London Legal Recruitment

Welcome to Ten Percent Legal Recruitment, specialist legal recruitment consultants in London for over 25 years. If you would like to contact us for further information about job vacancies either in central London, the suburbs or the city & in house legal departments, please get in touch.

London is a huge bewildering place if you are a lawyer relocating from other parts of the UK or overseas. There are well over 80,000 solicitors based within the M25 and the vast majority of law firms in the UK are located within 20 miles of the city centre. Over 20,000 of these solicitors work for the City law firms, with the remainder in house or with smaller private practice firms.

A bubble exists in the city centre – solicitors working in the Magic Circle practices (the 5 huge multi-national law firms based in London) earn salaries many times that of the average UK solicitor – and for many lawyers the salaries paid reflect levels seen across the UK. This can be a disappointment to solicitors relocating from other areas who expect a “Dick Whittington” and see streets paved with gold…

If you are thinking about moving to London we normally recommend renting to start with and seeing how the land lies. The main challenge for most of our candidates is finding somewhere affordable but at the same time accessible. There are so many different neighbourhoods in London with varying facilities that you really will not have a clue where to live until you have spent some time there. A large portion of the city is going to be too expensive for all but the super rich, others have limited transport and some you just wouldn’t want to go to. Postcode areas can make a difference together with 0208 and 0207 telephone number regions. 0208 is greater London and 0207 central London.

The vast majority of law firms can be found in central London, either in the West End (WC and W1 postcodes) or the city of London (EC and E1 postcodes). Collections of high street firms are found in West London (particularly Ealing), North London (Stoke Newington, Enfield and Tottenham), South East London and Croydon/Dartford/Bexleyheath, South West London (Brixton and Tooting) and North West London (Brent). Over 3,500 law firms have London postcodes and it is the largest concentration of solicitors firms in the UK. A good number of these are sole practitioners and smaller firms, with the larger players from the Magic Circle and Legal 500 practices being based in the City.