It depends on one thing: whether legal questions arrive regularly or once. Here is how these plans are priced, what they include, and when paying per job costs less.
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 hold off asking, and the small question becomes a large one.
What a subscription does well is remove that hesitation. It is not unlimited law for a flat fee. A provider implying otherwise is either capping it somewhere you have not read, or pricing for the average and hoping you are below it.
The range of prices is wide because the products differ, from a document library to a part-time lawyer of your own.
A document library, and the ability to ask a question.
A defined amount of a lawyer’s attention, or a discount on their hourly rate.
A part-time in-house lawyer, priced accordingly.
Most subscription legal services describe themselves as unlimited in some form, and the limit is always there somewhere.
The cap sits in the terms, and applies once your use passes what the provider calls fair.
An annual allowance of hours, quoted as a monthly price.
You pay monthly for the right to pay a lower hourly rate on top. A reasonable model, as long as you know that is what you bought.
Two questions settle it: how often the work comes up, and whether you need a document or somewhere to ask.
One contract a year is a review at £249 +VAT and you are done. The same goes for a shareholders’ agreement, a set of terms or an employment pack: a fixed fee is cheaper, and there is nothing to cancel afterwards.
Signing somebody else’s paperwork most months costs more per job than a plan. Business Legal at £249 +VAT a month is the first plan where a person reads your contracts and marks them up.
A question that comes up once is a single fixed-fee job. A one-job business has no use for a monthly plan.
The questions in between: too small to instruct anybody for, and too consequential to guess at.
A commercial solicitor is commonly £200 to £350 +VAT an hour. 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.
All +VAT.
The question to ask any providerWhat happens on the day I need more than the plan covers?
A straight answer to that tells you more than the headline price does. Ask us too.
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. Here it goes to AD Solicitors (SRA no. 8011228) at rates confirmed before that work starts. Tax and financial advice belong with your accountant.
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, outside the monthly fee.
Look for the contract length. Where a plan includes setup, as Virtual HR Manager does, that is why it runs on a twelve-month agreement. Our other two plans run month to month, and your documents stay yours when you leave.
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. That is a real difference, so weigh it. The comparison with the alternatives sets out where each option fits, including the cases where a regulated firm is the right answer.
To work out where you stand first, the free legal healthcheck scores eight areas in about five minutes and shows what needs fixing.
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) — and you are told which yours is before you spend anything. How this works, in full. For advice on your own situation, get in touch.
The range is wide, and it reflects different products. 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 a part-time in-house lawyer and is priced accordingly. Ours run at £49, £249 and £499 +VAT a month, 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 for you. 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 pays off 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. With an hourly meter running, those questions get put off, and they are the ones that turn into expensive problems.
Ours are month to month, with one exception. 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. For Buzz Legal clients that work goes to AD Solicitors, authorised and regulated by the SRA under number 8011228, at rates confirmed in advance and charged outside 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 more 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 at no extra charge. If you need the documents produced once, the employment fixed fees are the cheaper route.
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, with the first two plans cancellable at any time.
