Winter market season is expensive enough. Your legal advice doesn’t need to be

September is application season. Christmas markets, winter food festivals, town centre trading spots – the applications are going out now, and the pitch agreements are landing in your inbox soon after. Most of them come with a deadline attached and no real room to negotiate once you’ve paid your fee. You read it quickly, you sign it, you move on to the next one. Most of the time that’s fine. Occasionally it isn’t, and by the time it matters, you’re already bound by terms you skimmed rather than read.

What’s actually in these agreements

A pitch or event licence usually covers what happens to your fee if the event is cancelled, what insurance you’re required to hold, and what you’re liable for if something goes wrong on site. Some organisers set this out fairly. Some quietly push more risk onto traders than they’d accept if they stopped to think about it, a non-refundable fee even if the organiser cancels, or a liability clause that goes further than it needs to. None of it is obvious from a quick read, and none of it looks urgent until the week it suddenly is.

Where the PAYG package actually helps

This is worth being precise about, because it’s not what people always assume. PAYG hours are quick, practical advice, not drafting and not a formal document review. What that means here is a phone call before you sign: talk through what a clause actually commits you to, whether the cancellation terms are normal for the sector, and whether it’s worth pushing back before your money is in the organiser’s account rather than after. Ten or fifteen minutes, usually, out of hours you’ve already paid for. If an agreement genuinely needs marking up or renegotiating line by line, that’s a different job, either a proper document review or ongoing support, and we’ll tell you straight if that’s what it needs rather than let you think a phone call has covered something it hasn’t.

“I used the PAYG package and used to ask what I thought were stupid little questions, “Should I be worried about this clause?”, ” Is this normal?”, “Can I actually enforce that?” I was almost embarrassed asking half of them. Rachael never once made me feel like a question was too silly or that I should have known the answer already. We were so happy with how it worked that we upgraded to the Essential support package, so now Rachael helps review and provide feedback on our emails, letters and contracts before they get sent out, not just answer questions about them after they’ve been sent”

What it actually costs you not to have it

£595 for three hours works out at roughly £198 an hour. Ad hoc advice from a solicitor typically runs somewhere between £250-£350 an hour plus VAT, and that’s before you’ve spent time finding someone who understands catering and explaining your business from scratch. A call before you sign a pitch agreement, or a quick question about a confusing clause before it catches you out, and the package has already paid for itself, with hours left over for whatever else the season brings.

Worth asking yourself before you sign the next pitch agreement

Do you actually know what happens to your fee if the organiser cancels the event? If you’re not sure, that’s a five-minute question worth asking before you sign, not after.

Not sure where to start?

That’s exactly what the free consultation is for. As an NCASS member, you’re entitled to a free 30-minute legal telephone consultation with us, no obligation, just a straightforward conversation about where your business is exposed and what would actually help.

Get in touch and let’s make sure you’re ready before you need to be.

📨 [email protected]

Or call your nearest office:

☎ 0118 321 4188 (Berkshire & Home Counties)

☎ 01260 212414 (Cheshire & Northwest)

☎ 01843 808021(Kent & Southeast)