We are legal recruiters with over 45 years combined experience in the UK and offshore. Solicitor owned, donating 10% of annual profits to charity (hence our name). Small enough to be personal, large enough to be recognised, we provide services to lawyers from the start of their legal careers through to retirement. Niche commercial, high street solicitors’ firms, Legal 500 and in house legal departments all covered.
Personal, Small and Friendly
Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited is a small, specialist online UK Legal Recruitment consultancy, established in April 2000 by two of the current directors, Jonathan and Clare Fagan. We are privately owned and concentrate on the recruitment of Solicitors, Legal Executives, management and legal support staff for both permanent and locum roles. Over 10,000 solicitors are registered with our agency and we work with hundreds of law firms and in house legal departments across the UK and offshore.
Our Vision and Purpose
Vision
- Our vision is to be seen as a reputable and reliable recruitment service for law firms and legal departments across the globe.
- At the same time to provide a cost-efficient service to all users and offer free & paid ancillary services running parallel to our main legal recruitment business.
- We aim to innovate and have services on the site that are not available anywhere else.
- We promote the concept of donating a percentage of annual profits to charity and encourage other companies to do the same.
Purpose
- To provide a recruitment service that does not just put candidates and clients together but develops structured relationships that last for many years.
- To ensure that the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment brand is so well known that it builds value and goodwill.
- Legal recruitment is never going to enable us to buy an island in the Caribbean to retire to, but it would be nice…
We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office and our consultants are all members of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC). We are Cyber Essentials Accredited (a UK government IT security accreditation scheme). We hold £2 million Professional Indemnity Insurance, £2 million Public Liability Insurance and £10 million Employers Liability Insurance.
Job Hunting Lawyers
When you register with us, we let the firms in the area you seek employment know that we have a candidate looking for a particular type of work and give them a reference number. If interested, they contact us, and we let you know the firm’s details. If you are interested, we contact the firm and arrange an interview for you, letting the firm know your name at that point.
We do not send out personal details, and never identify you prior to you giving us consent to reveal your name to firms.
We are different because:
1. We do not pressure you into accepting positions or interviews, but instead make you aware of the opportunity to speak to interested firms.
2. We do not have a quota of CV’s to send out, there are no targets for us to reach, we do not employ salespeople to “sell” candidates and we are pleased for you regardless of how you obtain work (ie with or without our services).
3. We do not telephone you constantly or bombard you with emails. We will contact you by email and text with new vacancies and a monthly newsletter, and apart from chasing for interview feedback we do not make it a habit to harass candidates.
We cover all fields of law but mainly:
Child Care, Civil Litigation, Clinical Negligence, Commercial Contracts, Commercial Litigation, Commercial Property, Company/Commercial, Compliance, Construction, Conveyancing (Residential), Corporate, Crime, Debt Recovery, Employment, Family/Matrimonial, General In House Counsel Roles, Housing, Immigration, Insolvency, Intellectual Property, Landlord & Tenant, Law Costs Draftsmen, Mental Health, Mergers & Acquisitions, Pensions, Personal Injury, Planning, Plot Sales, Prison Law, Private Client, Probate (Contentious), Professional Negligence, Property Litigation, Public Sector, Real Estate, Shipping Law, SME Business Advice, Sports Law, Taxation, Trademarks, Trusts & Tax, Wills & Probate.
The Ten Percent Group of Websites
Ten Percent Legal Recruitment is part of the Ten Percent Group of websites, mostly owned by Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited and TP Recruitment Limited. The group includes the Interim Lawyers website (our locum platform), TenPercentUnlimited (our unlimited recruitment service), Jonathan Fagan Law Firm Sales, Crime Solicitor Recruitment, Home Counties Legal Recruitment, www.lawyer-recruitment.co.uk (directory of legal recruitment agencies in the UK), www.legal-recruitment.co.uk (our monthly newsletter homepage), www.tp-secretaries.co.uk (specialist permanent legal secretary recruitment) and other regional sub sites. We also part own www.universitytranscriptions.co.uk and www.tptranscription.co.uk, both specialist online academic and business transcription & translation services. For details of all the websites in our group please visit www.tenpercentgroup.com.
