Employers

We cover all types of law if we get instructions from firms and in house legal departments. Our main areas where we do most business are with small-medium sized solicitors firms either on the high street, or in niche commercial practices in the City of London or regions. Although we have links and occasional dealings with larger city & corporate/commercial firms, we are not so busy in these areas.

We like to support firms that still provide legal aid work, but sadly we often find that recruitment is simply not possible because candidate expectations on salary are very different to the levels being offered by the firms. In the past we have worked a lot with crime, mental health, immigration, housing and family legal aid posts, but its very rare we get much on these fronts at present.

On the in house legal department side we have dealt with companies across the UK of all shapes and sizes and in all industries. We have worked with multi-national blue chip companies as well as SMEs looking for a very part time in house legal counsel.

We have worked with clients as diverse as offshore private practice law firms, in-house departments, charities, local authorities, licensed conveyancers and international law practices.

Main types of law covered:

Child Care, Civil Litigation, Clinical Negligence, Commercial Contracts, Commercial Litigation, Commercial Property, Company/Commercial, Compliance, Construction, Conveyancing (Residential), Corporate, Debt Recovery, Employment, Family/Matrimonial, General In House Counsel Roles, Immigration (Corporate & Personal), Insolvency, Intellectual Property, Landlord & Tenant, Law Costs Draftsmen, Mergers & Acquisitions, Pensions, Personal Injury, Planning, Plot Sales, 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.

We provide specialist legal recruitment services, usually on a contingency basis. Most of our recruitment is done from our database of candidates, carefully built up over the last 25 years. Our services include:

• Salary reviews & advice
• Legal recruitment for fee earner, legal executive, solicitor and paralegal roles
• Locum & interim assignments
• Permanent recruitment
• Contingency search & selection
• Headhunting (at our discretion)
• Law firm mergers & acquisitions
• Law firm valuations
• Exit strategy advice & assistance
• Subscription based legal recruitment

Our legal recruitment fees for permanent and locum roles are outlined here. We believe in transparency when it comes to fees and we publish ours online in full. We do not negotiate on fees and if you find agencies cheaper elsewhere we are very pleased for you!

Uniquely, solicitors’ firms and in house legal department clients are always offered 12 month instalment & rebate periods for all permanent legal recruitment undertaken through us.

Candidates (ie solicitors looking for work) do not pay any fees to us:- to charge a person to find a job is illegal in the UK.

Headhunters are legal recruitment consultants who either source well-regarded solicitors via their network or simply cold call as many as possible via a LinkedIn Premium account (depending on your level of cynicism) to try to persuade them to change firms with offers of high salary or better terms. Most recruitment consultants offer a headhunting service and call it “search and selection”.

We do offer headhunting services. Our company has been around for 25 years and we have a network of connections, registered candidates, and extensive contacts in the legal profession. However we choose which clients we provide the service to and also for which roles. There is no point headhunting unless we have something to sell to candidates, so we will only agree to take an assignment if we can see the clear benefit to a potential candidate in joining your business. We charge an upfront fee in addition to our standard introduction fees for this service. If you would like to discuss using us to headhunt candidates, please contact us.

We have over 12,500 solicitors and legal executives registered with us, mostly on a passive basis (ie they are not necessarily looking for a role at the present time. Most of our recruitment comes from this resource, but we do also advertise roles out on various job boards.

We are specialist contingency search recruitment consultants for the legal profession in the UK. This means that law firms and in house legal departments send us their legal vacancies, and if we are successful in finding a suitable candidate who subsequently accepts a job offer, we get paid a fee. We concentrate mainly on qualified staff, including solicitors and legal executives.

Law firms and in house departments can use us as retained consultants, which means they pay us an upfront fee and we then act on an exclusive basis and carry out the whole recruitment process including marketing, initial interviewing and selection. This is sometimes known as RPO – recruitment process outsourcing.

We also offer headhunting services, although these are entirely at our discretion and we will only offer these if we think the role and salary justify it.

There are no fees charged to candidates at any time – this is illegal in the UK.

Yes we do, via our sister site Jonathan Fagan Business Brokers Limited. We have been involved in the sale, merger & acquisition of law firms and accountancy practices for over 20 years. Our company assists with retirement, valuations, exit strategy (you are never too young to start planning), mergers, sales and acquisitions. There are always over 40 law firms for sale on our website. If you would like a confidential discussion about law firm M&A please get in touch.

Yes we do. We have a specialist department for handling in house legal jobs, whether this is for general counsel, solicitors to assist counsel, specialist in house legal teams or legal department managers. We have regular dealings with in house legal departments across the UK in a wide range of companies from large multinational businesses through to small SMEs.

Our company deals with the supply of locums or contractors on an ad hoc basis via our Locum and Interim Lawyer service – www.interimlawyers.co.uk. We also handle permanent recruitment at all levels and in all industries including education, energy, construction, health, professional services and compliance.

Yes we do. About 70% of our work is locum, ad hoc and interim cover, with 30% being permanent recruitment for law firms and in house legal departments. If you would like to find out about our specialist locum lawyer services please visit www.interimlawyers.co.uk – there is a full FAQ section on the site as well as a free downloadable guide to being a locum solicitor. The Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment service covers both locum and permanent work for solicitors, legal executives, support staff and fee earners.

Yes we do – it tends to be locum work rather than permanent recruitment.

In recent times a lot of local authorities have decided to outsource part of the function of their HR departments to large RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) companies who operate a list of recruiters to supply staff. We suspect the HR people within the local authorities thought this may be easier for them and they would no longer have to bother phoning round agencies on a Friday afternoon. Having coached redundant executives via the Jobcentres many years ago we know that a number of HR staff from local authorities were made redundant following their decisions to outsource their own jobs!

These types of arrangements have made it harder for smaller agencies to stay profitable when undertaking local authority work, as the middle men now cream off rather a lot of the profit, and Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment has chosen to stay well away from these contracts for the time being. Add to this the crazy way a lot of local authorities implement IR35 (a particularly onerous piece of tax legislation applied to locum work) to every vacancy rather than checking each one and it is really an area we have stayed well away from over the years.

However local authorities do occasionally look outside these frameworks and you will see locum local authority vacancies on our sites from time to time.

Yes we do. We publish an updated list every month – take a look at our salary review reports here – https://ten-percent.co.uk/salary-reviews/