Fixed fees for business legal work

Contract review from £249 +VAT. Terms and conditions package from £695 +VAT. Employment starter pack from £895 +VAT. Shareholder agreement from £1,250 +VAT. HR policies and staff handbook from £1,495 +VAT. Those are starting prices for a job of ordinary size and complexity, and you get a single fixed figure for your job, in writing, before anything starts. For context, a solicitor charging the £200 to £350 +VAT an hour commonly quoted for this work would give you between roughly 45 minutes and an hour and a quarter for £249. Subscribers take 10% off any of these.

“From” is the price for a job of ordinary size. You are quoted above it when the document is unusually long or complicated, when there are more than two parties, when you sell to consumers as well as to businesses, or when you need several sets of documents. Whichever applies, you are told which and why in the same email as the price, before you commit to anything. If a job is too big to price as a fixed fee at all, you are told that in the same email.

No. Every price on the list is quoted excluding VAT, which is added at the standard rate of 20%. In cash terms, a £249 contract review is £298.80, a £695 terms and conditions package is £834, and a £1,495 handbook is £1,794. If your business is VAT-registered you will usually recover it; if it is not, treat the gross figure as the cost. Your quote states the fee, the VAT and the total, and that total is what appears on the invoice. A fixed-fee job carries no file-opening charge, admin fee or expenses line.

Fixed against a written scope. Before anything starts you get a document saying what is included, what is not, what you will receive and when. Nothing begins until you have agreed the scope, the price and the delivery date in writing. If something outside that scope turns up, we stop and re-quote before doing it, so nothing new appears on the invoice. That works both ways: a contract review covers one contract of ordinary length with one follow-up exchange, so a second round of mark-up after the deal changes, or negotiating with the other side for you, is a new job with its own price.

We stop and tell you before doing it. Most of that risk is removed at the scoping stage, which is why we ask for the document itself: the difference between a straightforward set of terms and a complicated one shows on the first read. Where a job grows, you get a second written quote for the additional part and you decide. You are never billed for work you did not approve. Sometimes a job becomes something else, such as a contract review where the other side has already threatened a claim. That becomes a referral to AD Solicitors.

For a review: a marked-up copy of the contract showing where the problems are, a plain-English summary separating what is standard from what carries risk, suggested replacement wording for the clauses to argue about, and one follow-up call or email exchange. For drafting: the finished document, plus a note on how to make it apply. For terms, that means putting them on the order form and referencing them before the customer commits. Printed on the back of an invoice, they arrive too late to bind anyone. All of it is in plain English, so you can use it without calling us.

A fixed fee suits a defined, one-off job. A subscription suits a business that keeps generating legal questions. Business Legal is £249 +VAT a month, which is £2,988 +VAT across a year paid monthly or £2,490 +VAT paid annually, and includes typically four to six matters a month plus up to three contract reviews. Buy the same volume as fixed-fee work and you pass that within a handful of jobs. If you send us one contract a year and nothing else, pay the fixed fee. Legal Foundations at £49 +VAT a month, £588 +VAT across a year paid monthly or £490 +VAT paid annually, sits in between: the template library, the health check and 10% off fixed-fee work, which takes £149.50 off a £1,495 handbook.

Non-reserved work is done by the Buzz Legal team. Reserved legal work is done by Robert Festenstein, a solicitor at AD Solicitors (SRA no. 8011228). When he does it, he acts as a solicitor at that regulated firm and not as part of Buzz Legal Ltd. You are told which applies before anything starts. The protections differ: 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. Our About page sets that out in full, and our complaints procedure explains what we do instead.

You hear about it before you spend anything. If a job needs reserved legal work, or has already become contentious, that is identified at the quoting stage. It goes to AD Solicitors, authorised and regulated by the SRA (no. 8011228), at rates agreed and confirmed before that work starts. Whoever picks it up has already seen the matter, and any preparation done — the chronology, the evidence, the letter before action — goes with it, so you are not paying a regulated firm to read in from scratch. If a matter looks court-bound on day one, you hear that on day one.