What it costs
What legal read costs — and what you're actually buying
A publishing solicitor's legal read costs £250–£500 an hour, or £1,500–£5,000 for a full read. The time is driven by how much of the manuscript carries risk, which is why narrowing what you send them is the single biggest saving available.
What good looks like
- A publishing solicitor, not a general one
- A written report identifying specific passages and the specific risk
- Practical alternatives, not just deletions
- Clear about what is a real risk and what is a theoretical one
A separate free preview: A free outside view of your own pages
A separate editorial preview of one extract; it does not read the whole book or do the specialist job this page describes. Send up to 5,000 words. You get back what the draft appears to be doing to somebody who wasn't there when you wrote it, the strongest thing in it named, the exact place a reader starts to drift, and three revision priorities in order.
A separate editorial preview of one extract; it does not read the whole book or do the specialist job this page describes. An AI-assisted read of your own pages. Not a human edit, not a line edit, and not a scored report.
What you are actually buying
A legal read identifies where a manuscript creates exposure: defamation, privacy, confidentiality, and material about living people or ongoing disputes. It is standard practice in trade publishing for memoir and investigative non-fiction.
Why it costs that
A publishing solicitor's legal read is billed on time, and the time is driven by how much of the manuscript carries risk. A memoir naming several living people takes far longer than a novel with none. Rates reflect specialist expertise — defamation and privacy work is a narrow field and the people who do it well are not general practitioners.
How to spend less
Narrow the scope before you instruct anyone. A solicitor reading 90,000 words bills for 90,000 words; a solicitor reading fourteen flagged passages and a summary of the rest bills for far less and gives you a sharper answer. Also remove what is doing no work — a good deal of risky material is in a manuscript out of momentum rather than necessity.
What good looks like
- A publishing solicitor, not a general one
- A written report identifying specific passages and the specific risk
- Practical alternatives, not just deletions
- Clear about what is a real risk and what is a theoretical one
Questions to ask them
- Have you done publishing work specifically?
- Will you tell me what to change, or only what is risky?
- What is your hourly rate and how long do you expect this to take?
Red flags
- A general commercial solicitor with no publishing experience
- Advice to remove everything identifiable, which removes the book
- No written output
Honestly
This is not optional for a memoir involving living people who will not enjoy it. It is also cheaper the earlier you do it: at proof stage a problem chapter is load-bearing, and unpicking it means reopening a book you had finished.
About Your Book Pro
Your Book Pro is a book-writing platform built in Britain. Start with an idea, notes, half a draft, a podcast, or a finished manuscript, and use our purpose-built AI tools for planning, feedback, editing, proofreading, cover designs, and to create print-ready files. Writing is totally free: you can type, upload or speak your book as much as you like, and use only the editing tools you need with Plus, or go unlimited with Pro.
Produce world-class drafts at the fraction of the cost of hiring a human editorial team.
Every account starts with 1,000 welcome credits, and a plain export of your own words is free.
These prices are here to be used, not to sell you something — brief a freelancer with them, sanity-check a quote, or work out what you actually need. Where Your Book Pro changes the arithmetic, the page says so; where it does not, it says that too.
This is not optional for a memoir involving living people who will not enjoy it. It is also cheaper the earlier you do it: at proof stage a problem chapter is load-bearing, and unpicking it means reopening a book you had finished.
What it costs
| What you are buying | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Publishing solicitor, hourly | £250–£500/hr | UK specialist media law rates |
| Full legal read of a memoir | £1,500–£5,000 | 6–10 hrs at the above |
CIEP suggested minimum rates effective 1 March 2026; Books.by; publishing.co.uk; The Ghostwriters Agency. Dated 9 September 2026.
Screen your manuscript
Email me my free review linkQuestions people ask
- Do I need a legal read?
- If the book names living people in ways that could damage them, or discloses private information about identifiable individuals, it is worth taking advice.
- How much does a legal read cost?
- Roughly £1,500–£5,000 depending on length and how much of the book carries risk.
- Does changing names protect me?
- Not by itself. The test is whether the person is identifiable to people who know them.
- Is truth a defence?
- To defamation, yes, if you can demonstrate it. To misuse of private information, no — and that is the risk memoir writers most often miss.