Employment law support for charities and non-profits
A qualified solicitor on your team — same working day, unlimited questions — at a cost that makes sense for an organisation accountable for every pound.
Every employer's risk, rarely the budget to match.
Charities carry precisely the same employment law obligations as any commercial employer. A grievance, a redundancy consultation, a disciplinary, a TUPE transfer — the law makes no allowance for a smaller budget or a stretched team.
What charities usually don't have is in-house legal support. Employment questions land with a chief executive, a director of finance and resources, or a single HR generalist already covering recruitment, payroll and everything else. And instructing a law firm for a day-to-day question is difficult to justify when hourly rates are measured against restricted funds and a trustee board's expectations.
A familiar pattern: questions get parked, decisions get made on instinct, and problems that could have been resolved in a five-minute conversation surface months later as formal claims.
The employment law pressures specific to charities.
Trustee accountability without employment expertise
Trustees carry real duties, but most are volunteers with no employment law background. When a difficult people issue reaches the board, the question “are we handling this correctly?” is one nobody in the room can answer with confidence.
Funding cycles drive restructuring
When a grant ends or a contract isn't renewed, restructuring and redundancy follow — often at speed, often affecting people who are deeply committed to the cause. Consultation obligations, selection criteria and process requirements all apply, and the compressed timescales are exactly when process errors happen.
Complex workforce structures
Charities frequently combine employees, volunteers, sessional and casual workers, secondees and people on supported-employment arrangements. Worker status questions are genuinely difficult, and getting them wrong carries consequences for pay, holiday, pensions and claims.
TUPE on commissioned services
Charities delivering public-service contracts face TUPE when services transfer in or out — with all the consultation, information and measures obligations that involves.
Mission-driven workforces and burnout
Deep personal commitment is a strength, but it correlates with long hours, blurred boundaries and burnout — which surfaces as sickness absence, grievances and, sometimes, protected disclosures.
Reputational exposure
An employment dispute at a charity is not just a legal and financial problem. It can attract press attention, funder questions, and — where it overlaps with safeguarding or serious incidents — regulatory scrutiny. The reputational cost frequently exceeds the legal one.
Every pound is accountable
A tribunal award, a settlement or even the legal costs of defending a claim represent money that was raised for beneficiaries and spent elsewhere. That is the calculation that makes prevention so much more valuable to a charity than to a commercial employer.
How Counsl works for charities.
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We plug into the systems you already use
Counsl integrates with Microsoft Teams and your HR system, so advice sits where your team already works.
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Ask in plain English
No formal instructions, no need to frame the question like a lawyer.
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The platform prepares the ground
Counsl gathers the employee's contract and your relevant policies, asks any follow-up questions, and briefs the solicitor — which is what makes the response fast.
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A qualified solicitor answers
A practising solicitor, not an AI, reviews every query and replies with clear, confidential, practical advice, same working day. You can book a call whenever you'd rather talk it through.
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The record keeps itself
Every query and answer is logged automatically in a secure case file, encrypted and held on UK and EU-based servers, never uploaded to a generic AI. No separate paper trail to maintain — and if a matter ever escalates, an anonymised summary of the whole history at the click of a button. For reporting to a board or a funder, that record is worth having.
More detail on how Counsl works and the platform.
What we help with.
- Grievances and disciplinary processes
- Redundancy and restructuring
- Consultation requirements
- TUPE on service transfers
- Employment contracts and policies
- Worker, volunteer and casual status questions
- Sickness absence and capability
- Performance management
- Flexible working requests
- Discrimination questions
- Whistleblowing and protected disclosures
- Settlement and exit conversations
Prevention, not litigation.
Traditional employment solicitors are usually engaged once a dispute has escalated, and their model benefits when it does. Counsl is built the other way round.
We are not a litigation firm. We don't take on tribunal claims. Our model is early intervention — fast, correct advice on everyday matters so issues are resolved properly and never escalate.
For a charity, that isn't only a legal argument. Every claim avoided is money that stays with your beneficiaries.
We believe the best employment tribunal claim is the one that never gets filed.
Questions from charities.
Yes. Every query is read and answered by a qualified, practising solicitor. The platform handles information-gathering; a real person gives the advice and signs it off. You can also book a call.
Pricing is based on headcount and includes unlimited queries, so it's predictable and scales with your size. Smaller organisations are welcome — we'll tailor a plan to your budget. See how pricing works.
The advice comes from a qualified solicitor, and every matter is documented in a secure case file. If your board needs assurance that an issue was handled properly, the record is there.
No. Queries are unlimited. The model only works if your team feels able to ask early.
All data is encrypted and stored on UK and EU-based servers, in compliance with GDPR, and is never uploaded to a generic AI tool or used to train any AI model.
HR advisers give general good-practice guidance. Counsl gives you advice from a qualified solicitor, grounded in the law, together with a structured record of what was advised and when.
No — we're built to help you avoid them. If something does escalate, we'll help you understand your position and can refer you on.
More answers — data security, confidentiality, how we differ from a law firm — on the FAQ page.
