TERMS & CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS
INTRODUCTION
All work carried out by Ackland & Co (also referred to as "we" or "us") for you as our client is subject to these terms and conditions of business, except to the extent that any changes are expressly agreed with you in writing.
1. ACKLAND & CO
Ackland & Co Solicitors are authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) under SRA Number 282115.
We must comply with the SRA’s requirements in force from time to time including the SRA Standards and Regulations and related Codes of Conduct 2019 and the SRA Accounts Rules 2019. Further information on the current SRA Standards & Regulations can be found on their website:
https://www.sra.org.uk/consumers/who-we-are/sra-regulate/
2. PLACE AND HOURS OF BUSINESS
Our offices are located at 68 Llandaff Road, Canton, Cardiff, CF11 9NL
Our usual office hours are between 09:00 and 17:00 Monday to Friday.
We are happy to offer appointments by prior arrangement between 09.30 and 16.30 Monday to Friday.
The office is normally closed on Bank Holidays and also between Boxing Day and New Year’s Day.
3. COMMUNICATION
We welcome telephone enquiries and endeavour to accept calls when they are made, unless the person to whom the call is directed is engaged. In that case, we endeavour to return telephone calls the same working day or, if that is not possible, the following working day.
We endeavour to acknowledge email correspondence by not later than the next working day after it has been received.
We endeavour to reply to all correspondence within 5 working days of receipt.
It is not always possible to respond within the abovementioned time frames, but we strive to do so.
We will not provide our bank details by email and will not change our bank details during the course of any transaction. If you receive an email that appears to be from us either providing bank details or asking you to make a payment to any new bank account that we have not previously supplied you information for, please telephone us immediately as there is a high possibility this will be a criminal attempt to defraud you of money.
4. SCOPE OF OUR SERVICES
When you give us instructions, we will send you an engagement letter acknowledging your instructions.
That letter will also refer to certain matters which we are obliged to mention for compliance purposes.
The letter will need to be read and considered in conjunction with this Terms of Business document and any other correspondence indicating our professional fees.
All of this provides for the terms of what we have agreed between us.
5. AUTHORITY TO GIVE INSTRUCTIONS
Instructions may be provided in person orally, by telephone orally, in correspondence or by electronic correspondence.
We will act upon your instructions, but we may require written confirmation of oral instructions first, depending upon the nature of those instructions.
We will accept instructions from you personally.
We would accept instructions from others on your behalf only if they are legally empowered to provide instructions.
If you are a Company, unless advised to the contrary, we may accept instructions from any authorised officer of the Company.
6. FEES AND OTHER CHARGES
Our fees and charges will be calculated on the basis set out in our correspondence with you.
We are VAT registered which means we must charge VAT, at the prevailing rate of 20 %, on our fees.
By way of illustration, if our fee is £500, the VAT would be £100 which means our invoice total would be £600.
Our VAT Number is 712 868919.
Our fees for some types of work are fixed. For other areas of legal work, fees are calculated on a time expended basis by applying an hourly rate for that time.
Time is charged in units of 6 minutes.
Short phone calls and routine outgoing emails and letters sent and received are normally recorded as a single unit and all other work is recorded in units of 6 minutes.
We review our rates for this type of work, not less than annually or otherwise upon a change in the fee earner representing you.
This is because work undertaken by a more experienced solicitor or fee earner on your behalf might be charged out at a higher rate than work undertaken by a less experienced solicitor or fee earner.
Of course, the same principle would apply also if conduct of your case is taken over by a less experienced solicitor or fee earner.
If we amend our rates we will notify you of the changes and the revised rates would take effect from a date to be agreed with you.
In addition to incurring legal fees, it is sometimes necessary to incur expenses and other unavoidable costs, which solicitors often call disbursements
For conveyancing cases, the disbursements are normally Land Registry fees to obtain up to date title deeds, a bank charge for transmitting funds, Local authority and miscellaneous search fees, Stamp Duty Land tax (known as Land Transaction tax in Wales) and Land Registration fees.
Normally, we require you to cover those fees shortly before completion of the transaction.
For litigation cases, we ask you to fund any disbursements shortly before they are to be incurred.
Typically, the disbursements can be Court fees, barrister’s fees and fees charged by experts. These fees can be expensive and ordinarily we would not incur this cost without first obtaining your authority.
7. BILLING AND PAYMENT TERMS
For conveyancing work, we normally ask for payment on or shortly before completion.
