The total cost of a conveyancing transaction is often made up of several different parts. These can broadly include:
- Legal fees — the cost of the firm's work and legal services;
- Additional costs — fixed administrative or transaction-related charges applied by the firm; and
- Disbursements — third-party costs paid by the firm on your behalf as part of the transaction.
Understanding the difference between these categories can help make prices easier to compare.
Legal fees and additional costs are generally determined by the firm itself.
Disbursements are different. They are costs that arise because third parties are involved in the transaction. These costs are usually not set by the firm and can depend on the property, the transaction type or information that only becomes known later. Examples can include:
- Property searches;
- HM Land Registry fees;
- Leasehold management packs;
- Indemnity insurance policies; and
- Other transaction-specific third-party costs.
Choose My Lawyer separates disbursements into two categories:
- Included disbursements; and
- Excluded disbursements.
Included disbursements are costs that can ordinarily be identified with reasonable confidence at the point of comparison and can therefore be included within the comparison price.
For the pilot platform, included disbursements comprise:
- Search costs (using the standard comparison approach explained here); and
- HM Land Registry fees.
HM Land Registry fees are calculated separately because they are based on published fee scales rather than market estimates. Choose My Lawyer calculates these fees using information such as transaction value and transaction type so that they can be included consistently within comparison results.
Because included disbursements already form part of your displayed comparison price, they should not ordinarily increase the price shown to you later.
Excluded disbursements are different. They are costs that cannot reliably be identified at the point of comparison. Examples may include:
- Leasehold management packs;
- Additional location-specific searches;
- Indemnity insurance policies; and
- Other transaction-specific third-party costs.
These items are excluded because they depend on circumstances that may only become known later in the transaction. This means excluded disbursements may sometimes increase the total cost of your transaction once additional information becomes available.
This does not mean information is missing. It means that the information cannot yet be determined with sufficient confidence.
Included and excluded disbursements are separated so that comparison prices remain transparent, consistent and meaningful.
Where additional costs arise, we believe firms should explain clearly what has changed and why.
If you notice a material difference between information shown through Choose My Lawyer and information later provided by a firm, we encourage you to tell us. This helps us identify market patterns and improve the quality of information shown to future users.
Choose My Lawyer does not decide whether a firm's pricing approach is right or wrong.
CML organises and explains. You decide.