These terms, together with our engagement letter, form the agreement under which we provide legal services to you. Please read them carefully.
These terms, together with our engagement letter to you, form our agreement with you to provide legal services. These terms apply to each matter we work on with you. If there is a conflict between these terms and our engagement letter, these terms will prevail, unless the engagement letter expressly overrides them.
We can change these terms in response to legal, regulatory and technological changes, and any other situation which may reasonably require us to change these terms, and we may increase our hourly rates. If we do so, we’ll notify you and you can contact us to terminate your instructions before the changes take effect.
If you are an individual who is not instructing us in connection with your business, you may have a legal right to cancel our agreement with you and receive a refund of any sums you have paid us in advance. Where this applies you may use the form found at the back of these terms. You are likely to have these rights if we take instructions from you outside of our offices or at a distance, for example online or over the telephone. Your right to cancel expires 14 days after our agreement is made and if you request us to start work during that period you will have to pay us for any work we do up until you cancel. Work which we start at your request during the cancellation period cannot be cancelled once completed, even if the cancellation period is still running.
We only advise on matters within the scope of your instructions, as set out in our engagement letter. Unless your engagement letter clearly says otherwise, we will not advise you on the financial or tax aspects of any matter, on your wider tax or financial interests, on the law of jurisdictions outside of England and Wales, or on accounting and commercial issues (including on the viability and prudence of this matter), even if a relevant issue arises during the course of our work together. You may wish to seek separate specialist advice on these matters.
We do not provide tax advice in relation to your conveyancing transaction. You remain responsible for all tax liabilities and filings, and you should obtain independent advice from a suitably qualified tax adviser or accountant. By way of example only (and not exhaustively), we do not advise on: the incidence, calculation or mitigation of Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) in England (including first-time buyer relief, multiple dwellings relief, mixed-use or subsidiary dwellings, linked transactions, or the higher rates for additional dwellings), Land Transaction Tax in Wales or Land and Buildings Transaction Tax in Scotland; Capital Gains Tax (including principal private residence relief and non-resident CGT); income tax on rental properties; inheritance-tax implications or estate planning; VAT (including the option to tax, transfers of a going concern, and new-builds/conversions); the Annual Tax on Enveloped Dwellings (ATED); or any corporate or partnership tax consequences. Any assistance we provide in preparing or submitting an SDLT/LTT/LBTT return is an administrative form-completion service only, based solely on information you supply, and must not be relied upon as tax advice.
Our advice is intended solely for you. We do not accept or assume responsibility to anyone other than the clients identified in our engagement letter. Unless we agree otherwise in writing, you must not share our advice with anyone else.
We may instruct third parties (such as barristers, expert witnesses, enquiry agents, search providers, estate agents and any other provider) reasonably required to provide services to you. You are responsible for the sums charged by third parties and their services are provided to you on their terms. We use reasonable skill and care in selecting and appointing third parties.
If our services to you are delayed by an event outside our control, we will contact you as soon as possible to let you know and do what we can to reduce the delay.
For convenience and speed, we will correspond with you by email and rely on communications coming from your email account. However, email is inherently insecure. We are not responsible for loss or damage caused by email use, provided we have taken reasonable security measures, including against viruses or similar harmful items. In any event, we will not accept any emailed instructions from you to alter your banking details or instructions on where money should be sent.
Our filtering software may prevent us receiving emails from you or in relation to your matter and we are not responsible to you for losses resulting from this.
We are normally open between 9.00am and 5.00pm Monday to Friday, except for bank holidays. Our staff may sometimes respond to communications and work outside of our normal office hours, but this is at our discretion, and we ask you to respect that there will be times when we are not available.
We may give advice and information to, and act on instructions from, any of the individuals to whom our engagement letter is addressed without the need to copy such advice to, or to confirm such instructions with, the other(s). You can let us know in writing that we are authorised to deal with someone else on your behalf in this way. For organisations, rather than individuals, we can ask for a formal resolution confirming who can instruct us.
As a firm, we wish to support and promote equality and diversity. If it would assist you for our services to be delivered in a different way, please let us know and we will investigate how we can help.
Our fees for our services in your legal matter are calculated either on the basis of time spent or on a fixed, capped basis and may be staged, as set out in the matter engagement letter we have sent you.
