Legal Studio Solicitors

16/10/2026

London, Gloucestershire, North Yorkshire. Clare Young's career has been heading steadily north. It’s now got wheels.

Nobody rings a lawyer about wills, trusts and probate for fun. Clare has spent twenty-plus years being the person they ring anyway, when the marriage ends, or the business is sold or somebody dies.

Clare’s own big change was joining Legal Studio as a consultant. Her out-of-office location is now a hillside in the campervan, family and dogs in the back.

Not every lawyer wants a campervan and Legal Studio isn't for everyone. If you're curious about becoming a consultant, message us for a chat.

15/10/2026

Employers: the three month window to bring an employment tribunal claim is about to become six.

For employees, that's more time to gather evidence and take advice before deciding whether to act.

For employers, it's a longer window in which a dismissal, grievance or workplace dispute can turn into a claim.

There's an upside too. More time can mean more room to resolve things by negotiation, rather than ending up in a tribunal at all.

Elizabeth Harmer, Employment Solicitor and Legal Studio consultant, considers what the change means for employers, and how you can manage the longer exposure window.

Read the full article here:

08/10/2026

When people hear “transport lawyer”, they may picture ships, lorries and cargo moving from one place to another.

That’s part of it, but transport law also covers the contracts behind those journeys, the warehouses where goods are stored, the insurers covering the risks and the disputes that arise when something is damaged, stolen or destroyed.

It’s specialist work, built on a detailed understanding of how transport and logistics businesses operate in practice.

That’s what Tim Knight and Andrew Large have spent years building at TKTL.

When they began thinking about the firm’s future, the challenge wasn’t to replace what they had created. It was to give the practice more support and room to grow without changing the things clients already valued. The same lawyers. The same direct relationships. The same specialist advice.

Now with Legal Studio behind them.

We’ve looked more closely at what TKTL does, what becoming Powered By Legal Studio means and why keeping what already works was so important.

Read the full article:

It includes the contracts behind those journeys, the warehouses where goods are stored, the insurers covering the risks and the disputes that follow when something is damaged, stolen or destroyed.It’s a highly specialist area, and TKTL has spent years building a practice around it.

06/10/2026

Darren Sherborne has never been especially interested in making employment law sound more mysterious than it needs to be or sitting on the fence.

He has no time for posturing, because most clients don't come to an employment lawyer looking for legal theatre.

They come because something difficult has happened, or may be about to happen, and they need to know where they stand.

Darren brings more than 36 years’ experience in employment relations and employment law, including more than 30 years conducting employment tribunal cases.

He started in the trade union movement before moving to advise employers, giving him a practical understanding of workplace disputes from both sides.

He advises employers, individuals, directors, senior executives and employees on tribunal litigation, industrial relations, TUPE, restrictive covenants, service agreements, director disputes, workplace exits and internal investigations.

He has served as an ACAS Arbitrator, conducted independent investigations and helped parties resolve disputes as a mediator.

His approach is simple.

Cut through the noise.

Explain the position and give some advice, come off the fence.

Focus on what needs be done and how to get there.

We are very pleased to welcome Darren Sherborne to Legal Studio.

09/09/2026

The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 came into force in June. It does not replace current UK data protection law, but it does change some of the rules sitting behind everyday tasks like using customer data, answering subject access requests, running cookies on your website and sending marketing emails.

For most businesses this change will need mean rewriting their entire data handling process. It means checking whether the documents already in place are still fit for purposes and making some small adjustments.

John James and Nathan Combes share some advice on how a business can improve their processes without reinventing the wheel.

01/09/2026

Freedom can sound wonderful on paper. Nobody telling you what to do, getting in your way or bothering you with unnecessary processes. All good.

But freedom shouldn’t mean being abandoned.

If you’re running your own practice, you should still know what happens when things don’t go to plan. Who deals with compliance. Who you call when something unusual lands. Whether there’s an actual human being around when you need to talk something through.

Because without that, it isn’t really freedom. It’s being left to get on with it, come rain or shine and they’re not the same thing.

We think experienced lawyers should have autonomy. They don’t need somebody hovering over every decision, checking where they are or approving how they spend their Tuesday afternoon.

Autonomy is a lot easier to enjoy when you know what sits behind you. You know where the boundaries are. You know what the firm takes care of and what belongs to you. And you know there are people there when you need them, without those people needing to insert themselves into everything when you don’t.

There’s quite a lot of structure behind Legal Studio. There has to be. We’re a regulated law firm, not a collection of people with laptops and a shared logo. The point is that the structure should do something useful.

It should make it easier for good lawyers to get on with being good lawyers. Not create another layer of permission, another person to copy in or another meeting to discuss the meeting you’ve just had.

Freedom works better when you know there is a proper firm behind you. Not another layer above you

29/08/2026

Some brilliant lawyers would not be right for Legal Studio.

And that’s okay. We’d happily put that in a recruitment campaign because it’s true.

If you like the structure of a traditional firm, knowing what progression looks like and having somebody else map out the direction, consultancy might be quite a shock to the system. There’s nothing wrong with the traditional model if you’re happy in it.

Legal Studio is something very different.

You have a lot of freedom here, but nobody is going to decide what you should do with it. You have to think about the practice you want to build. The clients you want. How much you want to earn, how much you want to work, whether you want to grow something substantial or whether you get to a point where you think, actually, this is plenty. And you have to be comfortable owning those decisions.

We’ll give you opportunities, support, introductions and things you can use to build your practice. But we’re not going to insist you use every one of them, or decide what your practice should become. Equally, we’re not going to find every piece of work for you.

