Charities are subject to a special legal framework imposing significant restrictions, responsibilities, and requirements on the organisation and those responsible for running it. These can be significantly more complex than those which non-charitable organisations need to comply with.
Charities today face a complex range of legal, regulatory, financial, political and commercial challenges, and ensuring your charity complies with its own governing document, and the wider charity law framework, is a key responsibility of all charity trustees.
It is vital to their success that all charities can call upon specialist charity legal support when they need it, which is why our dedicated team of charity law solicitors are available to support you and ensure that you meet your key responsibilities.
All our offerings come with our deep knowledge and understanding of the charity sector, clear advice, practical solutions for you, prompt responses, and transparent legal costs.
Our charity law compliance support
We are able to provide integrated, specialist legal support on all aspects of charity law compliance. Whatever your legal issue, our full spectrum of advice ensures a comprehensive solution for your charity, with your charitable purposes and the needs of your beneficiaries at the forefront. Our support includes:
- Registering new charities, for example CIOs (charitable incorporated organisations)
- Incorporating existing charities as CIOs or charitable companies limited by guarantee
- Trustee duties and responsibilities (including providing ‘in house’ training to trustee boards)
- Constitutional issues and updates
- Governance issues, policies and procedures, including compliance with the Charity Governance Code
- Obtaining Charity Commission consents and permissions
- Charity law implications of property transactions and developments
- Funding and finance issues including secured lending and social investment
- Fundraising, donations and appeals, including arrangements with professional fundraisers and commercial sponsors and compliance with the Code of Fundraising Practice
- Trading arrangements including establishing trading subsidiaries and related governance arrangements
- Trustee payments and other benefits
- Charity collaborations, joint ventures, restructures and other major corporate transactions
Charity mergers and dissolution We can also support you when if things do go wrong, providing advice on what to do next so you can be certain you are taking the right steps at the right time.
- Making serious incident reports (SIRs) to the Charity Commission
- Helping charities and their trustees respond to Charity Commission investigations and inquiries
- Helping charities respond to complaints from the public
Supporting charities every step of the way
We are one of very few law firms in the South West with genuine specialist, in-depth, charity law expertise, as well as being recognised as a leading firm for charity law by the independent Legal 500 and Chambers legal directories.
Our team is led by James Evans, who is one of very few senior charity specialist lawyers based west of Bristol, working exclusively with charities, social enterprises, education institutions and other ‘social purpose’ organisations.