Understanding our commitment to you: How we work to ensure your satisfaction and protect your interests.

1. These terms and how we can change them

1.1. Our agreement with you. These terms, together with our engagement letter to you, form our agreement with you to provide legal services. These terms apply to each matter we work on with you. If there is a conflict between these terms and our engagement letter, these terms will prevail, unless the engagement letter expressly overrides them.

1.2. Changes to these terms. We can change these terms in response to legal, regulatory and technological changes, and commercial needs, and we may increase our hourly rates as explained in 7. If we do so, we'll notify you and you can contact us to terminate our instructions before the changes take effect. However, the terms which apply to your agreement with us will be those in force at the time you signed the engagement letter. Any reference to ‘we’, ‘us’ or ‘our’ in these terms is to Circle Cloud LLP, and any reference to ‘you’ or ‘your’ is to the person placing an order on our site

2. Limitations on our services

2.1. All of our services are based on the law of England & Wales and are only suitable for parties that are based in England & Wales,

2.2. For the purposes of these terms, you are a ‘consumer’ if you are buying services from our site as an individual for purposes wholly or mainly outside of your trade, business, craft or profession. You are a ‘business customer’ if you are buying services from our site for purposes relating to your trade, business, craft or profession. Some terms only apply to your instructions if you are a consumer and other terms only apply to your instructions if you are a business customer, so please make sure you read these terms carefully 2.3. If you are a business customer, you are responsible for ensuring that you have all the necessary permits and licences to conduct your business activity lawfully and compliantly.

2.4. Our services are delivered according to industry practice and standard business terms. You warrant that the services are suitable for you as they are and will expressly and in writing notify us of otherwise. We will give you a chance to review the services once delivered to determine if any amendments need to be made. If no amendments are requested, you warrant that you are fully satisfied with the services.

3. About us

3.1. We are a limited liability partnership company. Our registered office is at 981 Great West Road, London, TW8 9DN, UK. We may from time to time use the word "partner" to refer to a senior staff member but this does not mean that they are necessarily a partner or director of the company.

3.2. You can contact us by sending an email to info@circlecloudconsultancy.com or calling us on 02038270470.

3.3. Circle Cloud LLP are a mix of members that provide tax, advisory and law services. Although some members of Circle Cloud LLP are solicitors and therefore regulated by the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (‘SRA’) (for more details, please see www.sra.org.uk ), Circle Cloud LLP is not a firm regulated by the SRA.

3.4. As a result of not being a firm regulated by the SRA, we cannot provide reserved legal activities. We will inform you in advance if this affects the services we can provide to you.

Reserved legal activities are defined under the Legal Services Act 2007 and include:

 The right to appear before and address a court; 
 The issuing of proceedings before any court; 
 Conveyancing; 
 Wills and probate;
 Administration of oaths; and 
 Notarial services. 


3.5. Circle Cloud LLP does obtain professional indemnity insurance that satisfies the SRA’s minimum terms and conditions

4. Our services

4.1. We provide tax, advisory and law services. Matters outside the scope of our instructions. We only advise on matters within the scope of our instructions, as set out in our engagement letter. Unless your engagement letter clearly says otherwise, we will not advise you on the financial or tax aspects of this matter, or on your wider tax or financial interests, advice on the law of jurisdictions outside of England and Wales or Scotland, conveyancing, litigation or accounting and commercial advice (including on the viability and prudence of this matter), even if a relevant issue arises during the course of our work together. You may wish to seek separate specialist advice on these matters.

4.2. Only you can rely on our advice. Our advice is intended solely for you. We do not accept or assume responsibility to anyone other than the clients identified in our engagement letter. Unless we agree otherwise in writing, you must not share our advice with anyone else.

4.3. Third party service providers. We may instruct third parties (such as barristers, expert witnesses, enquiry agents and financial advisers) to provide services to you. Where appropriate, we may instruct these third parties as your agent so that you contract with them directly. However the third parties are instructed, you are responsible for the sums charged by third parties and their services are provided to you on their terms.

5. What you agree to do

5.1. You agree to:

1. Provide us with clear, timely and consistent instructions, and respond fully, frankly and quickly to our requests for information and co-operate with us and those we instruct on your behalf. The information you give us must be full and accurate, to the best of your knowledge and belief. We don't verify the information you give us, unless we have expressly agreed to do so.

2. Tell us straight away if your contact details change.

3. Pay our fees. This will be as detailed in the engagement letter.

6. Our communications with you

6.1. Risks of email correspondence. For convenience and speed, we will correspond with you by email and rely on communications coming from your email account, as well as Clio’s client portal. However, email is inherently insecure. We are not responsible for loss or damage caused by email use, provided we have taken reasonable security measures, including against viruses or similar harmful items.