Our History
Jonathan Fagan, our Managing Director, was a trainee solicitor in 1999 and began applying for newly qualified solicitor roles in the Midlands. He explains why he started Ten-Percent:
“It was quite clear that the recruitment agencies I applied for jobs through were simply churning CVs. A couple of consultants rang me to explain where they were going to send my CV to, and it was blindingly obvious they had a mailing list of all the law firms in the East Midlands and my CV was being sent out to all of them. I got interviews with solicitors’ firms who were offering me starting salaries of £19-20,000 and complaining about how much the agencies were charging for hardly doing any work. I asked one of the consultants at a larger recruitment agency (Michael Page) how much their fee was and he explained that it was 25% of my first year’s annual wage. I could not believe that firms were paying this for me, a newly qualified solicitor. At the time all communication was by phone, fax and letter and I spotted that there was a clear gap in the market for an internet based recruitment company”.
No Online Legal Recruitment in 2000
“No agencies were online at the time. A few had websites, but their business model was for face to face meetings, working the telephone and advertising in the trade journals. We decided to do the complete opposite and set up online with no face to face meetings, as little telephone contact as possible and no advertising.”
Recruitment is so easy. At least, that’s what we were told by everyone we spoke to. When we set up the business we thought that money would be pouring in, the company would be global within 6 months, and within two years we would be retiring to live offshore in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands! We were so confident of our future success that before we had even earned a penny we decided that it would be a great idea to commit to donating 10% of our profits to charity. We set this in stone by calling ourselves ‘Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited’, which has bound us to the obligation ever since..
Full Time Solicitor – Part Time Recruitment
It took us just under 12 months to get our first commission – a crime solicitor in a high street practice in Suffolk. The company was operated by a mobile phone using WAP (remember that?) as Jonathan continued to practice as a high street solicitor in Nottingham. Most days were spent at work as a lawyer and evenings spent working on our online presence, contacting solicitors firms and trying to recruit more candidates. Running a start up company – learning to programme and set up a website from scratch, dealing with Companies House, learning sales & marketing techniques and holding down a full time job – meant that there wasn’t a lot of time to do anything else! Leisure time became a thing of the past..
After a couple of years in practice and rather a lot of weekends and evenings spent running Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment, it was quite obvious that something had to give. Jonathan gave up his day job and became our first full time recruitment consultant. At the time we were based in Oadby, Leicestershire and within a year or so we had an office in West Yorkshire as well, even though a good percentage of our work has always been in London and the South East of England.
Office Relocation from Leicester to Chester
In 2003 we moved the company office to Mold in North Wales (near Chester). After realising that trying to do accounts and run a business is guaranteed to ensure complete frustration and lots of heads banging on walls, we recruited a Finance Director to handle our finances and avoid too many late nights wrestling with VAT returns on Sage!
Recession in 2008
By 2005 we were working across the UK, concentrating on permanent legal jobs. Four other consultants joined us and the legal job market had never looked better.. We began looking for larger offices and increased all our advertising budgets etc.. as we anticipated a rapid expansion in our sales still further. Alas, after forming in 2000 as markets were on the up, we experienced the flip side of running your own company as the recession hit us hard in 2008. Our sales figures went off a cliff as a good proportion of our business was in permanent conveyancing, a bad place to be in 2008. A good number of conveyancers ended up out of work; stacking shelves at Tesco and driving buses became commonplace.
Fortunately we were able to reduce our overheads quickly and thanks to our experience in legal careers (we provided extensive legal careers services at the time) we survived; in part due to a contract we were awarded by the DWP – career coaching newly unemployed professionals.
Unlimited Recruitment and the Future
In 2011 we launched the UK’s second unlimited legal recruitment service (LawStaff Online – now defunct – was the first) and developed www.tenpercentunlimited.co.uk to enable firms to avoid agency fees altogether whilst still receiving recruitment agency services.
By 2015 our business has evolved still further. We now undertake about 50% locum work and 50% permanent placements, with clients who use our unlimited recruitment service and also those who use our standard recruitment agency model including our 12 month instalments and rebate periods.
Over 10,000 solicitors and legal executives are registered with us – a good number stay with us for the duration of their careers. We estimate that over 1,500 law firms have used our services since April 2000.
We get over 60,000 hits per month from lawyers using our recruitment services and law students using our legal careers information portal. We get a very significant proportion of our work through personal recommendations from candidates and clients whom we have already assisted.
The Ten-Percent Foundation
In 2002 we established a charitable trust called the Ten-Percent Foundation. For further information about our charitable donations to date you can visit the Ten-Percent Foundation website. We have maintained our commitment to donating 10% of our profits through good times and bad times, and are always on the lookout for new projects to support.
Finally… if you haven’t read enough, watch Jonathan Fagan, our MD, walk through a field and tell you a bit more!