On this page we provide information about our costs and disbursements for some of our services.
These are indicative costs based on average transactions that we provide to assist our clients.
It helps to have accurate and relevant information about a firm of solicitors when considering purchasing legal services. We are always happy to quote for specific work so it is clear from the start how much a legal service or transaction is going to cost,
We hope that by publishing our average fees that it will help members of the public and small businesses to make informed choices when instructing us.
We provide a quote for every matter and whatever we quote in costs and disbursements is repeated in our initial client care letter.
Hannays requests our clients to sign the initial client care letter and a copy of our terms and conditions and return them to us, so we are sure that the information has been communicated before instructions are started.
The quotes provided are personalised to your matter and are quoted sometimes as fixed fees and sometimes as an hourly rate depending on the type of legal work to be carried out..
If you are considering using our firm for your legal work, but find a cheaper alternative, please remember that when you shop around that price isn’t the only factor to take into account.
- Do you want to use a reputable service, provided by solicitors (who are regulated)?
- Do you want face to face appointments?
- Do you want to be able to use a local service?
- Do you find faceless internet services that make it hard to speak to a human being difficult to trust?
- Do you need to see a solicitor in your home if you don’t feel up to travelling or in the hospital if you are ill?
- How long it will take to conclude your instructions?
- Do you want the facility of being able to ring and speak to a person?
For information on our fees and disbursements for Freehold or leasehold domestic property sales/purchases click HERE
For information on our fees for mortgages/re-mortgages and disbursements for domestic property click HERE
For information on our fees for Probate or Letters of Administration and disbursements click HERE
For information on the fees we charge for drafting Wills please click HERE
There is some further information included in our FAQ’s below that you may also find useful.
FAQs
A ‘disbursement’ is an expenditure incurred which is necessary to progress the matter on which you instructed us and charged by third parties.
Court Fees, Search Fees and Land Registry fees are examples of disbursements.
We inform you in advance of any disbursements you should expect to pay and why they are necessary.
If there are any changes to the disbursements you need to pay during your matter we will keep you informed about the cost and explain why it is necessary.
Disbursements are billed to you at cost (we do not add any further costs to them). Sometimes disbursements include VAT.
Usually, disbursements once paid to the third party are non-refundable, so for example, if you have paid for your house searches we will ask you if we should proceed to order them to ensure we are ordering them at the right time for you.
Most disbursements are paid initially from our own bank account and we then request you to repay us.
Sometimes we request that you pay a disbursement to us in advance of it being paid, for instance Court fees or property search fees.
When you pay us for disbursements, your payment is deposited in our client account.
On receiving your payment, if we have paid already for the disbursement we will then transfer the specific amount of money that the disbursement costs to our own bank account from our client account to reimburse our expenditure.
We do not transfer a disbursement fee that you have paid us to our own account until we have actually paid for the disbursement on your behalf.
If you have paid us funds to pay a disbursement, we will pay the expense directly from our client account using your funds.
We account to you for the disbursement payments in our interim, final bills or in the case of a house purchase in the final completion statement.
Sometimes, disbursements cost less or more than anticipated and if you have paid us in advance for the disbursement and we find that it costs less when it is paid we will refund you the difference as part of our final billing.
For several reasons disbursements sometimes cost more than anticipated. If this happens we will request a balancing payment from you and explain why the disbursement has cost more.
We will always be clear with you about the disbursements we pay on your behalf and their costs but if you have any queries please do not hesitate to contact the solicitor or lawyer named in your client care letter as acting on your behalf.
You can make a payment to us by cheque, bank draft, debit card payment or bank transfer.
If you want to pay by bank transfer your solicitor or lawyer will advise you of our bank details when a payment is due and when to pay it.
We also accept cash payments, but the maximum we will receive from any client across all their current transactions is £500 in cash.
We cannot accept debit card payments for any part of the funds involved in purchasing a property, but we can receive our costs and disbursements by card payment.
The reason we cannot accept a deposit or the purchase monies for a property by card payments is because of the guarantees made by the banks regarding the use of cards. As property purchases usually involve substantial amounts of money the banks stop us from accepting payments for property purchases made by card as the bank does not want to be held responsible for returning the funds for these high value purchases if things go wrong.
If you pay us by cheque it normally takes 3-5 days to clear.
If you pay us by debit card your payment will take 3 days to clear into our account.
We do not accept payments made via a credit card.
Please be aware that anyone sending funds to us will have gone through our anti-money laundering procedures checks. Clients should not ask someone else to make the payment to us who is not named in the transaction and who has not been checked by us, as we will not be able to use those funds until further checks have been made and usually have to return the funds to the sender after those checks have taken place.
We do not charge a service fee for returning funds to our clients by BACS as we want to provide at least one free of charge method of sending funds to our clients.
However, if the amount we need to return to our clients is more than £1000, we will send the funds by Faster Payment or CHAPS bank transfer to ensure they reach our client safely as the bank makes further checks when funds are sent by these types of bank transfer.
When we have to do this we charge our clients £40 + VAT to send a bank transfer payment and explain that this is what we charge when we provide an initial quote for the work being carried out for our clients.
International transfers are charged at £40 + VAT.
VAT is always charged at the prevailing rate set by the Government.
The current rate of VAT applicable to our costs and most disbursements is 20 percent.