Terms of Business
Introduction
Melyn Legal Limited, trading as Melyn Legal is authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) under SRA number 8003011. Our registered office is at Cwrt, Lambourne House, Lambourne Crescent, Llanishen, Cardiff, CF14 5GL.As a matter of good professional practice certain information is given to you at the outset of a new matter. That information is included in these Terms of Business which set out how we provide our professional services to you. These should be read in conjunction with the letter of engagement we have also provided to you.
Our Services
We will agree with you at the outset of your matter the work required and we will provide you with a fee estimate of that work. If any additional work is required we will agree that with you in advance.We maintain client care by providing our services to the following standards:
- We will provide you with a fee estimate or fixed fee in respect of the work be carried out and we will keep you updated on any variations or anticipated variations to fees.
- We will advise you of the likely timescales involved.
- We will explain the legal work involved and what we require from you.
- We will communicate in plain language.
Unless you instruct us otherwise, we will use email and other electronic means in the course of carrying out work for you, for example to correspond with you or others involved in your matter. Email is not secure and can sometimes fail to reach the intended recipient as quickly as anticipated or at all. If you send us an email concerning a matter requiring urgent attention please call us to check it has been received. We do not accept any liability for the lack of security of emails or the failure of emails to arrive as quickly as anticipated or at all.
Client Confidentiality and Data Protection
We will abide by our professional duty and fulfil our obligations under relevant data protection legislation including the Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) to keep your affairs confidential and process your personal information in a lawful manner. We may make disclosures- As authorised by you;
- To our auditors solely for audit purposes, or
- As required by law, for example, under legislation concerning the prevention of terrorism and money laundering.
Such circumstances are described in the Guidance Note to the Solicitor’s Code of Conduct issued by the SRA (see www.sra.org.uk). Please note certain of these laws also prohibit the person required to make the disclosure from informing anyone else that the disclosure has been made. We will not be in breach of our duties as a consequence of any disclosure made in good faith to comply with the provisions of such legislation. Further information about our handling of personal information (as defined in the GDPR) can be found in our Privacy Notice.
From time to time we may outsource certain aspects of work. We will take steps to ensure that any third party to whom we outsource takes confidentiality seriously and we will always seek a confidentiality agreement. If you do not want your file or any aspect of the work that we undertake for you to be outsourced, please advise us in writing.
Document Retention and Storage
After completing the work, we will be entitled to keep all your papers and documents while there is still money owed to us for fees and expenses.We will keep our file of your papers for up to 7 years, except those papers that you ask to be returned to you. We keep files on the understanding that we can destroy them 7 years after the date of the final bill. We will not destroy documents you ask us to deposit in safe custody.
If we take papers or documents out of storage in relation to continuing or new instructions to act for you, we will not normally charge for such retrieval.
However, we may charge you for:
- Time spent producing stored papers that are requested.
- Reading, correspondence or other work necessary to comply with your instructions in relation to the retrieved papers.
Money Laundering Regulations
The law requires us to obtain satisfactory evidence of the identity of our clients and sometimes people related to them. This is because law firms who deal with money and property on behalf their client can be used by criminals wanting to launder money. We may need to carry out an anti-money laundering check in relation to you and will request information from you to allow us to do so.We are professionally and legally obliged to keep your affairs confidential, however, we may be required by law to make a disclosure to the National Crime Agency. If we make a disclosure in relation to your matter we may not be able to tell you that a disclosure has been made. We may have to stop working on your matter and may not be able to tell you why.
Our Fees and Invoicing Arrangements
Unless otherwise agreed in writing, our fees are based on the time we spend working for you under the applicable hourly rate as set out in our letter of engagement.Our fees and expenses specified to you are exclusive of VAT. We will add VAT, where VAT is chargeable, to our invoices. Our VAT number is 435 6026 08.
During the course of your matter there may be disbursements that we need to pay on your behalf, for example court fees or fees for expert reports. We have no obligation to make such payments on your behalf unless funds have first been provided by you for that purpose.
We will be entitled to charge you for work carried out by us for you on a particular matter irrespective of whether or not that matter proceeds to completion or trial.
We will review the hourly rates we charge from time to time and reserve to the right to increase our rates. We will notify you in advance if our rates change.
We will keep you regularly informed regarding the fees incurred on your matter and will raise invoices on a monthly basis, unless those fees are less than £100 in which case those fees will roll over to the following month. You can pay our invoices by electronic bank transfer to our bank account as specified on the invoice. We do not accept cash.
Invoices are payable within 14 days of receipt. We will be entitled to apply any sums that we hold for you towards payment of any invoice we have issued to you unless we have agreed that specific sums are to be held by us for another purpose.
Where any amount is unpaid we are entitled to exercise a lien over (to retain) your file until those unpaid amounts are settled in full. We reserve the right to decline to act any further for you if payment of our outstanding invoices has not been made.
We reserve the right to charge the statutory rate of interest on any invoices not paid within 28 days in accordance with the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998.
Interest
We earn interest on the money that we hold in our client account on your behalf at rates determined by our bank. Subject to an annual minimum of £50, we will account to you for any interest received where the total interest received in respect of your client money held in relation to any particular matter for the period during which we hold it exceeds £50.Complaints
Please view our complaints policy here www.melyn.legal/complaints.Limitation of Liability and Insurance
You acknowledge and agree that if you wish to make a claim relating to or in connection with the services provided by us, the claim can only be brought against the Firm and not against the individual members, officers, employees or consultants.We maintain a professional indemnity insurance policy which complies with the SRA’s requirements with insurers approved by the Financial Conduct Authority. Full details of our current insurance arrangements are available on request.
We do not exclude or limit our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence.
Termination
You may terminate your instructions to us in writing at any time.We may decide to stop acting for you only with good reason, for example, if you do not pay an interim bill or comply with our request for payment on account, if you fail to give us proper instructions on how to proceed or if we feel that you have lost confidence in how we are carrying out our work.
If you or we decide that we will no longer act for you, you will pay our charges to the date of the termination. We will be entitled to keep your documents
Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013
If we have met with you but not at our offices, or you have instructed us remotely i.e. by telephone, letter or email, the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 apply to your matter. If applicable, this means that you have the right to cancel our engagement without charge at any time within 14 days of your agreeing to instruct us. If you wish to do so you must inform us of your decision to cancel in writing by email.If you request us to commence work within the cancellation period you will be responsible for paying us the reasonable costs of the service. If the work we are conducting for you has been started, on your instruction, and completed during the cancellation period you will lose your right to cancel.