A small first floor office desk with files, a lamp and a window onto the street

About

A small office above a shop in Hampton, and a filing cabinet that does most of the work

BramleyCase started in 2022 after a run of the same conversation. Somebody had bought a car, or paid a builder, or lost a deposit, and had been told by two solicitors that the sum in dispute was smaller than the cost of doing anything about it. Both solicitors were being honest. That is genuinely how the economics work below about five thousand pounds.

What was left for those people was a search engine, a forum thread from 2016, and a template letter that begins “I am writing to express my disappointment”. That letter never works. It has no dates, it cites nothing, it asks for justice rather than a specific sum by a specific day, and the person reading it at the other end has seen four hundred of them.

So the business is narrow on purpose. We do the written stage of small civil disputes, at a fixed price, and we stop at the line where the Legal Services Act 2007 says an unregulated person must stop. Being unregulated is not a gap we are hoping you overlook. It is the reason we can charge a hundred and forty five pounds for something a firm would have to bill at four hundred, and it is why the scope of what we do is described on this website in more detail than most people want to read.

What has changed since the first year

Two things, both from getting it wrong. The first is that we now put the written position note before the letter rather than after. Early on we would draft the letter, send it for approval, and only then discover that the client had a document that changed the picture. Doing the assessment first costs us a day and saves everybody a fortnight.

The second is the refusal rate, which we did not expect. Roughly a third of first calls end with us saying no. Some are reserved work. Some are matters where a free ombudsman will do a better job than any letter we could write. Some are simply weak, and the honest thing is to say so while it is still a phone call rather than an invoice. We track that number and we are not trying to reduce it.

Shelf of ring binders with handwritten spine labels
Closed files are kept six years, which is the limitation period on a simple contract, then destroyed.
View from the office window onto a suburban high street
Percy Road. The office is above street level, up a staircase with no lift, which we mention because it matters to some people.
A paper diary open beside a keyboard with dates marked
Every deadline goes in paper as well as software. It has caught two errors that the software did not.

Who does the work

There are two of us and we do not publish photographs, because a portrait on a website tells you nothing about whether somebody reads a contract carefully. What follows is what we can and cannot do, which is the part that affects you.

Casework

Victoria Bramley, director

Owns the company and reads every file that comes into it. Fifteen years in contract administration and dispute handling inside two service businesses before this, dealing with the customer facing end of things that had gone wrong. Not a solicitor, has never claimed to be, and holds no practising certificate.

Handles every document review, every position note and every letter. If you telephone during the working week this is usually who answers.

Files & administration

The person who keeps the diary

Runs the diary, the file index, the post and the proof of delivery. Part time, three days a week, and responsible for the fact that in four years we have not missed a response date on a matter we were handling.

Does not give any view on the merits of a matter, and will not be drawn on one, which is the correct answer rather than an unhelpful one.

Four things we will not do, whatever the fee

  1. Take a case to keep the month busy

    If the papers do not support what you want, you hear that on the first call. The refusal rate is around a third and we would rather it went up than down.

  2. Predict an outcome

    We give an honest view of strength. We do not tell you that you will win, we do not publish a success rate, and we treat any adviser who does either with suspicion.

  3. Carry out reserved work quietly

    Rights of audience, conduct of litigation, reserved instruments, probate, notarial acts and oaths are reserved by Schedule 2 of the Legal Services Act 2007. We do none of them and we do not blur the edges of that list.

  4. Chase you after a no

    If you decide not to instruct us, that is the end of it. No sequence of emails, no follow up call three weeks later, and your details are deleted after twelve months as the privacy policy says.

If you want to check we are real, telephone before you send anything

020 8972 1652 during the working week. Ask whatever you like, including how long we have been doing this and what we are not allowed to do.

Contact details