If our fees are calculated on a time spent basis:
| Fee Earner Level | Hourly Rate |
|---|---|
| Solicitors and legal executives with over 8 years’ experience | £355.00 |
| Solicitors and legal executives with over 4 years’ experience | £318.00 |
| Other solicitors or legal executives and fee earners of equivalent experience | £277.00 |
| Trainee solicitors, paralegals and other fee earners | £226.00 |
If we have agreed a fixed or capped fee with you:
All hourly rates, estimates, fixed, capped or staged fees we quote to you are exclusive of the following, which you must pay in addition:
We normally hold some money from you as security against non-payment of our charges (fees, disbursements and expenses) until a matter is concluded. We can require you to pay an appropriate amount on account before we start work and to top it up from time to time. We are not obliged to use such money to pay our bills, but we can do so.
We invoice you regularly and on completion of your matter or at the intervals indicated in your engagement letter. We may raise an interim statute invoice. Statute invoices are final for the period they cover and your rights to challenge them are time limited. All statute invoices (whether interim or final) will be marked accordingly.
We can invoice you for disbursements and expenses for any period at any time, even after we have invoiced our fees for that period.
Our bills are payable when you receive them. We charge interest on unpaid bills at a rate of 6% above the Bank of England’s base rate. Interest will begin to run before securing judgment.
Even if someone else has agreed or been ordered to pay our charges (fees, disbursements and expenses), or you expect this to happen, you are still responsible for paying us. This includes where you are claiming back part or all of our charges from an opponent in litigation.
If we are instructed by more than one person, then we can require any of those persons to pay our bills in full (joint and several liability).
To complain about an invoice, please follow our complaints procedure (see paragraph 13). You can also ask the court to assess our bill of costs under Part III of the Solicitors Act 1974, subject to certain time limits and conditions.
We may hold money on your behalf in our client account at Barclays. We are not responsible for any loss resulting from the failure of any bank. Our client account is in England and Wales and is covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS). The FSCS only covers a maximum of £85,000 held by you in BARCLAYS PLC, whether within our client account or otherwise and eligibility conditions apply. For more information visit the FSCS website at fscs.org.uk.
We pay you interest on your money held in our client account as follows:
Nothing in these terms limits any liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or any liability that cannot legally be limited. Where you are an individual who is not instructing us in connection with your business (a consumer) and the matter is contentious (it involves a dispute with a third party), we do not exclude our liability to you for our negligence.
Subject to paragraph 9.1, if you are a business, we will not be liable to you, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), for breach of statutory duty or otherwise, arising under or in connection with this agreement for any indirect or consequential loss.
Subject to paragraph 9.1, we will not be liable to you, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), for breach of statutory duty or otherwise, arising under or in connection with this agreement for any loss arising as a result of:
Subject to paragraph 9.1, our liability to you shall be reduced to the extent we can prove that you would have been able to recover a contribution pursuant to the Civil Liability (Contribution) Act 1978 from another adviser on the same matter. That contribution shall be assessed on the basis that the advisers contracted with you on broadly the same terms as we have, did not exclude or limit their liability to you, and were able to pay the sums due to you in full.
We may agree with you a liability cap for any given matter. This will ordinarily be agreed in our engagement letter before beginning work on the relevant matter. We will not cap our liability below the minimum amount of the professional indemnity insurance cover solicitors must have in place to insure against mistakes, currently £3 million. Where a liability cap is agreed, it will apply to our aggregate liability to both you and to any other client for whom we are instructed in that matter. Subject to paragraph 9.1, the cap will apply whether the liability arose in contract, tort (including negligence), for breach of statutory duty or otherwise and whether it arises under or in connection with this agreement.
Services are provided by our staff for and on behalf of our law firm. Our staff do not assume any personal responsibility to our clients in relation to work carried out under these terms and any personal liability of any member of staff is therefore excluded. Any claims against our firm should be brought against the firm as a Limited company. You agree not to bring any claim (including in negligence) against any employee or member of our staff including principals (that is partners, members or directors) as individuals in their personal capacity in connection with any loss or damage suffered in connection with our services. If you do bring a claim against any of our staff, they can rely on our agreement, including its limitations of liability.
