Who we are, what we can do, what we cannot, and why the second half of that sentence is on the page rather than buried in the small print.
Business Debt Recovery is a trading style of Buzz Legal Ltd. Buzz Legal exists because most of what a business actually needs from a lawyer is not reserved to lawyers, and paying £250 to £350 an hour for it makes no sense. Debt recovery is the clearest example there is.
Recovering an unpaid invoice is, for the most part, unregulated work. Establishing who the debtor legally is, checking the debt is in time, calculating the statutory interest and compensation, drafting the letter before action, negotiating, agreeing a payment plan that can be enforced — none of that is reserved by law to anyone. It is also where the overwhelming majority of commercial debt is actually recovered.
The Legal Services Act 2007 reserves six activities to regulated firms. Two of them matter in debt recovery: exercising a right of audience, and conducting litigation — which includes issuing a claim. We do neither.
When a case needs them it goes to RHF Solicitors (SRA no. 324115), where Robert Festenstein is a solicitor and Head of Legal. That is a genuine referral to a regulated firm, not a badge on a website. It also means you do not change supplier at the worst possible moment: we stay on the file, and the people who wrote the letter before action are still the people you speak to.
Because Buzz Legal Ltd is not SRA regulated, you do not have access to the SRA compensation fund, the SRA's complaints process, or the Legal Ombudsman in respect of our work. We carry professional indemnity insurance and we have our own complaints procedure, but that is not the same thing, and you should know it before you instruct us rather than afterwards. Work done by RHF Solicitors is covered by their regulation, not ours.
Commercial debt collection is usually sold on commission, and commission has a problem: it is charged on money that was always yours, and it is charged most heavily where the work was least. A £40,000 invoice that pays on the first letter costs the same percentage as one that took a year and a judgment.
We charge for the work, agreed in writing before it starts. It also removes the incentive that matters most to you: when the honest answer is that a debt is not worth chasing, we can say so without it costing us the whole case. We would rather lose one fee than sell you five steps that end in a judgment against an empty company.
England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland — but they are not the same job and we will tell you which one you are in before you spend anything. Scotland has its own courts and its own procedure, including a charge for payment before diligence. Northern Ireland has its own rules and enforcement runs through the Enforcement of Judgments Office rather than through bailiffs or High Court enforcement officers. The statutory interest and compensation entitlement applies across the whole United Kingdom.
Buzz has offices and people in England and in Northern Ireland, which is a practical advantage on Northern Irish debt that most recovery firms cannot offer.
Buzz Legal Ltd sits alongside Buzz Accounting and the rest of the group. That matters here more than it usually does, because debt recovery runs into accounting questions constantly — VAT bad debt relief, writing off a ledger, whether a customer's filed accounts suggest they can pay. If you already have an accountant, we work with them. If you would rather the whole thing sat in one place, that is available too.
Contract work — payment terms, retention of title, personal guarantees, the documents that stop this happening again — sits with Buzz Legal on fixed fees.
The five stages, what you can add to the debt, and the letter-before-action checklist.
Tell us what you are owed and who owes it. You get back what the debt is actually worth once interest and compensation are added, what we would do first, and the fixed fee for doing it.