Tools

Which one do you need?

Pick by the situation you are in rather than the area of law. An invoice has gone past due and you want to know what it is now worth: the late payment interest calculator. You employ people and are not sure what is meant to be on file: the employment documents checker. Somebody wants a contract signed and you do not know what you would be taking on: the contract risk checker. You own the company with someone else and nothing has ever been written down: the shareholder agreement readiness check.

Each answers a question that has a definite answer. The three checkers ask between nine and eleven questions; the calculator needs an amount and two dates, with the Bank of England base rate pre-filled and adjusted for the date your invoice fell due. The result appears on screen with the working underneath it, rather than as a score you have to take on trust.

Nothing is gated. You do not enter an email address to see a result — the answer appears as soon as you have finished, and emailing a copy to yourself is an option you can ignore. That is deliberate: a checker you have to pay for with your contact details is a lead form wearing a calculator's clothes.

What they cannot do is read your documents. A checker knows what you told it, so it flags the gap and explains the consequence — it does not know whether the clause you have is drafted well enough to do the job. Where the result carries real money, that is the point to have the actual wording read. The fixed-fee work page prices the common pieces: a contract review at £249 +VAT, business terms and conditions at £695, an employment starter pack at £895, a shareholders' agreement at £1,250 and HR policies with a staff handbook at £1,495, all excluding VAT. The subscription starts at £49 +VAT a month if legal questions arrive steadily rather than once. Anything else is scoped and priced in writing before work starts.

The figures behind the tools

Two of the four rest on numbers set by statute, so it is worth knowing them before you run anything. On a late commercial invoice, the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 gives you statutory interest at 8% above the Bank of England base rate where your contract does not provide a substantial remedy of its own. Base rate has been 3.75% since 18 December 2025, which puts statutory interest at 11.75% a year. On top of the interest, section 5A of the same Act gives a fixed sum for each unpaid debt: £40 where the debt is under £1,000, £70 where it is £1,000 to £9,999.99, and £100 where it is £10,000 or more. That compensation is claimable once per unpaid debt, on top of the interest, so it is worth putting on a chasing letter as its own line rather than folding it into a total.

On the employment side, the written statement of particulars under section 1 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 has to be given on or before the first day of employment, and since 6 April 2020 the duty covers workers as well as employees — so casual and zero-hours staff are entitled to one too. That single date is why the employment checker asks when your next person starts: the deadline is day one, not the end of the first month.

The other two tools deal with the law's default position rather than a rate. A contract that is silent on liability, termination or intellectual property does not fall back on something sensible; it falls back on the general law, which is often less favourable than the clause you did not negotiate. A company with no shareholders' agreement runs on the Companies Act 2006 and the model articles, which decide share transfers and deadlock on terms the owners never actually negotiated. Both checkers state the default so you can see what you are relying on.

A result is a starting point for a decision, not the decision itself. The late payment calculator gives you a number you can put in a chasing letter, and the number does the work: an invoice that has sat unpaid for four months is worth measurably more than the invoice, and saying so in writing, with the statutory basis named, changes the tone of the conversation. Add the fixed compensation as a separate line so it is visible rather than buried in a total.

The contract and employment checkers produce a list of gaps, and the useful move is to sort that list by consequence rather than by effort. An unlimited liability position on a contract you are about to sign matters more than a missing entire-agreement clause, even though the second is quicker to fix. On the employment side, a missing written statement is a day-one breach that a tribunal can add compensation for when it decides another claim, so it sits above the policies that are advisable rather than compulsory.

The shareholder check works differently again, because what it exposes is usually not a document you can produce next week. It is a conversation between the owners that has not happened yet — what occurs if one of them leaves, stops contributing, or wants to sell to someone the others do not want as a partner. Running the check is often most useful as a way of putting those questions on an agenda while everyone is still on good terms.

If a result gives you something you want dealt with rather than explained, book a free legal review and say which tool produced the list. It is a short call: you say what came out, we tell you what it would cost as fixed-fee work, and we say plainly if any of it is reserved work that has to go to RHF Solicitors instead. It is a faster conversation when the gaps are already written down.

Each tool has a guide that sets out the same ground at length — what the document does, which parts of it decide who carries the risk, and what tends to go wrong. Run the tool for the answer, read the guide when you want to understand why the answer is what it is. All eleven are on the guides index.