These are the standard terms and conditions of business of TLW Solicitors.
These are the standard terms and conditions of business of TLW Solicitors.
They explain the basis of our charges, how we will act on your behalf, and cover various administrative matters. We would ask you to read these terms and conditions carefully.
TLW Solicitors is a trading name of TLW Solicitors Limited, a company incorporated in England with registered No 08392275. Our registered office is Third Floor, CAI Building, Coble Dene, North Shields, Tyne & Wear, NE29 6DE.
We use the term “partner” to refer to a director of TLW Solicitors Limited.
We are authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (‘SRA’). The SRA is the independent regulatory arm of The Law Society of England and Wales, our professional body. TLW Solicitors Limited are governed by Codes of Conduct and other professional rules which you can access on the SRA’s website at www.sra.org.uk or by calling 03706062555. Our SRA authorisation number is 823682.
The Compliance Officer for Legal Practice (“COLP”) is Peter McKenna and the Compliance Officer for Financial Administration (“COFA”) is John Burn. TLW Solicitors Limited are also registered Data Controllers with the Information Commissioner’s Office (Registration ZB344572)
During the course of your matter you may receive services from companies other than TLW Solicitors Limited which may be a separate business to TLW Solicitors Limited which is not regulated by the SRA and as such may not be covered by the SRA Compensation Fund and/or is not covered by our professional indemnity insurance.
The services we provide for any matter will be described in our retainer letter or will otherwise be agreed between us before we begin to act. The services may be varied by agreement during the course of the matter. Our services will not include advice on the tax implications of any transaction or course of action.
The address for you to contact us is:
TLW Solicitors
Third Floor, Cai Building,
Coble Dene, North Shields,
Tyne & Wear, NE29 6DE
Our office hours are 9.00am to 5.00pm, Monday to Friday, excluding bank holidays. In certain circumstances it may be possible to see a solicitor outside of these hours or alternatively to arrange for a solicitor to see you at your home or business premises. We also have a 24 hour seven days a week telephone answering service. We aim to ensure that any message left with our telephone answering service is responded to within 24 hours or next working day if later.
Unless you withdraw consent and there is no legal obligation to do so, we will communicate with you and others when appropriate by email or fax. We will use reasonable and appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure the security of correspondence and documents sent by email or fax. TLW implement reasonable and appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect against computer generated viruses.
TLW Solicitors is committed to promoting equality and diversity in all of its dealings with clients, third parties and employees. Please contact us if you would like a copy of our equality and diversity policy.
All work carried out by us to which these Terms and Conditions relate will be carried out under the overall supervision of a partner and/or senior solicitor. Individual matters will be dealt with by partners, a senior solicitor or relevant qualified and experienced personnel. The identity of the primary case handler will always be notified to you together with the identity of the supervising partner or solicitor. More than one of our personnel with appropriate qualifications and experience may be involved in your matter. Any overlap should enable your claim to be dealt with more efficiently.
We are obliged by the Solicitors Regulation Authority to have professional indemnity insurance in place. The level of cover we have in place is £3 million. The territorial coverage of this insurance is worldwide.
As the identity of our professional indemnity insurer may change from year to year in the event you require details of our current insurer these are available for you to inspect at our office or in the alternative we can provide you with these details upon request.
Our maximum liability to you in this matter will be £3 million including interest and costs unless we expressly state a different figure in our letter confirming your instructions. If you wish to discuss a variation of this limit, please contact the person dealing with this matter. Agreeing a higher limit on our liability may result in us seeking to increase our charges for handling your matter. We will not be liable for any consequential, special or exemplary damages or losses or any damages, costs or losses attributable to lost profits or opportunity.
Your contract Is solely with TLW Solicitors Limited, which has the sole legal liability for the work done for you and for any act or omission during the course of that work. No representative, director, officer, employee, agent or consultant of TLW Solicitors Limited will have any personal legal liability for any loss or claim.
Unless explicitly agreed otherwise, In writing;
We are not responsible for any failure to advise or comment on matters falling outside our Instructions as set out In these terms and conditions and/or our client care letter.
We will at all times comply with our obligations under the Solicitors Accounts Rules for the handling and deposit of money on your behalf. Client funds are placed with financial institutions of good standing. This is currently Natwest Bank Plc. We do our best to monitor those accounts where client accounts are held to assess the risk to client funds.
Where practicable and if you so request in writing, we will discuss with you the financial institution with which your funds will be deposited in order to maximise your opportunity to benefit from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (“FSCS”).
The FSCS is the UK’s statutory fund of last resort for customers of banking institutions. The FSCS can pay compensation up to £85,000 if a banking institution is unable, or likely to be unable, to pay claims against it.
