2008/9/18 Chris Wood hot20024@hotmail.com:
They usually charge you for their services. Some charge upto £25 for answering your question over the phone but most solicitors are legally binded to give you 30 minutes free legal advice before they charge you. My nans friend is a solicitor and he says that they charge for things such as answering the telephone and also writing letters and responding to letters and be glad your not hiring a barrister as they charge a minimum of £95 an hour.
We're looking for advice (desirable, but not essential) and someone to sign off on the application (a legal requirement). The former we may be able to get for free (as you say, you can usually get 30 minutes free advice, although I don't know if that applies to corporate matters), the latter I would expect we need to pay for whoever we get (it involves writing something down - I believe that almost always results in a fee). Since we need someone to sign the application, we may as well try and make it someone that can offer useful advice as well. Also, we're likely to require legal advice at some point in the future (WM DE have been sued what, 4 times so far? And that's just issues that have actually gone to court), so it would be good to have a professional to turn to and not need to find one in a hurry.
We can afford reasonable set up costs, the board can fund them out of their own pockets and get reimbursed out of the first membership fees. We have 28 people interested in being supporting members. Assuming half of them actually sign up and a membership fee of £10 (both conservative estimates), that's £140 straight off. I think the application itself costs £30, that leaves £110 to pay a solicitor - hopefully there will even be something left over for travel expenses (I'm just guessing what they're likely to charge - none of their websites seem to include minor details like costs...). I'm happy to sub the chapter £140 for the few months it will take to get the fees in.