How We Hold Ourselves to Account

Nobody browses law guides for pleasure. Readers arrive on difficult days: a divorce turning formal, a landlord's letter, an arrest, a death in the family with a house attached. What we owe a reader in that position is not comfort but accuracy, and this page sets out how our UK Law Guides earn it.

One boundary first, because everything else stands on it. These guides are legal information: what the law says, how a process works, what help costs, which deadlines exist. They are not legal advice, which is the application of the law to your particular facts and can only come from a professional you have engaged. We write to make you a well-armed client, not to spare you one.

Before a guide reaches you

Every guide is built from primary sources, opened and read: the current text of legislation, court and tribunal rules, regulators' own publications, official statistics. A summary of a statute is not the statute, and a citation that loads is not yet a citation that supports the claim, so we read the section itself before it earns a place in a guide. When a claim rests on a source we could not confirm independently, a fee survey for instance, the guide names that source in the sentence. And every guide is independently fact-checked before publication by someone who did not write it: each citation re-opened, each number, date and name tested against what the source actually says.

When a guide states the law

The United Kingdom contains three legal systems: England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. They differ on exactly the things our readers care about most, from limitation periods to tenancy rules to probate. So every legal statement in a guide is tied to the system it was verified in, by name, and nothing checked for England and Wales is dressed up as UK-wide. We verify against legislation as currently amended, and we check for pending changes not yet worked into the published text, because an out-of-date section reads exactly like a current one until you look closely.

When a guide quotes a fee

Fear of costs keeps people from getting help at all, so we treat cost as a subject, not an afterthought. Fees appear as ranges in pounds, dated with the year they refer to, and with VAT accounted for, since VAT applies to most solicitors' bills and a fifth is not a rounding error. We explain fee structures in plain English: fixed fees, hourly rates, and "no win, no fee" agreements, including the parts of that phrase doing the least work. We do not predict what your matter will cost, because no honest page can.

When you go on to hire someone

A guide's last useful act is helping you check who you are dealing with. Solicitors in England and Wales are regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and complaints about their service go to the Legal Ombudsman; Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own regulators, and our guides name the right one for the right system. On the financial side, "accountant" is not a protected title in the UK, so guides on tax and accounting show you how to check for chartered or certified status with the professional bodies. Where an unregulated provider may lawfully offer a service, the guide says so plainly, along with what protection you give up by choosing one. That is how we write about the dubious end of the market: not accusations against named firms, but the checks that make you hard to fool.

When something we published is wrong

It will happen; the useful question is what we do next. A confirmed error is corrected in the guide itself, where it stood, with a dated note. Every guide carries a dated "last verified" line, and the visible updated date changes only when the law or the facts changed, never for appearances. If you spot an error first, use the contact page and name the guide and the claim; we will check it against the primary sources, and a genuine error gets its dated correction.

Some things you will simply never read here: predictions of your case's outcome, invented clients, quotations from professionals who do not exist, or credentials our team does not hold. Guides are researched, written and checked by our editorial team and signed Legal Directorate Editorial. And where the honest conclusion is that you have reached the point of needing a professional, the guide says exactly that, and stops.