6.2. Blocked emails. Our filtering software may prevent us from receiving emails from you or in relation to your matter, and we are not responsible to you for losses resulting from this.

6.3. Opening hours. We are normally open between 9.00 am and 5.00 pm Monday to Friday, except for bank holidays. Our staff may sometimes respond to communications and work outside of our normal office hours, but this is at our discretion and we ask you to respect that there will be times when we are not available.

6.4. Who we can give advice to and whose instructions we can act on. We may give advice and information to, and act on instructions from, any of the individuals to whom our engagement letter is addressed without the need to copy such advice to, or to confirm such instructions with, the other(s). You can let us know in writing that we are authorised to deal with someone else on your behalf in this way. For organisations, rather than individuals, we can ask for a formal resolution confirming who can instruct us.

7. Our fees, disbursements, and expenses

7.1. Our engagement letter sets out how we calculate our fees. Our fees for our services are calculated either on the basis of time spent or on a fixed basis and may be staged, as set out in our engagement letter.

7.2. Fees on a time spent basis, fixed fees, disbursements, expenses and VAT. All hourly rates, estimates, fixed, capped or staged fees we quote to you are exclusive of the following, which you must pay in addition:

7.3. Deposits and retainers. We request a non-refundable deposit from you before we commence work.

8. Our invoices

8.1. When we invoice you. We invoice you regularly and on completion of your matter or at the intervals indicated in your engagement letter. We may raise an interim statute invoice. Statute invoices are final for the period they cover and your rights to challenge them are time limited. All statute invoices (whether interim or final) will be marked accordingly.

8.2. We can invoice disbursements and expenses at any time. We can invoice you for disbursements and expenses for any period at any time, even after we have invoiced our fees for that period.

8.3. If you believe you have been charged too much, under the Solicitors’ (Non-Contentious Business) Remuneration Order 2009 and the Solicitors Act 1974 (specifically sections 70- 72), you have the right to have your invoice formally assessed by the courts. You must apply within one month of receiving the invoice or within one year, but you may have to pay first before the court will assess it. In special circumstances you can apply after one year. Given the strict time limits, it is best to seek independent legal advice as soon as possible after receipt of your invoice. 

8.4. Payment is due on receipt and we charge interest on late payments. Our bills are payable when you receive them. Our invoices remain payable on receipt regardless of the investigation of any complaint. 

8.5. We charge interest on unpaid bills at a rate of 5% above the Bank of England's base rate. Interest will begin to run before securing judgement.

8.6. You are responsible for our charges, even if you have third party funding. Even if someone else has agreed or been ordered to pay our charges (fees, disbursements and expenses), or you expect this to happen, you are still responsible for paying us. This includes where you are claiming back part or all of our charges from an opponent in litigation.

8.7. Multiple clients are jointly and severally liable for our bills. If we are instructed by more than one person, then we can require any of those persons to pay our bills in full (joint and several liability).

9. Consumer cancellation rights

9.1. You have 14 days from the date of the signed engagement letter to change your mind and cancel the services with us.

9.2. We will not provide any services during the 14-day cancellation period unless you request for us to do so. We are under no obligation to accept your request.

9.3. If you request for us to start providing services during the 14-day cancellation period and we agree to do so, this will impact your cancellation rights as follows:

9.3.1. you lose your right to cancel once the services are fully performed and will not be entitled to a refund even if the cancellation period has not expired;

9.3.2. if the services have not been fully performed, you will be required to pay for the services we provided up to the time that you told us that you want to cancel.

9.4. To cancel your instructions, please email us at info@circlecloudconsultancy.com

10. No claims against our staff

Services are provided by our staff for and on behalf of our law firm. Our staff do not assume any personal responsibility to our clients in relation to work carried out under these terms and any personal liability of any member of staff is therefore excluded. Any claims against our firm should be brought against the firm as a limited company. You agree not to bring any claim (including in negligence) against any employee or member of our staff including principals (that is partners, members or directors) as individuals in their personal capacity in connection with any loss or damage suffered in connection with our services. If you do bring a claim against any of our staff, they can rely on our agreement, including its limitations of liability.

11. Events beyond our control

We are not liable to you if we fail to comply with these terms because of circumstances beyond our reasonable control.

12. How you and we can terminate our agreement

12.1. You and we can terminate this agreement. You may terminate your instructions to us at any time by telling us in writing. We can also stop acting for you, if we have reasonable grounds to do so, for example because you have broken our agreement by not giving us timely instructions or paying our invoices on time. We can also stop acting for you if the lawyer-client relationship of trust and confidence has broken down, if we discover a conflict of interest, if to proceed would otherwise be contrary to legal or regulatory duties, if the risk profile for your case has significantly changed or if you experience an insolvency event. We will write to you explaining our decision, giving you as much notice as possible.

