How to submit a legal advice request
Our in-house team of solicitors specialises in legal matters related to parish and town councils, providing tailored legal advice and support. Submitting your legal requests with thorough and accurate information is essential to ensure we can offer the most effective assistance. The following guidelines outline the necessary steps and considerations for submitting a legal request.
All requests for legal advice must:
- Comprehensive facts — Provide a detailed account or summary of the relevant facts of your request and include a chronology of events if it helps clarify the situation.
- Supporting documentation — Attach all pertinent documents, such as employment contracts for employment-related queries, leases for property issues, or governing documents for charity-related questions. If referencing specific individuals, clearly identify their roles or positions if this is not immediately apparent in the documents.
- Email correspondence — If your request involves an email chain, please summarise the discussion and identify all parties involved to ensure clarity.
Important considerations for parish and town councils facing legal claims:
- Insurance policy coverage — If your parish or town council is facing a legal claim and has access to legal advice and representation through its insurance policy’s legal expenses coverage, you should not seek additional advice from us. Failure to notify your insurer of a threatened or actual legal action may result in withdrawing your legal expenses cover, per your insurance policy terms.
- Existing legal representation — If your parish or town council already has solicitors acting on its behalf, you must provide evidence that these solicitors consent to us offering a second legal opinion.
Your county association will triage your query, signposting to existing guidance and information or submitting your query to us or a local adviser. We cannot accept queries directly unless your parish or town council is part of the Direct Access Scheme. Once we have logged your query, we will respond to requests for advice within 15 days. We receive a high volume of requests with urgent deadlines. We endeavour to meet these deadlines. This will, however, depend on our capacity.