Compare · Solicitors
Most invoices do not need a solicitor. They need somebody who will not stop asking.
A solicitor's letter is a genuinely powerful thing and it is not free, in money or in what it does to the relationship. The question is almost never whether it works. It is whether you have earned it yet.
We are not solicitors, we never pretend to be, and there are debts where going straight to a firm is the right first move rather than the last. Those are listed further down and they are not edge cases.
The short answer
A solicitor is a rung, not an alternative. Credit control is what makes the rung credible when you reach it, and what usually means you do not have to.
Side by side
What each one is actually for.
| Dimension | Going straight to a solicitor | Hound |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Reserved legal work: a letter before action, a claim, advice on your position. | Credit control. Chasing, statutory interest, evidence, and the decision about when a solicitor is warranted. |
| What it costs | A fixed fee per letter, and considerably more to issue a claim. Recoverable in part if you win. | £199 a month for the whole ledger, plus 8% of a qualifying recovery, capped at £1,000 an invoice. |
| When it fits | The debt is undisputed, large, and the debtor has ignored everything reasonable you have already done. | From day three, on every invoice, before any of the above has had a chance to become true. |
| Evidence | You assemble it, or you pay them to. Gaps in your paperwork surface late and expensively. | Assembled as we go, so a matter arrives at a firm already documented rather than reconstructed from memory. |
| Effect on the relationship | Generally terminal. A letter before action is not something a customer forgets. | Designed to be survivable, with the legal step held back as a rung you can decline. |
| Who instructs | You. | Still you. We are your agent and never a party. Nothing reserved is ever done without your approval, by name. |
| Small debts | Frequently uneconomic. Winning can cost more than losing. | We will not let a debt under £750 go to a firm at all, for exactly that reason. |
No ticks and crosses, because these are two different jobs rather than the same job done well and badly. Figures checked 6 August 2026.
01
The letter works partly because of what came before it.
A letter before action arriving out of nowhere is a surprise. Arriving after four documented, dated, increasingly firm approaches from your accounts address, it is a promise being kept.
That matters practically, not just rhetorically. The Pre-Action Protocol expects parties to have engaged before proceedings, and a debtor who can show that the first they heard of a problem was a solicitor's letter has a better story than one who ignored a documented sequence. The chasing is not a softer version of the legal step. It is the thing that makes the legal step land.
02
Most debts never get there, and that is the saving.
The overwhelming majority of overdue invoices are recovered by somebody consistently and unapologetically asking, on a schedule, in a way that makes clear the asking will not stop. No court, no letter before action, no fee.
The value of a credit control service is mostly in the invoices that never become legal matters. If a ladder recovers eight of your ten stuck invoices before rung five, you have saved eight fixed fees and eight relationships, and the two that go on to a firm arrive with a complete evidence pack rather than a shoebox.
03
What we will not do, and will not imply.
We are not solicitors. We do not give legal advice, we do not draft letters before action, we do not issue claims, and nothing we send implies a power we do not have. That last one is a rule with teeth: a chasing letter that dresses itself up as a legal threat is both dishonest and, if it misrepresents your rights, potentially unlawful.
What we do instead is add the statutory interest and fixed compensation the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 already gives you, assemble the correspondence and the invoices into something a firm can act on, and tell you plainly when we think a debt has stopped responding to chasing.
At that point it goes to a regulated firm, at cost, with no margin taken by us, and only after you have approved it by name. You remain the creditor and the instructing party throughout. We are your agent operating the process, not a party to the matter.
04
The threshold we hold ourselves to.
There is a floor in the code, not just in the copy. We will not pass a debt to a firm below £750. Published fixed fees for a letter before action vary widely: Pearson Legal publish £75 + VAT for a simple letter on an outstanding invoice, Rothera Bray publish £255 + VAT. Below our floor, winning starts to cost the client more than losing, and we would have been the ones who set that up.
Court fees are separate again, they are set by HMCTS rather than by any solicitor, and they are the only figures on this site that Parliament controls. Issuing a claim between £1,000 and £1,500 costs £80; between £5,000 and £10,000 it is £455; above £10,000 it is five per cent of the claim. The full schedule is on GOV.UK.
There is a lower floor too. We will not chase at all below £250. The fixed statutory compensation band starts at £40, so on a very small invoice the compensation is a large fraction of the principal and the letter starts to read like a shakedown rather than a business asking to be paid.
Where we are the wrong answer
When to skip us and ring a solicitor today.
These are not hypotheticals. If one of them describes your situation, chasing is the wrong next move and we would tell you so rather than take the subscription.
- The debt is genuinely disputed. A disputed invoice never enters our sequence at all, and what you need is advice on your position rather than a firmer reminder.
- You are in a construction dispute heading for adjudication under the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996. Adjudication is a specialist job with a 28-day clock and it is not credit control.
- A limitation period is close. Six years passes quietly and no amount of chasing fixes a claim that has become time-barred.
- The debtor is insolvent, in administration, or you are considering a statutory demand. That is legal territory from the first step.
- You need advice about your contract rather than your invoice. We can tell you what is overdue and what the 1998 Act adds to it. We cannot tell you what your contract means, and we will not guess.
We would rather you read that and go elsewhere than sign up and work it out in a month. If one of those lines is you, the honest answer is that we are not the thing to buy.
Straight answers
What people ask about the legal end.
Are you solicitors?
No, and we never pretend to be. Hound is credit control. When a debt needs a letter before action or a court claim it goes to a regulated legal partner at cost, and only after you have approved it. Nothing we send implies a power we do not have.
Can I just send a letter before action myself?
You can, and for a straightforward undisputed commercial debt plenty of people do. It needs to comply with the relevant pre-action protocol, set out the sum and the basis for it, and give a reasonable period to respond. If you get that wrong the court can take a dim view of it later, which is the main argument for having somebody do it who does it every week.
Do you take a cut of the solicitor's fee?
No. Legal costs are passed to you at cost, we tell you the figure before anything is instructed, and we take no referral fee and no margin. We would rather say that plainly than have you wonder why we recommended escalation.
Who is the client if it goes to a firm?
You are, throughout. You are the creditor and the instructing party, we are your authorised agent operating the process, and we are not a party to the matter. Every referral records by name the person who gave the instruction.
What if I need advice before any of this?
Then go and get it, and do not let us slow you down. We are the wrong first call for anything that turns on what your contract says, on whether a dispute is real, or on a deadline you might be close to missing.
Start
Hand us the worst one and see what happens.
Debt Rescue is a 60-day trial on a single stuck invoice. Nothing is charged up front, and if we have recovered nothing by day 60 we cancel it ourselves and you are charged nothing at all. That is the entire cost of finding out whether any of the above is true.