Our fees
Signing Settlement Agreements
These are legal agreements which must enter into if you reach an agreement with your employer about a compromise sum to be paid to you on the termination of your employment in view of you bringing an unfair dismissal or some other claim.
This legislation requires that you receive independent legal advice on this from a solicitor and we are happy to provide this service.
This is free to you because the employer pays our fees.
Your settlement agreement will include a clause that the employer will pay legal costs in a specified amount.
This will usually be sufficient to cover our fees but we will confirm when you contact us about this.
The sum paid is usually between £250 – £500 + VAT.
This fee covers our costs for advising you on the terms and effect of the agreement itself. In doing that we will give very preliminary consideration as to whether or not you might have a claim for unfair dismissal or on some other ground (e.g. discrimination) but our fees for substantive advice on that would be payable by you at our standard hourly rates as set out below.
Hourly rates
Our fees for advising unfair or wrongful dismissal, discrimination or any other aspect of employment law are calculated on a time-basis at £450 per hour plus any disbursements (out-of-pocket expenses) such as the cost of any report that might need to be obtained etc. plus vat where appropriate.
We will try and give an estimate of what the whole claim might cost once we have an idea of what is involved and spoken to you.
That would be dealt with under an initial consultation which is a fixed fee for half an hour of £225 plus VAT. We would normally do that on a Zoom meeting.
Legal Expenses Insurance
You may have legal expenses insurance under your household or another insurance policy.
You should check with the insurer to see whether our fees would be covered – sometimes they will appoint their own panel solicitors but in either case it means that you may not have to pay any fees.