We’d rather put some lawyers off by being clear about that than persuade everybody that consultancy is for them. Because it isn’t.

Consultancy isn’t traditional law with all the annoying bits conveniently removed. There’s still business development. Income can be less predictable. You’ll have to make decisions without somebody further up the hierarchy making them for you. You need to know what you’re good at, where you need help and when something isn’t working.

What we can do is put a proper firm around you. Compliance and operational support. Experienced lawyers to call when something becomes complicated, unfamiliar or stressful. The infrastructure behind you so running your own practice doesn’t also require becoming an expert in every deeply dull thing that sits around the actual legal work.

We’ll support the practice but the practice is yours.

Legal Studio doesn’t need to suit every lawyer.

It just needs to suit the right ones.

If you’re wondering whether that might be you, our Join Us pages explain how it works in practice: https://www.legalstudio.co.uk/join-us/

27/08/2026

A law firm telling you that you need less legal work sounds like a poor business model.

Sometimes it’s exactly the advice you need.

Not every disagreement needs a formal letter, and not every position needs defending to the death. There are also very, very few situations improved by another three people being copied into an email chain that’s already 47 messages long and seems to have developed a life of its own.

There are times when you absolutely need to fight. The risk is serious, the principle matters or somebody needs to hold their ground.

Sometimes you fight because you have to.

But sometimes the sensible legal advice is much less dramatic.

Make the phone call. Change the clause now. Sort out the process before the same problem turns up again six months later wearing a different hat.

Get advice while something is still relatively small and everyone involved is still capable of being reasonable.

And occasionally the advice might be: yes, you are perfectly entitled to pursue this. But do you really want to?

Because having the legal right to do something doesn’t automatically make doing it a good commercial decision.

Most clients have an outcome they want. Spending the next twelve months becoming intimately familiar with the other side’s correspondence is rarely on the wish list.

A lawyer obviously needs to understand the law. But they also need to understand what the client is trying to achieve and know when the law is helping them get there, and when everyone is simply creating more of it.

Sometimes the right answer is litigation, difficult negotiations and a substantial amount of legal work.

Sometimes it’s getting involved early enough that none of that becomes necessary.

If a problem can be sorted before it becomes a case, with fewer meetings, less correspondence and considerably less to put in the litigation update, we’re entirely comfortable with that.

26/08/2026

One thing lawyers often say after moving into consultancy is that they feel relieved.
You might expect excitement. Freedom. Control. And all of that is real.

But relief is realising how much energy you’d been spending making yourself work in a way that didn’t suit you. Trying to concentrate somewhere you find impossible to concentrate. Losing half a day to meetings, then finally getting your actual work done once everyone else has gone home, while slowly losing the will to live. Getting into something, being interrupted, finding it a nightmare to get back into it, then being interrupted again. All while juggling deadlines and trying not to forget the thing you were supposed to have done yesterday.

Being visible enough. Sociable enough. Available enough. Knowing when to speak and when not to. When to look interested in something that would have been considerably more useful as an email.

Being successful can make it much harder to notice what a way of working that doesn’t suit you is actually costing. You can be a brilliant lawyer and be the person everybody trusts. Nobody would necessarily think, this person is spending a massive amount of energy simply getting through the working day in the approved fashion.

For neurodivergent lawyers, there can be another layer. Years of adapting, masking, pushing through so used to doing it that you stop questioning why you’re completely spent afterwards. But you don’t need to be neurodivergent for the rest of it to feel familiar.

Some people do their best thinking at seven in the morning. Some need quiet. Some like bouncing ideas around with other people, then disappearing to actually think.

And when people start working in a way that suits them, they don’t work less. What changes is the effort of trying to fit somebody else’s idea of what a working day should look like. The constant adjustment, coping, energy spent proving that you can manage it perfectly well.

Perhaps that’s where the relief comes from. Law hasn’t suddenly become easy. You’ve just realised that being very good at coping with something was never a particularly good reason to keep doing it forever.

24/08/2026

Values are part and parcel of a law firm. We all have them.

They can be found in laminated folders, quite often on the website, on the About Us page, alongside photos of people looking exceptionally pleased to be standing in glass meeting rooms. Sometimes they’re shaking hands decisively.

At Legal Studio, we have values too, but the thing with values is that they become a lot more interesting when something happens that wasn’t expected.

It’s very easy to say you trust experienced lawyers when they make exactly the decisions you would have made. But what happens when they don’t?

It’s very easy to talk about autonomy when everyone quietly ends up building roughly the same sort of practice anyway. But what happens when somebody wants something different? When they want to go their own way?

And saying there’s more than one definition of success sounds wonderful until a really good lawyer says, “Well, actually, I have enough. I don’t want to get bigger.”

The real test is whether you still mean it then.

Because that’s what matters. Not what the values page says, but what happens when following those values is less tidy, less convenient, or means resisting the urge to make everyone behave in exactly the same way, as though they’re exactly the same people.

At Legal Studio, our principles are supposed to affect how the firm actually works. And that only really means something if we’re prepared to live with the consequences of them. That means trusting people even when it would sometimes be easier to tell them what to do. Accepting that different lawyers here will build different practices and different lives.

And, as we grow, being a bit suspicious of the instinct to solve every new situation by creating another rule.

That’s very lawyery but it isn’t always right.

We won’t get every decision right. There isn’t a business that will.

But if your values disappear the moment somebody does something differently, they’re not really values.

They’re just rules.