Payment must be made by bank transfer and we must be in receipt of cleared funds by not later than the close of business the day before completion of the transaction.
For non-conveyancing work, we normally bill all outstanding fees and disbursements/expenses on a 3-monthly basis.
A breakdown of any invoice will be provided on request.
We normally require payment of our invoice in full within 30 days of date of presentation of our invoice.
Payment can be made by bank transfer or cheque.
We do not accept payment in cash. If you deposit cash direct into our bank account, we reserve the right to charge you for any additional checks we consider necessary regarding the source of the funds.
We reserve the right to terminate our retainer and charge interest if our invoice is not paid within the 30-day time period.
Our invoices must be paid without any deduction or set off for any reason.
You are entitled to object to a bill via our complaints procedure and/or by making a complaint to the Legal Ombudsman and/or by applying to the Court for an assessment of the bill under the Solicitors’ Act 1974.
8. SOURCE OF FUNDS
At the start of any matter, we will normally ask you to tell us the source of any funds you may be using. It is simpler if the source is in an account, in your name, in a UK bank or building society. If the source is an unusual one, such as an account in another country or in the name of someone other than yourself, please tell us as early as possible, including the reason. If monies are paid into the firm’s account without our knowledge, this is likely to delay the transaction and you may incur additional fees.
We will usually ask you to provide us with bank statements for this.
9. DESTINATION OF FUNDS
Where we have to pay money out to you, we would normally do so by cheque in your favour, or into an account in your name. If instead you wish us to pay surplus money out into the name of someone other than yourself, please tell us as early as possible, including the reason.
10. YOUR MONEY & OUR INTEREST POLICY
Ordinarily and unless agreed otherwise, any money we might hold for you will be deposited in our client bank account in a clearing bank in accordance with the requirements of the Solicitors Regulation Authority Accounts Rules.
Lloyds Bank plc are our bankers.
If we hold money on your behalf for more than 28 days, unless we have agreed otherwise, or unless the amount of interest payable does not exceed £120 (in which case interest is not payable to you), we will account to you for interest on those monies. The rate on which we calculate the interest may vary but presently stands at a rate of 0.3 % per annum. When interest is payable, we would charge a fee of £100 plus VAT for calculating the amount of interest payable and processing payment. This fee is deductible from the amount of interest payable. Depending upon method of payment, the bank may charge a fee of £10 to process a funds transfer. This cost is also deductible from the interest payable. It is your responsibility to take advice in respect of any personal tax liability arising from receipt of interest monies.
There are certain circumstances when we can offer to pay money into a separate designated Client Account ("SDCA").
In such event, we would discuss this option and the potential benefits of so doing with you before seeking your instructions.
Please be advised that monies not held for a specific purpose may be utilised to pay any outstanding legal fees.
11. MONEY LAUNDERING, PROCEEDS OF CRIME AND COMBATING THE FINANCING OF TERRORISM
Money laundering and associated regulations place certain strict obligations upon solicitors.
These obligations require us to verify your identity and the source of any funds.
We are also required to report any evidence of or suspicion of money laundering or other criminal activity to the appropriate authorities, without reference to you.
We will complete an electronic identity check on all individuals relevant to your matter to comply with our anti-money laundering obligations.
By instructing us, you consent to us completing an electronic identity check on your behalf.
We have no liability for any consequential loss arising as a result of our compliance with statutory or regulatory obligations relating to money laundering and criminal activity.
Credit Check
Please note that the electronic search we use to verify your identity leaves a “soft footprint” that your credit profile has been checked, but it does not have any effect on your credit profile.
12. METHOD OF COMMUNICATION
Ordinarily, for ease and speed of communication, we will correspond by means of electronic mail.
We each agree to accept the risks of using electronic mail, including but not limited to the risks of viruses, interception and unauthorised access.
We each agree to utilise our best endeavours to check for viruses in information sent and received electronically, but we recognise that such procedures cannot be a guarantee that transmissions will be virus free.
13. RULES OF CONFIDENTIALITY AND DISCLOSURE
We will keep confidential information received from you while acting in connection with any matter unless: -
- We have your authority to disclose it; or
- Disclosure is required to deal with and progress your matter;
- We are required to disclose it by law; or We are obliged to disclose it to our Regulator or to our Auditor (in which case we would provide advance notice whenever possible), or
- The information is in or comes into the public domain without any breach of confidentiality on our part.
We owe the same duty of confidentiality to all our clients.
Our files are audited annually. Our Auditor selects which files are to be subject of the Audit.
