Questions and Answers – How does it work?

We provide businesses with both legal advice and risk-based guidance, to help them manage and navigate the risks and challenges they face. We know that sounds a little vague, but that’s because it has a wide application.

We are not a traditional management consultancy. The “management consultancy” part of our service is not separate or distinct from the “legal consultancy” part. We provide consultancy services to the managers and leaders of businesses and employers, in the context of the legal risks and challenges they navigate on a daily basis. Our aim is to help leaders run their own business as safely as they want, or take the risks they want with a better understanding of what they are getting into, and to protect them from both obvious problems and unseen risks.

That’s a big question, and there are lots of reasons. For more information on what is actually different, see the “How are you different from a law firm?” question.

One reason why we are different is that we want to distance ourselves from the pricing strategy used by the vast majority of the legal sector. We believe in fair pricing for high quality legal services. As a consultancy business, we do charge by the hour, but irrespective of what the market is charging for its services, Zeamos is committed to charging what it should, not what it can.

By being an unregulated consultancy business, we also avoid most of the bureaucracy, red tape and regulation that law firms are subject to, and which they often use as an excuse for their prices.

We want to be modern and not bogged-down in the traditions and standard model of the legal profession.

And we are proud to be part of a growing trend of legal consultancy business who have chosen to operate outside of the grip of professional regulation, for the same or similar reasons as we have.

We believe that being a legal and management consultancy enables us to better serve the interests of our clients and provides us with more freedom to support business clients in the way they really need, delivered in a cost effective way.

In short, there are some things that we simply are not allowed to do. Those are the things that are “reserved” for regulated law firms and solicitors.

That includes not being able to call ourselves a law firm or a firm of solicitors. We don’t mind, and we do not want to be known as such. So our legal advisers are called “legal consultants”, even if they are qualified and still personally hold a practicing certificate.

More importantly, there are things that we cannot actually do for clients:

• We do not handle client money;
• We do not undertake Court advocacy;
• We cannot Conduct Court litigation;
• We cannot do Probate, Conveyancing and Transfer of Property activities;
• We cannot do any Notarising or Administration of Oaths.

We are not permitted to advise on matters in the list above because they are “reserved” to regulated law businesses. It just wouldn’t be…. legal.

But we can handle employment litigation and advocacy in the employment tribunal because that is “non-reserved”, and it is in fact an area of specialism for us.

In addition, we do not advise on tax arrangements, crypto-currencies, financial advice generally, immigration matters, or pensions – all for similar regulatory reasons.

What we can do is help you find and manage the relationships with law firms who you need to take such advice from, so if you aren’t used to dealing with solicitors, we can deal with them for you as your consultants.

We have “licensed access” status from the Bar Standards Board, so we can instruct a barrister for you.

Absolutely not. We are committed to the absolute highest standards of confidentiality, data protection and information security, and of course business ethics.

We voluntarily use the same standards of systems and security as used in the legal profession, not because we are told to, but because that is what is right and best for our clients.

We pride ourselves on the fact that if you are using us for services that you might otherwise obtain from a law firm, you will receive the same or better quality and service that you would have received from a law firm. This is because our clients deserve it, and we don’t need any other reason than that.

We operate with the highest level of professional standards while prioritising the integrity of our client relationships which are built on trust over time. Although we are not regulated, we will not engage in any unlawful or unethical practices, and we won’t work with clients who expect us compromise our principles and values.

Yes, we have professional indemnity insurance in place to cover our advice for the benefit of our clients.

Our work is about relationships, solutions, helping and protecting our clients. If it isn’t something we know about, then we will help you find the right person to advise on the matter. That might be another consultant, law firm, or other professional adviser. We can help manage that relationship for you too, if you like. Of course, sometimes the issue or challenge you face is something novel, which nobody has dealt with before, so we might be the right person to help even if it is new to us too.

Zeamos is committed to only working with ethical businesses and employers. We are a solely business to business service provider.

Our clients are typically privately or publicly owned commercial businesses from a range of sectors. We also work with start-ups, entrepreneurs and some charities.

Typically, we charge by the hour for our time. It means that we don’t over charge, while still getting paid for what we do. While it certainly isn’t ground-breaking, we feel that it is the best way to ensure that we can stick to our fair-pricing values.

However, depending on your requirement, we can also agree daily rates, project fees or a monthly rate with associated service levels. We can also look at other arrangements if you think something else would work better for you.

We invoice on an interim monthly basis, and our fees are payable within 30 days of the delivery of our invoice.

Sorry, we don’t really do that. Our business is built on relationships, and we find that a cold pitching process doesn’t bring out the best of us or the value in what we do.

If you are looking to try and extract as many “extras” as possible out of a fixed price service, we probably aren’t the right fit for you.

We operate a lean business without a marketing team, graphic designers, finance analysts, ground-breaking software or teams of back office staff. It means we don’t have capacity or resource to prepare flashy in-depth pitch documents and presentations (which means, you don’t pay for that either). So if that’s what you want, we aren’t going to deliver.

If you’d like to “try us out” and see whether you like the way we do things, then we’d be delighted to speak with you. We do hope you like the way we do things, but we won’t tie you into any minimum term and we completely understand if it’s not a good fit for you. No hard feelings.

We are happy to quote for projects for existing clients, but we rely on our commitment to fair pricing and trusting relationships to validate those quotes.