Legal Recruitment Consultant

If you have a Legal background, LLB, GDL, LPC or BVC, one of the options open to you is to get into Legal Recruitment Consultancy. This can be a very exciting, lucrative, fast-paced and dynamic career. Often people go in to Legal Recruitment when they have decided Law itself is not the career they want to pursue for the long term, but they still want a career in which they can make some good money and have excellent prospects to progress rapidly. It is also a chance to use the knowledge of Law that you have worked hard to attain through study or experience.


The role is fundamentally a professional sales role with a focus on relationship building; the role requires new-business phone calls, often initially cold calls to decision-makers in a target client base. However this is not a call-centre type of culture, you are selling a specialist service often to Partners in Law firms who are experts themselves; this requires a professional, articulate and consultative individual, rather than an aggressive sell, that kind of approach simply wouldn’t work. If you want to get to know people and remain connected to the legal profession, this may be the job for you. This will involve lots of negotiating and organising, it will require a high level of interpersonal skills and you may even get to travel to exotic locations to meet clients if you’re lucky.


The other major element is finding relevant candidates through database searches, advertising, networking and also pro-active headhunting. Headhunting is generally the best method used to generate the very best candidate for the job. This also requires you to make lots of calls to Lawyers to build contacts and cultivate a relationship with them. Other elements include interviewing candidates, making pitches to prospective clients and putting together candidate profiles for clients. You will generally enjoy some autonomy in your role as you will essentially be an agent, “the middle person” between the companies and the people you are aiming to place.

Within your first year you would be expected to learn the market, learn how to headhunt and develop your client base and have a good handle on the role itself. Usually starting as a Trainee Consultant or Researcher within 6-12 months you would expect to be a full consultant with your own remit within a specific area, e.g. Consultant for Associate Level placements. Within 2-3 years you can expect to be in a leadership role, with responsibility for developing, training and mentoring junior consultants. Within 4-6 years you can realistically be looking at Directorship, Partnership and equity in the business.

Legal Recruitment companies generally cover 3 main areas of law:

• Private Practice – Qualified Solicitors up to Partner level placed into jobs at Law Firms.
• In-House – placing qualified Lawyers into Large companies up to Lead Counsel, usually FTSE 250 companies across various sectors but often focussed on Finance and Financial Services.
• Paralegal and Legal Executive Recruitment for Contract/Interim positions.

Earning potential: Top earning Recruitment Consultants in Legal Recruitment can earn in excess of £250,000 a year – not after 20 years in a job, realistically after 4 or 5. First year earnings range from around £40,000 to £60,000 with basic salaries of £18,000 up to £35,000 dependant on experience. One of the reasons Legal Recruitment can be so lucrative is because Qualified Lawyers are well paid. Typically a Legal Recruitment Consultancy charges 25%-30% fees for the placement of Lawyers with their clients. The service our clients offer Law firms is so highly regarded that they often generate fees of £50k up to £250k for a placement. Recruitment Consultants generally take a clear pre-determined percentage for each placement they personally make, as commission around 15%-40%. Not only is placing Lawyers lucrative, if you work for one of our clients for a few years there is a chance you can get involved in Partner and even team moves – where you are making multiple high level placements in one transaction. This is a very complex, challenging and rewarding procedure.