Churches are involved in a breadth of activities, from employing staff, working with children, owning a building and handling charitable money. All of which are subject to the law, and often quite obscure and complex areas of law at that. All of this equals a level of regulatory burden unimaginable to the early church.
Churches want to obey the regulations in obedience to Christ: “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established” (Romans 13) and out of love for those in contact with the church. However, the current culture of ‘jury by social media’ means that the stakes are high when churches get things wrong. The reputational and relational damage for not keeping up with the regulatory burden can be huge. Edward Connor Solicitors was set up to help churches feeling this pressure.
We believe that it is important that churches can access quality legal advice from lawyers that understand the particular intricacies of running a church. We know a church is a very different client to any other organisation a lawyer will work with. This is both because of the complexities of the areas of law that churches need to comply with, and the underlying theological and ecclesiological convictions of a church that will underpin everything it does.
Sadly, expertise and experience of this sort costs a lot of money. Specialist law firms face significant costs to be able to provide their level of expertise. Less specialist ‘high street’ firms can be cheaper, but the solicitors are likely to be generalist and sometimes unable to advise confidently in niche areas.
Things that add to the cost of an hour’s legal advice include:
- professional indemnity insurance (which means clients can have comfort that any loss caused by bad advice will be compensated),
- the law firm’s own compliance burden – law firms are even more heavily regulated than churches! (This means that clients can be confident they’re getting the best possible care),
- and the training and research that lawyers need to do to ensure they are keeping up to date with constantly changing areas of law.
Add to this the need for ‘normal’ law firms to make profit, and pay their lawyers high salaries, you can see why each hour of advice at a non-high street firm often approaches £400+.
At Edward Connor Solicitors, we want to offer the highest level of expertise and quality of service that churches would get in the most expensive law firms. If commercial businesses can access that quality of advice, why shouldn’t churches who are doing much more important work?
- Our lawyers are some of the country’s leading experts in their fields.
- The firm’s ethos is uniquely driven by gospel aims.
- All our lawyers are Christians and members of bible-teaching churches themselves.
- We work exclusively for Christian organisations meaning we have knowledge and experience that is second to none.
However, unlike all other law firms, we are not seeking to retun profits to business owners, being a charity ourselves means that every penny earned goes back to our charitable purposes of advancing the Christian religion. In addition, our lawyers make significant salary sacrifices to choose ministry in ECS over working in high paying law firms. This enables us to have an hourly rate significantly less than the rate being charged elsewhere for an equivalent level of expertise and experience.
Our hourly rate is the lowest that we know of for like-for-like services and we also offer discounts to smaller churches. This means you can get a Christian employment lawyer with decades of experience of working with Christian organisations and churches at the same price as a paralegal or HR consultant in another law firm!
We know our clients will still baulk at our costs. If we could, we would love to do our work without charge! But, even without market level salaries and a need to make additional profit, we need to cover the significant costs involved in providing such a quality and valuable service.
We know that when churches seek legal advice, it’s a big deal for them.
In interacting with a solicitor, churches are usually operating outside of their normal activities and comfort zone. A business that is experienced in dealing with legal matters might only need 5 hours of a lawyer’s time to complete a piece of work. Churches on the other hand, naturally look to their lawyers to be more hands-on. They will probably want an additional 2-3 hours of help to ensure they understand how the law applies to their situation, ecclesiology and peculiarities of operating.
This all means that churches frequently need to spend a lot of money on legal advice. They have the combined need of a special level of high-value expertise (the hourly rate) and a need for a large number of those hours (either because of the complexity of their situation or because of their need of additional help).
Churches can save money by being proactive with legal issues.
This is why we spend a lot of our time trying to educate churches (with free articles issued via our newsletter and on our website, by attending church conferences and providing training) so we can help churches get things right from the start.
Being proactive makes it less likely that churches will face more difficult and more costly issues in the future. However, we can pretty much guarantee that at some point in the life of a church in the UK today, it will be necessary to access legal advice. Maybe for something positive and exciting like purchasing a new property or employing more staff. Or perhaps for something more painful like a Subject Access Request or where there is relational breakdown or legal action has been taken against you (sadly, we’re seeing this more and more).
We understand the temptation to cut costs by cutting corners with legal advice, perhaps using Google and ChatGPT or a kind lawyer who might not have the necessary level of experience but is willing to give it a go. We would urge you to budget so you are able to access the right quality of legal advice when you need it. Your trustees and church leaders want to have confidence that they’re meeting their legal obligations and also honouring Christ, so it is important that they can get the right advice at the right time.
Questions to ask when seeking a lawyer:
- Do they have experience of dealing with charities, churches and Christian organisations?
- Do they have expertise in the right areas of law? Churches need lawyers with extensive charity and trusts law, data protection, and equalities legislation knowledge, in addition to the area of law that is applicable to their particular issue.
- Does your lawyer share your Christian convictions and the need to make serving Christ as Lord your highest priority? This will impact the advice they give you and the effectiveness of that advice to your ministry.
- Is your lawyer going to give you the time, patience and support you need to feel confident dealing with these issues? If your lawyer simply presented you with a legal document, would you have sufficient confidence to know that its right for your church and what to do with it?
Edward Connor Solicitors is not cheap, but we are confident we can offer all of this and more at a price that will not be found elsewhere.
