Talk through a consumer law issue with a New Zealand lawyer

You can use the consultation for a wide range of business-facing consumer law questions, including refunds, returns, website statements, disclaimers, customer complaints, sales scripts, promotions, pricing issues or whether your customer terms are saying the right things. It is best suited to a defined issue you want legal input on, rather than a full audit of all business practices. If you send through any key documents or wording in advance, the lawyer can use the call to focus on the practical issue rather than spending time identifying the basics.

It is often a good fit for small businesses, founders, marketing teams and operators who have a specific consumer law concern and want quick legal clarity before taking the next step. That might be a business responding to a customer complaint, updating website wording, checking a refund position or deciding whether a promotion needs further legal work. It is less suited to large-scale reviews across multiple channels or documents. In those cases, the consultation can still help identify the main issues and whether a broader service would be more appropriate.

A short consultation can identify obvious issues, explain the legal position on the facts you describe and point out where your current approach may create risk, but it is not the same as a full compliance audit. Whether a business is compliant often depends on the exact wording used, the sales process, the product or service involved and how customer interactions happen in practice. If you need a deeper review of documents, website copy or promotions, we can recommend a more suitable fixed-fee service after the call.

The most helpful preparation is to send through the exact material you want to discuss, such as customer terms, website wording, a complaint email, refund policy, promotion copy or screenshots of the relevant sales flow. It also helps to note the outcome you are trying to achieve, for example whether you want to respond to a complaint, update wording or check a proposed approach before launch. That gives the lawyer enough context to use the 30 minutes efficiently and keep the advice tied to the issue that matters most.

If the consultation shows that your business needs further legal work, we can outline the next option rather than leaving you with a vague recommendation. That may involve a document review, updated customer terms, an advertising claims review or more detailed advice on a complaint or refund process. You are not locked into ongoing support by booking the consultation. The call is intended to help you understand the issue first, then decide whether any follow-up legal work is worth doing based on the level of risk and what you need to fix.

Just submit an enquiry via this page or click the 'get started' button on our website to submit an enquiry. After you've submitted an enquiry, one of our legal consultants will review your enquiry within 1 business day and get in touch to get a better idea of exactly what you are looking for.

Then your legal consultant will send through an email with a bit more information about the services you need, along with a fixed fee quote setting out costs, scope of the service and timing. Have a read through it, and if you're happy with the scope, you can accept and sign our engagement letter online - easy!

Once you've formally accepted, we'll connect you with a specialist lawyer and they will work with you to complete your project. They will contact you by email or phone if they need to get in touch.

Sprintlaw works on fixed-fee pricing wherever possible, so you can review the scope and cost before you decide whether to proceed. For the Consumer Law Consultation service, pricing starts from $200.00.

After you enquire, a legal consultant will confirm what is included, the expected timing and whether any extra work is needed before you engage us.

We operate completely online, which means we can help you wherever you are in New Zealand. We have office spaces in Sydney, and in Melbourne, but our use of technology allows our team members to work remotely from around the world. Our legal team are mostly based in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. We also have a London office for Sprintlaw UK.

Our legal team is made up of experienced lawyers, who are specialists in various areas of law and hold an Australian legal practising certificate. None of our Sprintlaw lawyers are New Zealand qualified lawyers and they do not currently hold a New Zealand practising certificate.

They provide legal services working remotely from Australia via our 'legal consultancy' model, through which (under section 6 and section 35 of the New Zealand Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006) our Australian legal team are permitted to provide legal services to New Zealand businesses provided they do not provide services in certain 'reserved' areas of law. You can read our FAQ page to learn a bit more about our 'legal consultancy' model.

Given the strong similarities between Australian and New Zealand law, and the areas of law in which we practice (being small business and startup law), we do not view the fact that our lawyers have not qualified in New Zealand as having any substantive impact on the quality of our service. We are committed to ensuring that we provide high quality, affordable legal services to all our New Zealand clients.

Our legal team have all trained at leading firms, but have left the traditional corporate law world to join us on our mission to create a new and better way of delivering legal services. They have specialist expertise in technology law, intellectual property law, contract drafting and review, corporate law and commercial law.