, or when the same agreement is about to renew. What changes is the purpose: instead of telling you what to negotiate, the review tells you where you already stand — what you are committed to, what your options are, and whether there is a way out. Be aware that if the matter has already become a dispute it stops being fixed-fee work and needs a different conversation, and possibly a regulated firm. Say so when you send it and we will tell you which it is.
The service is built for business-to-business commercial agreements — client, supplier, reseller and partnership contracts. Selling to consumers brings a different set of rules into play, including statutory cancellation rights and the unfair terms regime, so consumer-facing terms are priced separately, as part of a terms and conditions package. If you are not sure which side of that line your document falls on, send it and we will tell you before quoting.
We will suggest wording for the clauses worth changing, so your reply to the other side is straightforward to send. What we will not do is hand over redrafted operative wording presented as legally approved and safe to rely on without advice on your particular circumstances — that is a line we hold deliberately, and it is part of what makes the fixed fee honest. If your matter needs a solicitor to draft and stand behind the wording, that goes to AD Solicitors and you are told before any money is spent.
Then paying per document is usually the wrong shape. A business that signs somebody else's paperwork most months is normally cheaper on a monthly plan, and the £249 +VAT a month plan is the first one where a person reads your contracts and marks them up for you. A single job stays a fixed fee. Tell us how many you sign in a typical month and we will show you both figures.
One line on what it is and who sent it. You get back a fixed price against a defined scope, or an honest answer that it is bigger than ordinary and what that would cost instead. See the privacy policy for how we use your details.
One commercial contract of ordinary length, read in full, for a fixed £249 +VAT agreed in writing before anybody opens the document.
