Charities

Our team of expert charity lawyers have significant experience of working with both national and international charities, dealing with the Charity Commission and the other regulators within the sector and advising charity trustees on how best to work with the various bodies, to satisfy their requirements and minimise the potential for reputational damage.

We advise corporate charities on a full range of company law, charity governance, and operational matters, including: policies, procedures and committee structures; charity trustees’ duties, terms of appointment and delegation powers; the relationship between the board and the executive team; governance audits and reviews; charity mergers, reorganisation and restructuring; and applications to the regulators for schemes and other consents. Our charity solicitors are skilled in translating complex charity law into practical solutions.

Our specialist charity lawyers are nationally renowned and respected. We pride ourselves on giving straight-talking charity legal advice with a mantra of ‘maximising property’ (increasing return or minimising costs).

We have specialists who can offer expert charity legal advice to help manage portfolios, complex property transactions and structural reorganisations, advise on the full range of disputes and issues arising in relation to short and long residential leases, commercial landlord and tenant, third party rights and rural land. Our approach is centred around three pillars: Operational and strategic property; Retail & Investment; and Legacy Property. We apply our deep knowledge of charity law to every stage of the property lifecycle.

Our employment and immigration team provide the full spectrum of strategic and operational legal advice to our clients in the charity and the not for profit sector, offering a single team who can support you with regular employment advice as well as full support on more complex employment matters including projects such as business transformation, pay and grading, board level issues, employment provisions in commercial contracts, employment aspects of transactions including all aspects of TUPE, as well as Tribunal support (including advocacy).

Our ‘refreshingly human’ employment contracts and handbooks are tailored to fit with the language used by your business in a way that is user friendly and easy to understand

Our commercial offerings for charities include drafting licensing arrangements to maximise revenue generating opportunities whilst protecting your brand and reputation and agreeing new contractual documentation with a tech solutions provider to deliver a more efficient and secure database tool for marketing and fundraising initiatives. We also provide additional overflow support for day-to-day matters and work alongside in-house legal teams on more strategic, complex projects that underpin organisational goals and objectives.

Alongside the strategic support we also advise our charity clients through a bespoke outsourced inhouse legal service. Our GC services solution allows our charity clients to outsource low value, low risk matters to us for a fixed monthly cost. We pick up your business as usual and ad-hoc queries so that your in-house team can focus on the higher value, more strategic projects which support the overall growth. In essence, our role is to advise on all legal queries which a reasonably competent in-house counsel would. We operate this model with a number of our charity clients, including Save the Children, Dogs Trust and Cancer Research UK.

We have a dedicated Legacies team which supports our national charity sector clients on all aspects of legacy income. We act for each of the top 10 legacy earning charities in the UK and have an impressive roster of large national charity clients – with key clients including the National Trust, RSPB, Age UK, RSPCA and The Salvation Army.

We support with the management of their legacy income, including resolving issues and disputes surrounding property and contentious probate, administering estates where the charity is the appointed executor or has decided to take up the role of personal representative and we advise on the related charity governance issues. The combination of governance, charity law, and income strategies is what makes our charities team unique.