You may terminate your instructions to us at any time by telling us in writing. We can also stop acting for you, if we have reasonable grounds to do so, for example because you have broken our agreement by not giving us timely instructions or paying our invoices on time. We can also stop acting for you if the solicitor-client relationship of trust and confidence has broken down, if we discover a conflict of interest, if to proceed would otherwise be contrary to legal or regulatory duties, if the risk profile for your case has significantly changed or if you experience an insolvency event. We will write to you explaining our decision, giving you as much notice as possible.
If you terminate your instructions or we stop acting for you, you must pay our charges (fees, disbursements and expenses) incurred up to the point of termination, as well as any charges we incur after termination, for example in transferring your file to another adviser or removing ourselves from the court record.
If you do not pay our invoices on time, we can retain documents, deeds and other items relating to any matter we are working on for you until you have done so (subject to such information that may be available to you under data protection laws). This is called exercising a lien over the items.
We retain all intellectual property rights in the advice which we provide and the documents which we prepare, but permit you to make use of such work for the purposes of your particular matter only.
When your matter completes or we stop acting for you, unless you request the return of any documents you have supplied to us, we will retain them for as long as we deem necessary for legal and regulatory reasons and then destroy them.
Simply Move is a trading name of BPLS Group Limited, a private limited company registered in England and Wales with company number 16508264. Our registered office is at 19–21 North End Road, London, England, W14 8ST. We may from time to time use the word “partner” to refer to a senior staff member but this does not mean that they are necessarily a director of the company. Our VAT number is [VAT NUMBER].
We are a firm of solicitors authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) and our legal services under this agreement are regulated by the SRA. Our SRA number is 8013123. You can find out more about the SRA and view the professional rules which apply to us on the SRA website.
As solicitors regulated by the SRA, we are able to provide certain financial services incidental to our legal work. We are included on the register maintained by the Financial Conduct Authority so that we can carry on insurance distribution activity, which is broadly the advising on, selling and administration of insurance contracts. This part of our business, including arrangements for complaints or redress if something goes wrong, is regulated by the SRA. The register can be accessed via the Financial Conduct Authority website at fca.org.uk/firms/financial-services-register. Further information will be provided to you in advance of any such work on our part, including providing you with a statement of demands and needs.
As required by our professional rules, we maintain professional indemnity insurance to protect clients in the unlikely event of a mistake being made in a case. We are insured by [INSURER NAME] with a limit of £3,000,000 for advice given under English law. Contact details and further details of our professional indemnity insurers are available on request from the individual handling your case.
The SRA Compensation Fund provides certain protection if a solicitor fails to pay money owed to a client or is dishonest. We do not anticipate any such problems arising in your matter but if you would like to learn more about the SRA Compensation Fund you can do so on the SRA website at sra.org.uk/consumers/compensation-fund.
We hope that you are happy with the service we provide. If at any stage you have concerns or wish to make a complaint, inform the person handling your matter straight away about the nature of your concern. If you do not feel comfortable speaking with the individual handling your matter, then you can contact info@simplymove.uk and ask for the matter to be looked at by a manager. If the person handling your matter cannot promptly resolve your concerns, then it will be dealt with as a formal complaint under our complaints policy (see our website for a copy of this policy). This process involves an investigation of the concerns by a senior member of our firm. We will then write to you within eight weeks setting out our final response to the complaint and how you can pursue your concerns further if you do not agree with our proposed resolution or outcome.
Alternative dispute resolution bodies such as Ombudsman Services, ProMediate and Small Claims Mediation can deal with complaints about legal services. If we agree to use such a scheme, we will inform you when notifying you of our final response to your complaint.
Consumers and smaller organisations may be entitled to complain to the Legal Ombudsman about our service if they remain dissatisfied. The Ombudsman would generally expect clients to follow a firm’s internal complaints procedure first. The Legal Ombudsman may exercise discretion to consider complaints out of time in certain circumstances. However, complaints to the Ombudsman should normally be made within six months of receiving our final response to your complaint and no more than one year from the date when the problem arose or, if you were not initially aware of the problem, within one year of the date when you should reasonably have known that there was cause for complaint.
