Guides

Start with the job, not the area of law

Owners rarely arrive with a legal category in mind. They arrive with a job in hand: a contract that needs signing by Friday, an invoice that went quiet ninety days ago, a first employee starting next month, a co-founder who wants out. So the eleven guides below are grouped by what you are trying to do, and each group opens with a sentence saying which guide answers which question.

Every guide explains what a document is for, which parts of it decide who carries the risk, and what tends to go wrong. None of them is a template you can sign, and none is drafting you can lift. That is deliberate: operative wording only works when someone has read your situation, and wording copied out of an article is the single most common reason a clause fails to do the job the owner assumed it was doing.

They are also written to be read before you need them. A guide read the week you are negotiating is worth more than the same guide read the week you are arguing, because almost everything that protects a business has to be in place before the thing it protects against happens. Terms have to be incorporated before the deal is done. An assignment of intellectual property has to be signed before the freelancer moves on. A shareholders' agreement has to exist before the fall-out.

What these guides are not

They are general information about the law of England and Wales, not advice about your circumstances. Buzz Legal Ltd is not a firm of solicitors and is not regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Six legal activities are reserved by law — among them conducting litigation and exercising rights of audience — and Buzz Legal does none of them. Where a matter needs reserved work, it is carried out by RHF Solicitors, authorised and regulated by the SRA under number 324115, and the handover is explained rather than quietly assumed.

Nothing here is tax or financial advice either. Where a decision has a tax consequence — how a shareholding is structured, whether someone is an employee or a contractor — the guides say so and point you at your accountant, because the legal answer and the tax answer are frequently different and both have to be right.

When you want a document actually dealt with rather than explained, the fixed-fee work page sets out the priced pieces — a contract review at £249 +VAT, business terms and conditions at £695 +VAT, an employment starter pack at £895 +VAT, a shareholder agreement at £1,250 +VAT and HR policies with a handbook at £1,495 +VAT. If legal questions come up steadily rather than once, the subscription runs from £49 +VAT a month. Anything outside those is scoped and agreed in writing before work starts.

Work it out yourself first

Four of the questions the guides cover can be answered on screen in a couple of minutes. The free tools page holds a late payment interest calculator, an employment documents checker, a contract risk checker and a shareholder agreement readiness check. They show their working and no email is needed to see the result, so it is often worth running the relevant one before or alongside the guide.

These four cover the documents your business signs or publishes. About to sign or issue a commercial agreement: business contracts, without the jargon. Buying from or supplying to another business: supplier agreements, which reads the same document from both sides. Sent an NDA before a conversation, or want one before you open your books: NDAs explained covers which way it should point and the line it cannot lawfully cross. Wondering what your website is obliged to publish: website terms and privacy, including the ICO fee.

Two guides for money that has not arrived, in the order you need them. Start with chasing unpaid invoices, step by step: what you are owed on top of the invoice, and what to send on day one, day seven and day fourteen. If it has gone past chasing, preparing for a dispute covers what the claim is actually worth, what to stop deleting today, the pre-action steps the courts expect and how long you have. Read them together — what you do in the first month of a late invoice largely decides how strong your position looks in the sixth. The late payment calculator will put a figure on the specific invoice while you read.

Employment is where the paperwork is least optional and the deadlines are real. Before a hire, employment contracts, the essentials for employers sets out what has to be in their hands on day one, whether the person is an employee, a worker or a contractor, and what belongs in the contract rather than the handbook. Before a difficult conversation with someone already employed, staff handbooks and policies covers the disciplinary process step by step and the 25% Acas Code swing that gets applied to the whole award. The employment documents checker will tell you which of it you are already missing.

Two guides about ownership — of the company, and of what the company has made. Shareholder agreements is for founders who have never written anything down about leavers, deadlock or who is allowed to become an owner. IP basics is for anyone who has paid a freelancer for a logo, a website or source code and assumed the payment transferred ownership. Both are read most often by people who have just discovered they needed them, which is the argument for reading them earlier. The shareholder readiness check will list what your company is missing in about two minutes.

One guide for the decision sitting behind all the others. Buzz Legal vs the alternatives weighs DIY templates, online document platforms, a high-street solicitor, an HR-support firm and Buzz Legal — what each is genuinely good at and where each lets you down. It includes the situations where a template is enough, and the ones where nothing but a regulated solicitor will do.