The limit is £85,000 per banking institution. If you hold other personal money in the same banking institution as our client account[s], the limit remains £85,000 in total.
Some banking institutions have several brands. The compensation limit is £85,000 per institution, not per brand. You should check with your banking institution, the FCA or a financial advisor for more information.
The FSCS also provides up to £1m of short-term protection for certain high balances, eg relating to property transactions, inheritance, divorce or dissolution of a civil partnership, unfair dismissal, redundancy and personal injury compensation (there is no financial limit on protection for personal injury compensation). This is called the temporary high balance scheme and, if it applies, protection lasts for a maximum of six months.
The FSCS (including the temporary high balance scheme) will apply to qualifying balances held in our client account. In the unlikely event of a deposit-taking institution failure, we will presume (unless we hear from you in writing to the contrary) we have your consent to disclose necessary client details to the FSCS.
Please let us know if you would like us to explain any of the above terms above.
We will discuss with you how to fund your claim, including eligibility for public funding assistance (formerly known as Legal Aid). You should always check to see whether you qualify for any legal assistance, for instance under a home or vehicle insurance policy or union membership.
(a) Conditional Fee Agreements
It is very often the case that we would be prepared to act on your behalf on the basis of a conditional fee agreement also known as a No Win No Fee Agreement. If so, the terms and conditions of that conditional fee agreement will be explained to you separately and you will be provided with a copy of the conditional fee agreement. In so far as the terms of a conditional fee agreement are inconsistent with these terms and conditions the terms of a conditional fee agreement will displace these terms and conditions.
(b) Time Charging
The method of charging for all other work undertaken by us will normally be based on the hourly rates set out below for our personnel applied to the time spent on your matter. These rates do not include VAT which will be added to the bill. These rates are reviewed annually.
In addition to the time spent, our fees may also take into account a number of other factors. These include the complexity of the issues, the speed at which the action must be taken, the expertise or specialist knowledge which the matter requires and if appropriate, the value of the subject matter involved.
Whether or not a matter proceeds to completion, we will charge you for work done and expenses incurred unless otherwise agreed. You have the right to challenge or complain about any bill we send you and apply for an assessment of the bill under part Ⅲ of the Solicitors Act 1974. We may charge interest on all or part of any bill that is unpaid.
From 1st July 2022 our charging rate is £295.00 per hour to which V.A.T at the applicable rate will be added.
These rates are subject to review each year and we will inform you in writing of any future change of rates.
Where possible we will give you an estimate of the likely overall fees in relation to a matter. lf we are unable to give you an estimate we will explain why. Unless our retainer letter provides otherwise any estimate or quotation of fees does not amount to a promise or agreement that we will perform our services within a fixed time or for a fixed fee.
We will notify you if any estimate of time and/or fees we have given you needs to be revised either because of unforeseen additional work becomes necessary or because your requirements or the circumstances have changed.
It may also be necessary to make outlays to others necessary to pursue your claim, such as experts or the Court. We call these outlays disbursements.
In a claim these are the typical disbursements or expenses that we may incur on your behalf:
Personal Injury
GP records……………………………………………£50.00
Hospital records………………………………..…….£50.00
Medical report……….………………………… £250-£750
Court Fees
Court issue fees……………………………………. £225.00
Allocation fees ……………………………………… £100.00
Listing questionnaire………………………………. £500.00
Property Damage
Motor engineers report …………………………£80-£100
Consultant engineer report……………………£500-£1000
Barristers Fees
Opinion on liability quantum…………… £250 – £500
Advocacy fees at trial………………… £100- £1,500
We reserve the right to charge and retain any interest recovered on account of costs and disbursements from any party.
The legal services we provide to you are subject to VAT. TLW Solicitors Limited are registered for VAT. Our VAT registration number is 417286683 The rate charged to V.A.T is 20% but is subject to any government amendments in this regard. Under current HM Revenue & Customs regulations, if you are a company, business or individual who is registered for VAT, you are responsible for any VAT on your legal costs. This is not refundable from the person or body at fault and as such we will submit to you a VAT account payment. You will be able to recover VAT payable in your VAT return. (If applicable)
For certain types of personal injury cases the amount of legal fees which you are entitled to recover is fixed by the Civil Procedure Rules. In the event that that amount is greater than the fees that would otherwise be due to be paid by you under these terms and conditions you hereby agree that the amount of your liability for legal fees to this firm will be the amount of costs payable under the fixed cost/predictive/protocol costs regime.
In accordance with the SRA Accounts Rules 2011 this firm operates an interest policy which will be applied in order to achieve a fair and reasonable outcome to you. Any money received on your behalf will be held in our client account. Money is normally held for a client as a necessary but incidental part of the retainer with the firm to facilitate your instructions usually by way of an instant access account.
