Do you have questions about our Subscription?

We’ve been doing this for a long time. All our lawyers are qualified and regulated, and they’ve all worked in-house before. This means we understand your challenges and how to help you overcome them

We get it, signing up to our subscription takes a small leap of faith. Our first job as your new legal team will be to earn your trust. Until then, we hope our client testimonials and track record will make the decision easier for you. With our fast onboarding and ability to hit the ground running, we’re sure you’ll feel confident that you’ve made the right choice in no time.

Not at all. We work with lots of fast-paced businesses where the clock is always ticking. We know that to be useful to you, we need to work to your timelines. We often return work the same day. If not, our aim is to deliver by your deadline or as quickly as possible.

You’ll notice our minimum initial term is two months. This lets us show you what we can do when we really know you and your business.

Some clients want us to help with straightforward tasks that call for minimal knowledge. In those cases, we can hit the ground running.

However, most of our clients want us to mesh with their teams, getting to know your business, product and risk appetite. This is our favourite approach because it lets us smash value out of the park. Yes, this approach needs a bit more time and patience on both sides. But in our experience, it’s absolutely worth it. Once we’re in your gang, we can support you with a much wider range of tasks with minimal input.

If you already have a playbook or any form of internal guidance that you use for assessing contracts, send this over. If not, no worries. We ask you questions about your standard position on things like indemnities, liability, risk appetite and intellectual property to get to know your business. We keep a record to refer to.

Commercial contracts, particularly tech and IP, are our bread and butter. We draft them, amend them, negotiate them and light fires with them. The only limit is your imagination.

We also have employment lawyers who support your HR team with anything they need and help keep you out of the tribunal. Then we have the data protection folks to help you stay off the ICO’s naughty list.

Whilst the expertise of all our lawyers is available to you as part of your subscription, you can dip in and out according to your changing needs.

This is where we differ from other law firms, because the answer is it’s up to you.

Ping emails to our Plume address, give us access to your systems, find us on Slack, Teams, Trello, Juro or send a carrier pigeon. We'll meet you where you are.

It’s not possible to roll over unused hours. This is the only way we can manage our capacity to deliver the service you deserve.

To help you stay on track with as little effort as possible, we send you weekly updates on your usage. If we see you’re not using your hours, we’ll help you spot opportunities for us to take more work off your plate and get the most value.

Our longer subscription terms give you more flexibility to use your hours. For example, if you sign up to our annual plan, you have the whole year to use your hours.

To help with capacity planning, you can only pre-book hours at the beginning of your subscription term.

That said, we know that life in business can be unpredictable and we're here to support you with that. So, if you use up all your booked hours, you can book more hours at our overage rate, which is invoiced monthly.

You can either pay upfront or by monthly Direct Debit. So, let’s say you book 30 hours for a quarter. You can either pay £6,900 at the start of the quarter, or £2,300 a month for three months. If neither of these options work for you, we may be able to agree a bespoke payment arrangement. This will be subject to a small surcharge to cover the extra admin.

We're a small business. Paying your invoices on time allows us to manage our cashflow so we don’t spend our limited resources chasing late payments. We really appreciate your understanding and cooperation.

This isn’t always easy, particularly while we’re finding our feet together.

After our initial chat, we'll make a recommendation based on what you've shared with us and our extensive experience delivering subscription services. You can always change your hours in the next subscription term.

We’ll email you every week to let you know how much time you’ve used and how much you have left.

If you’d like breakdowns based on project or customer, we can customise our reports for you.

We reply to emails on the same working day, even if it’s just to acknowledge receipt.

We always aim to turn work around as quickly as possible and within your requested timescales. Where we need more time to give a job our best, we’ll contact you to agree a timeframe.

You’ll have one of our lawyers as your primary contact to keep things nice and simple. We always pair businesses with lawyers based on expertise and experience.

Your lead lawyer won’t be the only one you work with. They involve other members of our team as and when necessary. To manage a tight deadline or to assist on something outside their area of expertise, for example. We also have our amazing Client Services team who will answer questions about your subscription or a piece of work.

Our internal knowledge-sharing system means everyone in the team can access relevant information about your business. This means we can easily share your work between us without you having to repeat yourself.

Whilst we know you’ll be sad if your lawyer leaves Plume, we’ll be working flat out behind the scenes to bridge the gap and continue supporting you at the same level.  

Absolutely. We use Teams ourselves so we can create a chat with you and anyone else you'd like us to. And if you give us access to your Slack, we'll be there!

Yes, we do this regularly. We're happy to provide a pragmatic assessment, but it's always with the caveat that we're qualified to practise in England and Wales and therefore not able to comment on how the contract could be interpreted in the applicable jurisdiction.

We have a strong network of overseas law firms, so we can always find someone local to review a contract, if you need.

When you pre-book time with us, we guarantee to work those hours for you. We limit how much time we pre-book, so we can always deliver for you.

We prioritise subscription work over non-subscription work, and pre-booked work over overage. So, in short, the only way you can guarantee our support is to pre-book with us.

This is why we can’t roll over unused hours. It allows us to deliver the service you deserve.