Terms of business
These apply to every matter unless your engagement letter says otherwise, in which case the engagement letter wins.
1. Who you are contracting with, and who advises you
Your contract is with ABOGADO LIMITED, a company registered in England and Wales under number 15407875, registered office 124 City Road, London EC1V 2NX. It invoices you, in pounds, and you deal with a UK business under UK consumer law.
The legal advice itself is given by a Spanish abogado: a lawyer admitted to a Spanish Colegio de Abogados, subject to Spanish professional conduct rules and covered by Spanish professional indemnity insurance. The name and número de colegiado of the abogado handling your matter are given to you in your engagement letter, before you pay anything, so that you can verify them with that Colegio.
For matters handled by the principal of the practice, that lawyer is Francisco Sánchez Calderón (referred to elsewhere on this site as Francisco Sánchez), admitted to the Ilustre Colegio de Abogados de Sevilla under número de colegiado 16.386.
ABOGADO LIMITED is not a firm of solicitors and is not regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Law Society of Scotland or the Law Society of Northern Ireland. The abogado handling your matter is not a solicitor.
2. What we do and what we do not
We advise on Spanish law only. We do not conduct litigation in the United Kingdom, do not undertake UK conveyancing, and do not apply for a grant of probate or a grant of confirmation. Those are reserved to UK-qualified lawyers and remain a matter for your own solicitor.
We do not give tax advice on your UK tax position, financial advice, or investment advice. Where your matter needs any of those, we will say so and, if you want, work alongside whoever you appoint.
Your engagement letter sets out the scope for your particular matter. If something falls outside it, we will tell you and agree a price before doing it, not afterwards.
3. Fees
Our fees are published at abogado.uk/fees and confirmed in your engagement letter before work begins. They are fixed: if a matter turns out to be larger than it looked, we tell you before doing the additional work and you decide.
Fees exclude Spanish taxes, notary fees, registry fees and translation costs. We give you those figures in writing, with a payment map, before you instruct us. How money moves is explained here.
Payment. Half on instruction, half on completion, unless agreed otherwise. Up to £500 in a single payment may be made by card through our payment pages; above that we invoice and you pay by bank transfer. We may charge interest on invoices unpaid 30 days after they are due, at 4% above the Bank of England base rate.
Small expenses we advance on your behalf — searches, certificates, apostilles — appear on our invoice with receipts. Anything above €300 we will ask you about first.
4. We do not hold your money
We do not operate a client account in the United Kingdom. Money for the Spanish authorities or the notary is paid by you directly. Where that is genuinely impractical, funds are held in a designated euro account in Spain under the professional rules applying to the abogado handling your matter, and accounted for to you in writing.
Our bank details never change. If you receive any communication saying they have, do not act on it — telephone us on 0330 684 5332.
5. Your right to cancel
As a consumer buying at a distance you have 14 days to cancel. The detail, including what you pay if you asked us to start straight away, is here.
6. What we need from you
Accurate information, and documents when we ask for them. A Spanish matter runs to external deadlines — the six-month inheritance tax deadline in particular — and we cannot meet a deadline that has passed while we waited for a document. We will chase you, and we will tell you plainly when a delay is about to cost you money.
We must identify you before acting, and in some cases identify the source of the funds. This is a legal obligation on the abogado handling your matter under Spanish anti-money-laundering law and we cannot waive it.
7. Confidentiality, and one exception
Everything you tell us is confidential and covered by Spanish professional secrecy. There is one exception we are required to disclose to you now: where Spanish law obliges us to report a suspicion to the authorities, we must do so, and in that event the law may prevent us from telling you that we have. We would rather you knew that this exists than discovered it later.
8. Liability
We are liable to you for loss caused by our negligence or breach of contract. Our liability is limited to the amount of our professional indemnity insurance cover in force at the time, details of which we supply on request.
We are not liable for loss caused by information you gave us that was wrong or incomplete, by delay on the part of a Spanish notary, registry or tax office where we have acted promptly, or by your failure to act on advice in time.
Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. Nothing in them affects your statutory rights as a consumer.
9. Ending the arrangement
You may end it at any time, in writing. You pay for work done to that point and for expenses already incurred, and we hand over your file.
We may end it where you do not give us instructions or documents we need, where an invoice is more than 60 days overdue, where a conflict of interest arises, or where we are asked to do something improper. We will give you reasonable notice and will not leave you at a deadline without warning.
10. Complaints
Our procedure is here: acknowledged within two working days, answered within one month, with an external route if we cannot settle it between us.
11. Law and jurisdiction
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may instead bring proceedings in your own courts, and you keep the benefit of any mandatory consumer protection of the law where you live.
This does not change the fact that the advice itself concerns Spanish law and that questions of Spanish law are determined by Spanish law.
12. Changes
We may update these terms. The version that applies to your matter is the one in force when you instructed us, and we will send it to you with your engagement letter so you have it in a form you can keep.