Legal Ombudsman contact:
Website: legalombudsman.org.uk
Address: PO Box 6167, Slough, SL1 0EH
Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk
Phone: 0300 555 0333
The Legal Ombudsman deals with concerns about the level of service which a client has received. Clients can report suspected professional misconduct to the SRA. Examples of professional misconduct include dishonesty, taking or losing your money or treating you unfairly because of your age, a disability or other characteristic. You can find out how to do this at sra.org.uk/consumers/problems.
We will keep confidential information we obtain through our services confidential, but we reserve the right to use and disclose it to:
For information about how we deal with your personal information, see our Privacy Policy as published on our website.
In some cases, we may hold more sensitive information about an individual such as about health. This may be necessary to pursue your legal matter. We are permitted to use such information to provide legal advice to you or in connection with equality legislation.
You can withdraw consent to your information being used in a particular way, but this may limit what more we can do for you (if anything).
As a client we may in the future send you a newsletter or similar. We find that most clients find this helpful. We rely on the legitimate interest we have in maintaining contact with former clients to do this in compliance with data protection law and your agreement for the purposes of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (which can be implied under these regulations). However, we will never share your information with third parties to market to you and will not contact you about non-legal services. We will make it quick and easy for you to opt out of future communications in every communication we send. If you already know that you do not want to receive these messages you can opt out now by emailing us at info@simplymove.uk.
Your information may be kept on computer servers within the UK or the European Union. If at any point information is stored on computer servers outside of the UK or the EU, we will have selected countries which are either approved for this purpose under relevant data protection legislation or are located where we are happy that the safeguards in place in that country to protect your information are appropriate under such legislation.
Generally speaking we will not share your information with third parties unless this is part of the work on your legal matter. For example, lawyers frequently may need to send certain information about clients to other lawyers working on the matter, to court or to government bodies. In rare circumstances we sometimes need to make reports of suspicious activity to the National Crime Agency. We also work with some trusted contractors or consultants who may have access to your information, such as service providers or copiers. All contractors have a contract with us which requires that your information be accessed appropriately and kept confidential (among other data protection requirements). Similarly, we may occasionally need to share client matter information with our professional indemnity insurers and their advisers. If you instruct us jointly with another client it will be necessary to share certain information relevant to you with the corresponding joint client in order to fulfil your instructions to us.
While we reserve the right to destroy non-original material at any time after the conclusion of your matter, we generally retain files for a period of six years after payment of the final bill and destroy them thereafter. At the end of a case, original documents will be returned to you. We will also always keep a small amount of information after file closure to do conflicts of interest searches in the future to comply with our professional duties.
Our general contact details are set out in our covering letter and the contact details for our information officer can be found on our website. Contact this individual if you want to exercise one of your data protection rights and in particular if you:
While we are regulated as a firm of solicitors by the SRA, if you have a complaint about how your personal information is being used which we have not been able to address you may also be able to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) directly. You can learn more about the ICO and personal data rights from the ICO’s website.
As a firm of solicitors, we must comply with different legal and regulatory requirements aimed at preventing crime. You agree to co-operate with us in order to verify your identity, your business structure, organisation history and sources of income, wealth and funds, and other matters relevant to discharging our legal and professional duties in this respect. This may include attending our offices with identification and other documentation for verification, but could also involve disclosure of more personal information such as bank statements and evidence of income. If it is not possible to attend our offices, lawful alternatives will be considered with you. We may check your credit rating.
If we have to report information about you or your matter to the National Crime Agency we may be prevented by law from informing you of this fact. If this happens we can stop work on your matter and withhold your money without notice or explanation to you, until the issue is resolved.
Strict limits apply to how we operate our client account (used to hold money on a client’s behalf in connection with a legal transaction). We do not accept cash. We cannot offer a banking facility and there are limits on how funds can be paid into and out of our client account.
This contract is between you and us. Other than our staff (see paragraph 9.6), nobody else has rights under it or can enforce it. Neither of us will need to ask anybody else to sign-off on ending or changing it.
If a court or other authority decides that some of these terms are unlawful, the rest will continue to apply.
These terms are governed by English law and you can bring claims against us in the English courts. If you live in Scotland, you can bring claims in either the Scottish or the English courts. If you live in Northern Ireland, you can bring claims in either the Northern Irish or the English courts.
Our team is happy to talk through anything in this document before you instruct us.