Our regulators may also require access to your files and/or confidential information to carry out their functions.
Unless you instruct otherwise we will assume your consent to such audit and/or access.
These organisations have the highest standards of confidentiality which apply to all information of which they become aware.
14. OUR SERVICE LEVEL OBJECTIVE AND COMPLAINTS
We wish to provide you with a high standard of personal professional service.
If you should at any time be unhappy with any aspect of our service, please share openly your concern with the person handling your case.
Thereafter, if you remain dissatisfied or so do not consider it appropriate to speak directly with the person handling your case, please contact
Simon Ackland on sa@acklandslegal.co.uk or by telephone on 02920 641 461
Or
Awen Mellick on am@acklandslegal.co.uk or by telephone on 02920 641 461
Simon and Awen are our Designated Complaints Officers. They will provide you with our Complaints Procedure Statement and endeavour to assist.
If a complaint has not been resolved to your satisfaction within 8 weeks of it being made, you can refer your complaint to;
The Legal Ombudsman, PO Box 6806, Wolverhampton WV1 9WJ.
Any complaint to the Legal Ombudsman must usually be made within six months of the date of our final written response on your complaint and within six years of the act or omission about which you are complaining occurring (or if outside of this period, within three years of when you should reasonably have been aware of it) but for further information, you should contact the Legal Ombudsman on 0300 555 0333 or at enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk or www.legalombudsman.org.uk. The Legal Ombudsman service is only available to members of the public, very small businesses, charities, clubs and trusts. Alternatively, you may be entitled to object to the bill by applying to the Court for an assessment of the bill under Part Ш of the Solicitors Act 1974.
Alternative complaints bodies such as ProMediate exist which are ADR certified and competent to deal with complaints about legal services should both you and our firm wish to use such a scheme.
We do not agree to use ProMediate as the legal ombudsman already works in a similar way even though not ADR certified.
15. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
All copyright and other intellectual property rights in anything we create to include but not necessarily be limited to correspondence and legal and non-legal documents, will always remain with us.
However, we grant you a perpetual licence free of any fee to use copies of materials we create for you, but only for the particular purpose for which they were prepared.
Use for any other purpose would require our prior written consent.
16. FILE STORAGE
We will store documents and papers electronically.
It is important that you keep all documents that relate in any way to the matter in respect of which you have instructed us. This also includes electronic data such as emails and archive data.
After completing any matter on your behalf, we are entitled to retain all your papers and documents if there is money owing to us for our charges and expenses.
We will retain our files along with any electronic versions of your file (except for any of your papers which you ask to be returned to you, or which we decide to return to you) for a minimum of 6 years from the completion of the matter (or such longer period if required or otherwise prudent) after which they may be destroyed without further notice.
Original documents such as Wills and Title Deeds may be deposited with us for safekeeping. We do not charge for this service.
We would not destroy or part with possession of Wills and Title Deeds documents without your express authority.
17. INVESTMENT SERVICES
If during your transaction you need advice on investments, we may have to refer you to someone who is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), as we are not. However, as we are regulated by the Solicitor Regulations Authority, we may be able to provide certain limited investment services where these are closely linked to the legal work, we are undertaking for you..
18. DATA PROTECTION
We confirm that we are the Data Controller of personal information (personal data) relating to living individuals who are either a named client or through whom we conduct our relationship with you. We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office.
The information we hold may also contain sensitive personal data. We will process such data in accordance with the provisions of the Data Protection Legislation.
By instructing us you are entering in to a contract with us and therefore we have a lawful reason for processing your data, both manually and by electronic means, for the purposes of providing advice, administration and management of your file.
We also have the lawful right to process your data because we have a legitimate interest in providing you with a service that is necessary to fulfil the contract between us.
“Processing” includes obtaining, recording or holding information or data, transferring it to other companies associated with us, service providers, the SRA or any other statutory, governmental or regulatory body for legitimate purposes including, where relevant, to other solicitors and/or other debt collection agencies for debt collection purposes and carrying out operations on the information or data.
We would always treat your personal information as confidential and would not ever process it other than for a legitimate and necessary purpose.
If we should ever be required to pass your personal information to parties located outside of the European Economic Area (EEA) in countries that do not have Data Protection Laws equivalent to those in the UK, we would take reasonable steps to ensure the privacy and security of your information.
