Fixed-fee legal work for business owners
Sometimes. It depends on one thing: whether legal questions arrive regularly or once. This page is the honest version of how these arrangements work, what they include, and when paying per job is cheaper.
Subscription legal services have become common for a reason. The traditional alternative is an hourly rate that makes asking a small question feel expensive, so small businesses do not ask, and the small question becomes a large one.
What a subscription is genuinely good at is removing the hesitation. What it is not is unlimited law for a flat fee, and any provider implying otherwise is either capping it somewhere you have not read or pricing for the average and hoping you are below it.
Here is how ours works, including the parts that are limits rather than features.
Two questions settle it, and neither is about price.
How often does this happen to you? One contract a year is a fixed fee — a review is £249 +VAT and you are done. A business signing somebody else’s paperwork most months, or fielding an employment question most quarters, is paying more per job than a plan would cost.
Do you want a document, or somewhere to ask? This is the one people get wrong. If what you need is a specific thing produced — a shareholders’ agreement, a set of terms, an employment pack — buy that thing. A subscription is for the questions in between, the ones too small to instruct anybody for and too consequential to guess at.
If you are a one-job business, we will tell you so. It costs us the larger sale and it is the only answer worth giving.
Most subscription legal services describe themselves as unlimited in some form, and the limit is always there somewhere. Sometimes it is a fair-use clause. Sometimes it is an annual allowance of hours quoted monthly. Sometimes the subscription is a discount mechanism rather than an allowance — you pay monthly for the right to pay a lower hourly rate on top, which is a perfectly reasonable model as long as you know that is what you bought.
The question to ask any provider, including us, is simple: what happens on the day I need more than the plan covers? A straight answer to that tells you more than the headline price does.
Reserved and contentious work. A live dispute, court proceedings, anything requiring rights of audience — none of that sits inside a monthly fee, here or anywhere sensible. It goes to RHF Solicitors (SRA no. 324115) at rates confirmed before that work starts.
Large defined projects. A shareholders’ agreement or a full set of terms is a piece of work with a beginning and an end, and it is priced as one. Where a plan includes setup — as Virtual HR Manager does — that is why that plan runs on a twelve-month agreement rather than month to month.
Tax and financial advice. That belongs with your accountant, and we will point you there rather than guess.
A commercial solicitor is commonly £200 to £350 +VAT an hour. That is the number every subscription is implicitly compared against, and it is why the arithmetic usually works: a plan at £249 +VAT a month costs about what one hour a month of hourly time costs, and buys considerably more than an hour of attention.
What it does not buy is a regulated law firm. Buzz Legal Ltd is not a firm of solicitors and is not regulated by the SRA, so our own work does not carry the SRA compensation fund or the Legal Ombudsman. That is a real difference and it is worth weighing rather than glossing over. The comparison with the alternatives sets out where each option genuinely fits, including the cases where a regulated firm is the right answer.
What each plan includes, what it does not, and how you start is on the subscription page. If you would rather work out where you stand first, the free legal healthcheck scores eight areas in about five minutes and tells you what actually needs fixing.
The range is wide, and it reflects genuinely different products rather than different margins. At the DIY end you are paying for a document library and the ability to ask a question. In the middle, plans buy a defined amount of a lawyer's attention or a discount on their hourly rate. At the top, a subscription is effectively a part-time in-house lawyer and is priced accordingly. Ours run at £49, £249 and £499 +VAT a month, which sits at the practical end: real documents and a person who answers, without a regulated firm's overhead attached.
It varies enough between providers that the word on its own tells you almost nothing. Ours give you somewhere to ask before you act, your core documents kept current, and from the £249 plan upward a person who reads your contracts and marks them up rather than leaving you to work from templates. The £499 Virtual HR Manager includes the employment contracts, handbook and core policies built for you. What none of them include is reserved or contentious work, or a large defined project such as a shareholders' agreement, which is priced separately as a fixed fee.
Only if the work is recurring. If you need one specific document produced, buy that document — a fixed fee is cheaper and there is nothing to cancel afterwards. A subscription earns its keep when questions arrive regularly and are individually too small to instruct anybody for: whether to sign the thing a customer has sent, whether you can let somebody go, whether a supplier's clause is normal. Those are the questions that go unasked when there is an hourly meter, and they are the ones that turn into expensive problems.
Ours are month to month, with one exception, and the exception is worth understanding rather than hidden. Virtual HR Manager at £499 +VAT a month includes Employer Essentials — the employment contracts, handbook and core policies — built for you at the start. That setup would otherwise be a fixed fee in its own right, so that plan runs on a twelve-month agreement. The other plans do not, and you can stop them. Your documents remain yours either way; leaving does not take anything back.
It goes to one, and you are told before any money is spent on it. Reserved legal activities — issuing and conducting court proceedings among them — can only be carried out by an authorised firm, and Buzz Legal is not one. For Buzz Legal clients that work goes to RHF Solicitors, authorised and regulated by the SRA under number 324115, at rates confirmed in advance rather than folded into the monthly fee. The groundwork already done under your plan goes across with it, so you are not paying a regulated firm to read in from scratch.
Virtual HR Manager at £499 +VAT a month is that plan. It is built for a business where the questions are about people rather than paperwork — whether a process is fair, what to put in writing, how to handle somebody who is not working out — and it includes the employment contracts, handbook and core policies rather than charging for them separately. If what you actually need is the documents produced once, the employment fixed fees are the cheaper route and we will say so.
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 RHF Solicitors, authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (no. 324115) — and you are told which yours is before you spend anything. How this works, in full. This site is information rather than advice on your situation.
Tell us roughly how often this happens to you — a contract most months, a staffing question most quarters, or one job you need doing now. You get an honest answer on which is cheaper, including when it is a one-off fixed fee. See the privacy policy for how we use your details.
From £49 +VAT a month.