Natasha Minchella is a qualified solicitor in England and Wales and she is therefore regulated by the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA).  The SRA  has strict rules which relate to solicitors and which stipulate that legal advice can only be provided through a regulated entity.  The Orchard and The Orchard Legal Membership are not regulated entities and therefore any support or advice Natasha provides through The Orchard is as a contracts and business expert and not a solicitor.  If you would like a quote for Natasha to provide regulated legal advice through one of the law firms to which she is affiliated, please email [email protected] for a quote.

Nothing in The Orchard entails "legal advice" as it includes template documents and related support and training and is not regulated by the SRA.

The main points for you to understand are that:

• you will not be able to complain to the Legal Ombudsman if you have a complaint about The Orchard or The Orchard Legal Membership, although the usual protection for non-regulated services exists, for example your contractual rights under our terms and conditions, statutory protection under the Unfair Contract Terms Act and Trading Standards;
• you will not have the benefit of ‘legal privilege’, although you will have the benefit of the contractual confidentiality obligations in our terms and conditions;
• we are not required to have the same level of insurance in place as we would if we were registered with the SRA, but we do have professional indemnity insurance at an appropriate level to cover our potential liability.
• If at any time we consider it to be in your best interest to use regulated services for a piece of work we shall inform you.
• In light of the above, you acknowledge that the Legal Membership does not create a solicitor-client relationship.

Template documents by their inherent nature carry risk as they have not been drafted with your particular business and circumstances in mind. This risk is reflected in the significantly reduced price of a template document compared to a bespoke document. Our contract templates are general framework documents.  They have not been prepared specifically in relation to your business and do not constitute legal advice.  It is always preferable to have a bespoke contract drafted for you and we recommend where you have any doubts or special circumstances that you instruct your own legal adviser to tailor our templates to fit your specific circumstances.  However, it is better to use a template document than no document at all and our templates have been drafted with care to be suitable for small businesses.

If you use our products and resources you acknowledge and accept that we do not provide you with an individual assessment of the suitability of our products and resources for your particular circumstances and it is your responsibility to decide whether our templates and other resources are suitable for you to use.  If you have any doubts we recommend that you consult a legal adviser so that they can draft a bespoke contract for you.

We will not be liable for any matter arising out of your use of the Legal Membership.

The only support that will be included in the price of the Legal Membership is technical support if you have problems downloading and saving the documents or viewing the videos or (if you have gold membership) responding to your queries via the monthly group legal drop in.  During these sessions we cannot undertake any specific drafting for you. If you need additional help with completing the template documents, you should email us at [email protected] to discuss support packages at an additional cost.

The templates and information in the Legal Membership are relevant to English law only and are not suitable for any business governed by the laws of another jurisdiction.

Your use of the Membership is subject to our Terms and Conditions, which you must agree to if you wish to become a Member.

You can access our Terms and Conditions by clicking here.