Regulatory Information
Frequently asked questions about our legal services and important regulatory information
Can you give our/my business legal advice?
We can provide legal advice, but we are not a traditional law firm. Any lawyer providing services under Polished Influence will be qualified and regulated as an individual in the same way as any other solicitor. Unlike traditional law firms, however, our business itself is not regulated or authorised by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (“SRA”) and we are not a law firm. Any solicitor operating through Polished Influence must still meet the same high standards set for all solicitors.
For some types of legal work, a client might need to use a traditional law firm (see below). For most legal advice, however, it is not always necessary for solicitors and clients to incur the full cost of a traditional law firm.
For our area 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. 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 an employee);
dealing with someone’s estate after they have died;
buying and selling property, including business property;
legal work which has a financial services element to it.
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. 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. For the types of legal work Polished Influence offers, it is not required to take out ‘professional indemnity insurance’ which meets the minimum standards of cover required of traditional law firms. Nonetheless, prior to providing services to your business, Polished Influence will have purchased other professional indemnity insurance up to a defined limit which will be confirmed to you prior to engagement;
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 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 which we support, we generally find that our clients benefit greatly from the legal model that we offer. We can offer clients the reassurance 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 at hello@polished influence.com. If you need this information in another format, please let us know.
Please note that Polished Influence provides general commercial and commercial contracts advisory based on the laws and jurisdiction of England & Wales.
We cannot provide any services that would amount to 'reserved' legal activities.