The main purpose of the rules is to keep that money safe and available for the purpose for which it was provided. The rules also seek to provide for the payment of a fair sum of interest, where appropriate, which is unlikely to be as high as that obtainable by a client depositing those funds personally.
In the event we hold money on your behalf either in our general client account or separate designated deposit account we will account to you for interest unless the amount of interest payable to you is £20.00 or less. If the amount of interest payable is greater than £20.00, interest will be paid to you at the prevailing rate of interest received by the firm for the relevant account for the period we held money on your behalf.
The period during which we will account to you for interest will be for the period we hold cleared funds and so will be dependent on the nature and method that funds are received by us and paid out (for example cash, cheque, telegraphic transfer). The payment of interest will be made on conclusion of your matter unless agreed otherwise.
In the event you or we wish to contract out of this policy due to the nature and size of the transaction involved this will be evidenced in writing between us and any other agreement will be subject to achieving a fair and reasonable outcome. This policy will be subject to review on an annual basis and any amendments will take into account the prevailing rate of interest received at the relevant time.
Our practice policy is only to accept cash from clients up to £250.00. If you try and avoid this by depositing cash directly with our bank, we may decide to charge you for any additional checks we decide are necessary to prove the source of the funds. Where we have to pay money to you, it will be paid by cheque or bank transfer. It will not be paid in cash or to a third party unless we agree otherwise.
We are not authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority. However, 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 Solicitors Regulation Authority. The register can be accessed via the Financial Conduct Authority website at www.fca.org.uk/firms/financial-services-register.
The Law Society of England and Wales is a designated professional body for the purposes of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 but the responsibility for regulation and complaints handling has been separated from the Law Society’s representative functions. The Solicitors Regulation Authority is the independent regulatory body of the Law Society and the Legal Ombudsman Service is the independent complaints handling body of the Law Society. If you are unhappy with any insurance advice you receive from us, you should raise your concerns with either the Solicitors Regulation Authority or the Legal Ombudsman Service.
We are not authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority. If, while we are acting for you, you need advice on investments, we may recommend the services of someone else who is authorised to provide the necessary advice. We make any such recommendation in good faith and this shall be the sole extent of our liability with regard to the recommendation in question.
Solicitors must keep the affairs of clients confidential except where disclosure is required or permitted by law or authorised by you, our client.
Recent legislation on money laundering and terrorist financing has placed solicitors under a legal duty in certain circumstances to disclose information to the National Crime Agency. Where a solicitor knows or suspects that a transaction on behalf of a client involves money laundering or terrorist financing, we may be required to make a money laundering disclosure. If this happens, we may not be able to tell you a disclosure has been made. We may have to stop working on your matter for a period of time and may not be able to tell you why.
We use the information you provide primarily for the provision of legal services to you and for related purposes including:
Our use of that information is subject to your instructions, the Data Protection Act 2018 and our duty of confidentiality. Please note that our work for you may require us to give information to third parties such as expert witnesses and other professional advisers. You have a right of access under data protection legislation to the personal data we hold about you.
By instructing us to act on your behalf you give your explicit consent to the storage, processing and use of personal data and sensitive personal data and the possible transfer of data outside the United Kingdom, providing the organisation receiving the personal data has provided adequate safeguards, your rights are enforceable and effective legal remedies for you are available following the transfer.
Under the terms of our agreement with certain work referrers, After the Event Insurers and/or their agents we may be required to provide information to them concerning your claim. These circumstances may include, but are not limited to: where there has been a material change of fact that is likely to affect the prospects of success of your claim; if the defendant makes an offer to settle your claim or if Court proceedings are commenced and/or at the conclusion of your claim. Furthermore, access to your file by third parties may be required for file audit purposes. Our work for you may also require us to disclose information to third parties such as medical agencies, experts, witnesses and other professional advisers during the course of your claim. By continuing to instruct us you agree to us disclosing information and allowing access to your file as and when required throughout the course of your claim.
Sometimes we may ask other companies or people to assist us with tasks such as photocopying or other work on our files to ensure this is done promptly. We will always seek a confidentiality agreement with these outsourced providers. The contract between TLW Solicitors Limited and any company that we outsource work to will include as a minimum the following terms, requiring the company to: only act on our written instructions, ensure that people are subject to a duty of confidence, take appropriate measures to ensure the security of any documentation etc., assist TLW Solicitors Limited in meeting its GDPR obligations in relation to the security of personal data, the notification of personal data breaches and data protection impact assessments, delete or return all personal data to the controller as requested at the end of the contract.
lf you do not want your file to be outsourced please tell us as soon as possible.
