A list of the most frequently asked questions to Ten Percent Legal Recruitment from solicitors, law firms, in house legal departments, law graduates & students.
General Information
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. 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. 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.
In the legal profession, a fee earner is someone who earns/generates fees for the law firm they work for. A solicitor generates fees for a law firm by doing something on a client’s file. So meeting a client, preparing a document, writing a letter, attending court are all billable types of work and this makes a solicitor a fee earner. A secretary does not generally earn fees because they undertake administration on files under the instruction of a solicitor. This is the way that a lot of law firms and lawyers make money – billing clients for their time – usually in 6 minute increments. A receptionist is not a fee earner and neither is an office manager or marketing manager. A paralegal is a fee earner because they undertake tasks that a firm will bill a client for.
Quite often when recruiting we will advertise for a fee earner because a firm are not bothered about the qualification of a candidate and more interested in their experience. So if a role is for a conveyancing fee earner, the candidate could be a legal executive, paralegal, solicitor, licensed conveyancer or non-qualified/QBE conveyancer. NB: QBE stands for ‘qualified by experience’.
Candidates
Very unlikely. UK law firms virtually always want UK law experience and will not look at lawyers from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan or Malaysia who do not already have UK experience, even though UK lawyers making the move the other way are quite often in demand in some of these countries. If you are a lawyer from another jurisdiction and do not have UK legal experience on your CV, your best bet is to contact the larger London recruitment agencies who have contracts with the City law firms for document review and higher level paralegal work.
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/
Yes, although only very occasionally and in particular circumstances. We have worked with law firms in offshore locations before such as Bermuda, the Falkland Islands and the Cayman Islands. We will not work with any law firms (particularly the Middle East) who are unwilling to provide evidence of an equal opportunity policy that is applied in practice (in the past we have been approached by firms in the UAE and Saudi Arabia to recruit white male solicitors aged 26-36 years old!). We do not tend to work in the opposite direction – UK firms tend to go for UK solicitors or lawyers from overseas with UK experience. Australian and New Zealand lawyers in particular are always very surprised to hear this.
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. 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. 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 have a vast collection of advice articles on our website for solicitors, legal executives, paralegals, law students & graduates, as well as entrants to the legal profession. visit our legal CV advice pages – https://ten-percent.co.uk/cv-advice/
One – us!
Registering with multiple agencies for permanent work can cause problems. If you are a conveyancing solicitor in Manchester, looking for positions in Manchester City Centre, there are about 50 firms you could apply to for work. If you register with 5 agencies, at least three of these may well send either your full CV, anonymous details or a briefing letter to each firm. This can cause issues. Think about registering with one agency to begin with, allow them 3 weeks to make any necessary enquiries with their clients, and then think about registering with others if unsuccessful. If you live in a remote area, such as North Devon, North Lincolnshire or the Lake District, we would recommend allowing at least 4 weeks before registering with anyone else.
No. We get on average between 5 and 15 CVs each week from students and non-qualified paralegals without 6 months experience registering for work. We cannot assist because firms do not want to pay an external source to find trainees and inexperienced staff when the market is so overloaded with potential lawyers! We can assist with careers advice or help with questions answered on our blog and by email, but if you are a law graduate you need to be out there contacting law firms, not recruitment consultants.
PQE stands for ‘Post Qualification Experience’ (or equivalent for legal executives or non-qualified staff). NQ stands for ‘Newly Qualified’ (solicitors).
NB: PQE is often indicated on job roles as a guide and it can be worth applying for roles still where PQE is indicated but does not quite fit your experience levels. However if a firm advertise for a solicitor with 20 years PQE and you have 6 months PQE, the role may not be suitable for you.
QBE stands for ‘Qualified By Experience’ – it is often used with conveyancing executives who have not gained a formal qualification but have many years experience.
In the legal profession, a fee earner is someone who earns/generates fees for the law firm they work for. A solicitor generates fees for a law firm by doing something on a client’s file. So meeting a client, preparing a document, writing a letter, attending court are all billable types of work and this makes a solicitor a fee earner. A secretary does not generally earn fees because they undertake administration on files under the instruction of a solicitor. This is the way that a lot of law firms and lawyers make money – billing clients for their time – usually in 6 minute increments. A receptionist is not a fee earner and neither is an office manager or marketing manager. A paralegal is a fee earner because they undertake tasks that a firm will bill a client for.