We will not use your information or contact you for marketing purposes.
f you wish to see our Privacy Policy, please use the link on our website www.acklandslegal.co.uk or otherwise contact our Accounts and Compliance Manager, Shane Palmer by email on sp@acklandslegal.co.uk or by telephone on 02920 226 668.
19. AUDITING AND VETTING OF FILES
External firms or organisations may conduct audits or quality checks on our practice. These external firms or organisations are required to maintain confidentiality in relation to your files.
For example, the firm is applying for accreditation of the Law Society Conveyancing Quality Scheme. As a result of this, we are, or may become subject to periodic checks by outside assessors. This could mean that your file is selected for checking. All inspections are, of course, conducted in confidence. If, however, you object to this, then please let us know and we will mark your file(s) as “not to be inspected
20. TERMINATION
You can ask us to stop work on your behalf at any time by writing to us.
We may also cease work on any of your matters by written notice, but we will only do this where there are good reasons for our ceasing to work on the matter.
Such reasons include, but are not limited to circumstances where we may reasonably consider that: -
You have not paid a bill or are a credit risk to us; or
There is a reputational risk to us; or
A conflict of interest arises; or
We are required by law to cease working for you.
In our view the prospects of success, do not merit us continuing to act for you.
You wish us to act in a manner which seriously conflicts with our advice and/or our ethical responsibilities and duties to a Court or to our Regulators.
Any legal fees and disbursements properly incurred by us in relation to your matter up to the date of termination will be payable by you, irrespective of the reason for termination.
21. DOCUMENT STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
We are entitled to keep all your papers and documents while there is money owing to us for our charges and expenses. Once our costs have been paid we will, unless other agreements are specifically agreed with a partner, return your original documents. We will store, at no cost to you, a set of records for an appropriate period of at least 6 years from the date of the final bill that we send you for the matter, after which we will securely destroy those records. We will not of course destroy any documents such as wills, deeds and other securities, which you ask us to hold in safe custody. No charge will be made to you for such storage unless prior notice is given in writing to you of any charge to be made from a future date, which may be specified in that notice.
We will not normally charge for the retrieval of documents from storage in relation to continuing or new instructions to act in connection with your affairs. In other circumstances we may make a charge based on time spent producing stored papers or documents to you, or another at your request. We may also charge for reading, correspondence or other work necessary to comply with your instructions.
22. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY
Under no circumstances shall our liability to you for damages for breach of contract, negligence, other tort, breach of trust or otherwise (including legal costs) exceed £2m.
23. SEVERANCE
If any provision in our agreement with you is invalid or unenforceable for any reason that shall not affect the remainder of our agreement with you.
24. APPLICATION AND PREVAILING TERMS
These terms and conditions of business supersede any earlier terms of business we may have agreed with you.
If there is a conflict between these terms and conditions of business and any specific terms agreed with you in relation to an individual matter (for example, any terms set out in a Letter of Engagement) then the specific terms will prevail.
It may be necessary to amend these terms and conditions of business from time to time.
The most recent and up to date version is held on our website. Should you have any objections to these terms, please contact the person dealing with your matter.
25. PROFESSIONAL INDEMNITY INSURANCE
Details of our Professional Indemnity Insurance are available upon request.
26. FORCE MAJEURE
It is understood and agreed that neither of us will be liable to the other for any delay or failure to fulfil obligations caused by circumstances outside our reasonable control.
27. EQUALITY, DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION
We are committed to promoting equality and diversity in all of our dealings with clients, third parties and employees. Please contact us if you would like a copy of our equality and diversity policy.
28. GOVERNING LAW AND DISPUTES
The contract between you and us is deemed to be made in England and Wales is governed by the jurisdiction of England and Wales.
29. CONSUMER CONTRACTS (INFORMATION, CANCELLATION AND ADDITIONAL CHARGES) REGULATIONS 2013
If you not instructing us on a business matter, the above Regulations will apply and you will have the right to cancel your instructions without charge within 14 days of the date on which you have asked us to act for you.
If these Regulations apply to you, we will make it clear and provide all the necessary information.
If these Regulations apply to you and you wish to cancel your agreement with us, you will need to return the Notice of Cancellation, which will be provided to you within this period of time although this is not obligatory provided that you communicate your Notice of Cancellation in some other form.
If it is the case that you authorise us to commence work on your case prior to the end of this 14-day cancellation period, you understand that you will be responsible for any costs incurred by us during that period and prior to any cancellation being provided.
If it is the case that you wish for us to commence work prior to the end of the 14-day cancellation period, you should complete the relevant form of Notice which will be provided to you.