12.2. Payments on termination. If you terminate your instructions or we stop acting for you, you must pay our charges (fees, disbursements and expenses) incurred up to the point of termination, as well as any charges we incur after termination, for example in transferring your file to another adviser or removing ourselves from the court record.

13.3. We can retain your documents until you pay. If you do not pay our invoices on time, we can retain documents, deeds and other items relating to any matter we are working on for you until you have done so (subject to such information that may be available to you under data protection laws).

13. How you can use our advice and how we handle your documents

13.1. Intellectual property rights. We retain all intellectual property rights in the advice which we provide and the documents which we prepare, but permit you to make use of such work for the purposes of your particular matter only.

13.2. Treatment of your documents on completion. When your matter completes or we stop acting for you, unless you request the return of any documents you have supplied to us, we will retain them for as long as we deem necessary for legal and regulatory reasons and then destroy them.

14. Complaints and other concerns

Circle Cloud is not a regulated firm, however, some of our team members are regulated solicitors and therefore have strict code of conduct in which they must comply with. We hope that you are happy with the service we provide. If at any stage you have concerns or wish to make a complaint, inform the person handling your matter straight away about the nature of your concern. 

15. Confidentiality Legal advice privilege, which protects confidential communications between a lawyer and their client, can be easily lost for example if you communicate with us through third parties or share our advice with third parties. We are not advising you on whether, and to what extent, legal privilege applies to your communications with us, however, you should be very careful when discussing your matter with anyone outside of our relationship.  

16. Data protection

16.1. Our privacy policy. For information about how we deal with your personal information, see our privacy policy as published on our website.

16.2. In some cases, we may hold more sensitive information about an individual such as about health. This may be necessary to pursue your legal matter. We are permitted to use such information to provide legal advice to you or in connection with equality legislation.

16.3. You can withdraw consent to your information being used in a particular way, but this may limit what more we can do for you (if anything).

16.4. As a client, we may send you a newsletter or similar in the future. We find that most clients find this helpful. We rely on the legitimate interest we have in maintaining contact with former clients to do this in compliance with data protection law and your agreement for the purposes of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 which can be implied under these regulations.

16.5. Your information may be kept on computer servers within the UK or the European Union. If at any point information is stored on computer servers outside of the UK or the EU, we will have selected countries which are either approved for this purpose under relevant data protection legislation or are located where we are happy that the safeguards in place in that country to protect your information are appropriate under such legislation.

16.6. We do not use your personal information to make automated decisions which affect you.

16.7. We will not generally share your information with third parties unless this is necessary to work on your legal matter. For example, lawyers frequently may need to send certain information about clients to other lawyers working on the matter, to court, or to government bodies. In rare circumstances, we sometimes need to report suspicious activity to the National Crime Agency.

16.8. While we reserve the right to destroy non-original material at any time after the conclusion of your matter, we generally retain files for a period of six years after payment of the final bill and destroy them thereafter. At the end of a case, original documents will be returned to you but, if we both agree, we may retain certain originals for a longer time period. We will also always keep a small amount of information after file closure to do conflicts of interest searches in the future to comply with our professional duties.

16.9. We do normally have a right to payment of any outstanding costs before releasing a whole file to you but individuals may arguably have a separate right under the UK data protection legislation to access certain personal data without charge. This may include having it in a particular electronic format (portable format).

16.10. If you have a complaint about how your personal information is being used which we have not been able to address you may also be able to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) directly. You can learn more about the ICO and personal data rights from the ICO's website www.ico.org.uk.

17. Anti-Money Laundering 

17.1. To ensure compliance with the Money Laundering Regulations 2007 and the Proceeds of Crime Act 2003, we are required to take steps to ensure that you are not involved in any form of money laundering.

  17.2. To do so, we must verify your identity. We will do this by using verification providers to search relevant databases as well as asking for documents which confirm your identity and address, as well as relevant details of your company. We must retain a copy of the documentation provided, as required by the relevant anti-money laundering legislation.

  17.3. You must provide such requested documentation as soon as possible, as we will be unable to begin working on your matter until we have conducted our anti money laundering checks. Therefore, we will not be liable for any delays in completing your matter, when such delays were a result of delays in the requested documentation being provided to us by you. 

18. Conflicts of Interest

18.1. We do not act where there is a conflict of interest. Although we are not a regulated firm, we have regulated solicitors who must not act where there is a conflict. Therefore, we have systems and procedures in place to ensure we do not act for a client where there is a conflict, or potential conflict, with an existing client.

  18.2 These terms are governed by English law and you can bring claims against us in the English courts. These terms are governed by English law and you can bring claims against us in the English courts.