Pricing

Free Initial Consultation

Our initial consultation with you will always be free, usually this will be by telephone or email but we are also happy to meet you where possible.

Contact application form offer

To complete an initial 14-page court application form for contact with your children, after advising you on your strongest arguments to put in it, emailing that completed application form to you with instructions for filing it at the relevant court, and advising you on whether you might qualify for remission of the court fee, we charge £25.

No-Nonsense Pricing

Our pricing model is straightforward.

For work we do ‘on location’ (in court, meetings with professionals or with you) we charge £40 per hour. For work we can do on our own, at our base offices, we charge £25 per hour.

In addition to these hourly rates, we charge travel and other expenses at cost plus £10 per hour for travel time. (So if we travel for two hours and use a train costing £11.50 we would charge you £20 + £11.50 = £31.50). If we travel by private car we charge mileage at 20p per mile.

We think our charges are very reasonable when you consider a solicitor might typically charge from £90 to £200 per hour with administrative rates typically being around £50 per hour.

The small print

For long periods of waiting around in court we charge a very much reduced rate of £10 per hour (as we do not believe you should have to pay full rates for us to sit in a chair!).

All times are calculated rounded up to the nearest ten minutes (so if it takes us 85 minutes to prepare a letter you will be charged for 90 minutes).

We do not normally charge for trivial items, like a brief phone call to confirm arrangements (“Just checking I’ll see you in court tomorrow at 11 am”, “Yes”). This is so you can have the peace of mind without having to worry about running up charges.

How can you provide such good value?

We are private individuals who work from home so we do not have the expense and overheads of maintaining offices, but mainly it is because we do this to help people and make a contribution towards our living costs, rather than purely to make a profit.

I can’t afford even these low rates

If you would like to represent yourself, but feel you cannot even afford our rates please call us to discuss how we can help you. We hope not to have to turn people away because we cannot reach an arrangement they can cope with.