Is Buzz Legal a law firm?
No, and that distinction has practical consequences you should understand. It is a non-reserved legal service — contracts, terms, employment paperwork, policies and dispute preparation — provided by people who do this work daily. Reserved legal activities, including conducting litigation, rights of audience, most probate work and property conveyancing, can only be carried out by an SRA-regulated firm, and those go to RHF Solicitors. It also means the SRA's protections, including the compensation fund and the Legal Ombudsman, apply to the RHF work rather than to the non-reserved work. Ask which side any given job sits on.
What does it cost?
Fixed fees for defined jobs, with the common ones published: Contract Review from £249, a Terms and Conditions package from £695, an Employment Starter Pack from £895, a Shareholder Agreement from £1,250 and HR Policies and Staff Handbook from £1,495. There are also monthly subscription plans for businesses wanting legal support on tap rather than per job, and pay-as-you-go advice where neither fits. No hourly billing, which removes the main reason people avoid ringing their lawyer until a problem is already expensive.
I found a template online. Is that good enough?
Sometimes, for something genuinely low-risk. The problem is that templates are drafted for the average case and your risk is rarely average. The clauses that decide what happens when things go wrong — liability caps, termination, payment terms and interest, intellectual property ownership, and which jurisdiction's law applies — are exactly where free templates are weakest, and often where they are copied from another country's law entirely. A contract review from £249 costs less than the first hour of a dispute. Two specific traps: IP that stays with the contractor by default, and terms that were never actually incorporated because nobody sent them before the work started.
Can you help me chase an unpaid invoice?
Yes. The sequence is: check what your terms actually allow, then a letter before action setting out the debt, statutory interest and the fixed compensation available under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts legislation. That letter resolves a good proportion of cases on its own, because it signals the matter has moved from chasing to process. If it needs to go to court, conducting litigation is reserved and it goes to RHF Solicitors. The honest caveat: a debtor with no money is a commercial problem rather than a legal one, and no letter changes that.
Is employment law included?
Contracts, policies, handbooks and process documents, yes. Tribunal representation is not — that goes down the regulated route. Getting the paperwork right first is usually what keeps a matter away from a tribunal in the first place: a written statement of particulars issued on day one as the law requires, a disciplinary and grievance procedure that follows the ACAS Code, and a documented process actually followed rather than reconstructed afterwards. Most employers who lose at tribunal do so on procedure rather than on the substance of the decision.
What happens if my issue needs a regulated solicitor?
It goes to RHF Solicitors through a direct route, rather than you starting again with a firm that knows nothing about your business. What to expect at that point: separate regulated engagement terms, that firm's own fee structure, and its own complaints procedure — a complaint about regulated work has to be handled under theirs, not ours. It is a handover to a different regulated relationship, not a continuation of the same one, and knowing that in advance is better than discovering it mid-matter. See our complaints page.
Does this apply in Northern Ireland or Scotland?
Raise it before assuming. England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are separate legal jurisdictions with different contract precedent, different employment procedure and different court systems. A shareholders' agreement or handbook drafted for England and Wales is not simply portable, and the practical risk is a document that reads correctly and does not do what you expect when tested. Where your business or your employees sit outside England and Wales, say so at the outset so the work is either drafted for the right jurisdiction or routed to a firm qualified there.