Quite often when recruiting we will advertise for a fee earner because a firm are not bothered about the qualification of a candidate and more interested in their experience. So if a role is for a conveyancing fee earner, the candidate could be a legal executive, paralegal, solicitor, licensed conveyancer or non-qualified/QBE conveyancer. NB: QBE stands for ‘qualified by experience’.
The police station accreditation scheme was introduced in the 1990’s in England and Wales, after solicitors were accused of sending their secretaries down to the police station to sit in interviews with murder suspects. A particularly notorious case was in Cardiff when a secretary/receptionist sent by a solicitor to observe an interview sat through questioning whilst a detective asked a suspect over 100 times whether he had committed the murder and subjected him to constant interviewing without a break.
The Law Society began to develop guidelines, and soon a recognised qualification emerged – the ‘accredited police station representative’. A police station representative attends interviews at police stations where a suspect is being spoken to by police officers under caution about a criminal offence. Its a tough job and very often involves working unsocial hours.
Pay has not increased much since we first wrote this FAQ back in 2000 and most reps earn around £22-25k per annum. Some self-employed reps earn a lot more, but the fees paid for attendance at police stations have not changed a lot in the same time frame and in fact in some cases they have actually dropped because of the implementation of fixed fees.
You do not need to be qualified to be a police station rep, but you must be with a criminal law firm with whom you can undertake the training. The cost is about £500 for the examinations, which consist of a written portfolio of cases you have experienced, written exam for some levels of candidates, and an oral exam. This is a tough test, and the rewards for passing it are that you can undertake police station work (which may or may not be considered a benefit when you are sat at a police station at 2am on a Sunday morning with a particularly unpleasant client!). It takes between 3 and 12 months to complete this qualification. If a solicitor wants to join the duty solicitor rota, he or she has to obtain this qualification at some stage in the same way as non-qualified representatives.
Every candidate registering with us will receives a personal service from our consultants. In the last 25 years over 12,500 solicitors have registered with us for vacancy updates and assistance with job seeking. We can advise on improving CVs where necessary, but we do not provide standalone legal careers advice (something we did offer until 2014).
If you register with us and you are a qualified solicitor, legal executive or experienced fee earner, we will add your details to our system and keep you updated with vacancies as they come in. We can provide targeted job application services on request and at our discretion, so if you want us to approach certain firms with an anonymous CV please give us a call or send an email to discuss.
We send out a newsletter to all our candidates on a monthly basis, and this includes careers advice and improving job applications.
We do not send out CVs to employers without your consent under any circumstances.
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 are good at what we do; locating new opportunities for lawyers registered with us for work and filling vacancies for our clients. Ten Percent Legal Recruitment is unique; we were the first wholly online legal recruitment consultancy, established in 2000, and we concentrate specifically on solicitors and legal support staff in private practice and in-house in the UK. We adhere to ethical guidelines and keep all recruitment strictly confidential. We donate 10% of our annual profits to charity, hence our name, and this is something we have done for over 25 years. We have helped 100s of solicitors find legal jobs, both permanent and locum, and we have a database of over 12,500 solicitors registered with us. Our company has worked with over 2,500 law firms to date. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment is owned & managed by a solicitor (non-practising) and our consultants are not sales people – we genuinely want to give candidates impartial advice to progress with their careers and also help our clients find the right people to fill their vacancies.
Employers
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/
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. 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. 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.
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.
Careers
Yes – we have a vast collection of advice articles on our website for solicitors, legal executives, paralegals, law students & graduates, as well as entrants to the legal profession. visit our legal CV advice pages – https://ten-percent.co.uk/cv-advice/
No. We get on average between 5 and 15 CVs each week from students and non-qualified paralegals without 6 months experience registering for work. We cannot assist because firms do not want to pay an external source to find trainees and inexperienced staff when the market is so overloaded with potential lawyers! We can assist with careers advice or help with questions answered on our blog and by email, but if you are a law graduate you need to be out there contacting law firms, not recruitment consultants.