Please email me at joel@woolfrural.co.uk if you cannot find an answer to your question.
Yes, absolutely. I am a qualified solicitor with a current practising certificate. I qualified as a solicitor on 15 September 2005, and I have years of experience in my practice areas.
I can provide legal advice, but I do not operate as a traditional firm of solicitors. I am qualified and regulated as an individual in the same way as any other solicitor. Unlike traditional law firms, however, my business itself is not regulated by the solicitors’ regulatory body, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (‘SRA’). Solicitors who work outside of a traditional law firm are sometimes called ‘freelance solicitors’. While for some types of legal work, a client might need to use a traditional law firm (please see below), for most legal advice it is not always necessary for solicitors and clients to incur the full cost of a traditional law firm.
While using my services can be more cost effective than working with a traditional law firm, the legal services I provide must meet the same high standards set for all solicitors. As well as benefiting from my years of study and training, I am also overseen where necessary by independent regulatory and complaints bodies:
The SRA and the Legal Ombudsman only deal with solicitors and a solicitor’s legal work, however. Any concerns about my business as a whole or any of my other work would be dealt with in the usual way, as for any other business.
Yes. For the type of legal work I offer, ‘freelance’ solicitors are not required to take out ‘professional indemnity insurance’ which meets the minimum standards of cover required of traditional law firms. Nonetheless, I have purchased other professional indemnity insurance to cover my legal advice up to a limit of £2,000,000. This is so that, in the unlikely event that I make a mistake in your legal work, insurance is in place to protect you. If you would like to see the policy to more fully understand the terms and exclusions or have any questions about the cover, please do let me know.
For my area of law, I find that this business model is a great fit for clients, delivering the expertise that they need within a boutique practice without all of the costs of a more traditional practice. However, I do wish to be open about the differences between my business and a traditional law firm, so there are some details on this below.
Freelance solicitors can be a great option for certain types of work such as general legal advice and legal drafting on a variety of topics including wills, commercial contracts, regulatory matters, etc. For some legal services, clients do still need to use traditional law firms, such as immigration work, making claims (including employment related claims made by the employee), and legal work which has a financial services element to it. For most areas of law, however, this has not been necessary since late 2019.
There may also be occasions where I feel that someone might be better off working with a traditional law firm and, if so, I won’t hesitate to tell you. Traditional firms can offer additional services and protections which can sometimes be particularly important, such as:
Where I recommend you to work with a traditional firm I can still assist with the management of the work which that firm is carrying out and be available to support you generally.