(Information, Cancellation And Additional Charges)
In the event we have not met with you at our premises and you are an individual acting for purposes which are wholly or mainly outside their trade, business, craft or profession the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 may apply to your contract with us. Further details of your right to cancel, effects of cancellation and asking us to start work during the cancellation period are contained within our client care letter.
The directors and staff of TLW Solicitors Limited are committed to bringing your claim to as speedy and successful a conclusion as possible. Unfortunately, it is in the nature of civil law/compensation claims that delays and other problems will arise, normally through no fault whatsoever on our part. However, in order to provide you with as efficient a service as possible we have set up a review procedure. If at any stage throughout your case you are unhappy about the service you have received or about a bill you have received from us and wish to make a complaint, please take advantage of our review procedure.
The first step to take is to discuss fully with the solicitor or staff member dealing with your case any matter which is troubling you or causing you any concern and he or she will seek to deal with it immediately and provide you will a full explanation of the position.
If you remain unhappy your problem can be referred in the first instance to Mr Peter McKenna, a partner in the firm. If you would like to speak to Mr McKenna, please telephone the office and ask to speak to him. If you remain unhappy with the position then the matter can be referred to the firm‘s senior partner, Mr John Burn who will be happy to discuss the matter with you. In the event that Mr McKenna or Mr Burn are actually dealing with your case then the matter will be referred to the respective partner not dealing with the case.
If for any reason we are unable to resolve the problem between us you can contact the Legal Ombudsman at:-
PO Box 6806,
Wolverhampton, WV1 9WJ.
Tel: 0300 555 0333
email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk
Website: www.legalombudsman.org.uk
The Legal Ombudsman expects complaints to be made to them; (a) within six months of receiving a final written response to your complaint ; and (b) no more than one year from the date of the act/omission you are concerned about ; or (c) no more than one year from when you should reasonably have known there was cause for complaint.
Depending on your individual status, some clients may not have the right to complain to the Legal Ombudsman, for example most businesses (unless defined as a micro enterprise), charities or clubs with an annual income of more than £1 million or trustees of a trust with an asset value of more than £1 million. However, even if you are a client who does not have the right to complain to the Legal Ombudsman you will still be able to take advantage of our review procedure and/or right to assessment of any bill.
We hope that you will never have to make use of our review procedures, but please be aware of its existence as it is intended to be of assistance to you and to offer you the highest possible level of service.
Any dispute or legal issue arising from our terms of business will be determined by the law of England and Wales, and considered exclusively by the English and Welsh courts.
Please be aware of the following circumstances when you will become immediately liable for our fees and disbursements:
In the event you become liable to pay our fees and disbursements we have the right to withhold access to your file of papers until our fees and disbursements are settled. We may also charge you interest on all, or part of any bill that is unpaid. You may end your instructions to us at any time in writing. In the event of your death, we may decide to terminate our retainer or alternatively continue the matter in conjunction with agreement from the personal representatives of your estate. We may decide to stop acting for you only with good reason. We must give you reasonable notice that we will stop acting for you. We are not responsible for reminding you about important dates and/or any deadlines after our appointment has been terminated.
Sometimes actual or potential conflicts between your interests and the interests of another client of the firm may arise during the course of your claim. If this is the case, we will discuss with you and determine the appropriate course of action. Professional conduct rules may require us to stop acting for you on that particular matter. Depending on the circumstances and unless otherwise agreed in writing, we reserve the right to act on behalf of another client (and not for you) in a matter in which you are an interested party. If you/the personal representatives of your estate or we decide that we should stop acting for you, you will pay our charges up to that point. These are calculated as set out in these terms and conditions or as may be revised from time to time.
At the conclusion of your claim we will proceed to store your file or papers usually for a period of at least 6 years on the understanding that unless there is good reason not to do so we will proceed to destroy your file. As part of our file closure process we will normally return original documents you have sent us during the course of your claim.
Due to the nature of the archiving and storage process we may be charged a fee of up to £10.00 plus VAT to recover your file of papers from our archive facility. This fee is subject to change over time. If you require access to your papers once your file has been closed you will be responsible for the cost of retrieving your file from our archives. In the event we are also required to carry out any further work on your file such as reading correspondence, photocopying documents or carrying out any other necessary work we reserve the right to charge you on a time spent basis at the prevailing hourly rate when the review work is carried out. We may also pass on to you any delivery charges we incur in producing stored papers or documents to you or someone else at your request.
The electronic file may be maintained beyond the time of our physical file destruction policy. However, this may not constitute a representation of your complete file.
Any dispute or legal issue arising out of our terms and conditions will be determined by the law of England and Wales and considered exclusively by English and Welsh courts.
Unless otherwise agreed these Terms and Conditions will apply to all future instructions you give us on this or any other matter.