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Frequently asked questions
General
Kang Law can employ solicitors to give legal advice, but we are not a traditional firm of solicitors. Our solicitors are qualified and regulated as individuals in the same way as any other solicitor.
Unlike traditional law firms, however, our business itself is not regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (“SRA”). We are a normal business. Solicitors who work outside of a traditional law firm are sometimes called ‘freelance solicitors’ or ‘independent solicitors’. For some types of legal work, a client might need to use a traditional law firm (see below), several of whom we have consultancy partner arrangements with, where conducting regulated, specialised or higher risk work.
For most legal advice, however, it is not always necessary for solicitors and clients to incur the full cost of a traditional law firm.
While using our lawyers can be more cost-effective than working with a traditional law firm, our legal advice is still provided by qualified and experienced solicitors. The legal services our solicitors provide must meet the same high standards set for all solicitors. As well as benefiting from the solicitor’s years of study and training, your solicitor is also overseen, where necessary, by independent regulatory and complaints bodies:
• Our solicitors are regulated by the SRA and comply with the high standards of ethical conduct required, including advising you in your best interests (regardless of what is best for our business); and
• Complaints about solicitors can be raised with an independent Legal Ombudsman free of charge (once the solicitor has had a chance to respond). More information can be found in our terms of business.
The SRA and the Legal Ombudsman only deal with solicitors and a solicitor’s legal work, however. Any concerns about our business as a whole or any of our other work would be dealt with in the usual way, as for any other business.
Yes. For the type of legal work we offer, unregulated practices are not required to take out ‘professional indemnity insurance’ which meets the minimum standards of cover required of traditional law firms. Nonetheless, we have purchased professional indemnity insurance to cover our legal advice up to a limit of £1,000,000. This is so that, in the unlikely event that a solicitor makes 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 us know.
For our areas of law, we 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, we do want to be open about the differences between us and a traditional law firm, so there are some details on this below.
An unregulated practice can be a great option for certain types of work, such as general legal advice, legal drafting on a variety of topics, including wills, commercial contracts, regulatory matters, etc. For some problems, clients do still need to use traditional law firms, such as:
• Suing people, being sued, or making claims (including immigration work and employment-related claims made by the employee);
• Dealing with someone’s estate after they have died;
• Buying and selling property, including business property;
• Legal work which has a clear 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 we feel that someone might be better off working with a traditional law firm, and if so, we won’t hesitate to tell you. Traditional firms can offer additional services and protections which can sometimes be particularly important, such as:
• The handling of client money: we cannot hold client money for you in the same way that traditional law firms do. Client money is money held or received on behalf of a client in a designated client account, separate from your firm’s money. Ordinarily, this is not a problem for our type of work. Client money held by traditional solicitor firms also benefits from possible access to the SRA compensation fund should a solicitor ever steal money from the client account (an extremely rare occurrence).
• SRA ‘minimum terms’ professional indemnity insurance cover: this significantly limits the circumstances in which an insurer can escape liability for funding claims in the event of a mistake being made and requires a minimum amount of cover of £2 million to £3 million;
• Please also note that the solicitor’s regulator, the SRA, has questioned whether ‘legal professional privilege’ would apply outside of a law firm. All solicitor work is confidential, including our own. Solicitor work could also benefit from ‘privilege’, which may not otherwise be available, which means that in some additional circumstances the client can refuse to disclose information to others. While we would argue that privilege applies in these new models and believe there are good grounds for doing so, the position is not as clear under this model as it is for traditional firms.
For the type of legal work that we do, we generally find that our clients benefit greatly from working with us under this model. We can reassure clients of working with a qualified and experienced professional without necessarily incurring the full cost of a traditional law firm service. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.
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