Where can I find legal jobs?

Here is a definitive list of places to find legal jobs in the UK, including England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

•   Chancerylane.co.uk – This is a specialist legal jobs board that lists all the vacancies as a minimum in the Ten Percent Group of legal recruitment websites. This includes solicitors, partners, legal executives, licensed conveyancers, paralegals, legal assistants, secretaries, practice managers and any other legal support roles. Established in 2005 and used mainly by solicitors.

•   Totallylegal.com – This was a website set up by a couple of entrepreneurs and later sold to the Trinity Mirror Group for a seven figure sum. In recent times it has not been so prominent in the legal search fields, but it’s still very much there and a go-to site for a number of jobs, mainly for recruitment agencies advertising paralegal and legal support roles.

•   Law Society Gazette jobs – This tends to be for high street and niche commercial private practice roles for solicitors, and not so common to see legal support roles here. It tends to be quite specialist roles that are posted and is a standard must-view website for all solicitors and legal executives looking for work.

•   Lawyer Recruitment Directory – This is a recruitment directory set up by the Ten Percent Group with a list of all the legal recruiters in the UK and links to their websites. You can also view links to their finances as posted to Companies House, and see a brief description of each.

•   Simply Law Jobs – This is a website set up some years ago and has never been one of our favourites at the Ten Percent Group when it has come to advertising, simply because we have never had any success from any recruitment we have done using the site, although I’m sure plenty do. Like Totally Legal, they maintain a CV database but in a similar sense to Totally Legal the CVs contained on here do not particularly stand out in our experience.

•   Reed.co.uk – The mother of all job boards, this was set up by a recruitment agency many years ago and is huge. It encompasses all areas of professional practice including law, and we still get quality applicants from it all these years later, after being with the job board for some considerable time. It tends to be good for paralegal and support roles but you do also get qualified lawyer roles advertised on here as well.

•   Thelawyer.com – This tends to be for specialist in-house niche roles and quite a lot of group counsel positions are advertised on their job board. It doesn’t tend to be as busy for private practice roles, and similarly any support roles do not tend to be as popular on this site.

•   On the High Street – One of the main ways of getting work in law firms is simply to approach them directly, and you can do that in person whilst walking down your local high street and calling into the offices. Whilst this may seem a little bit extreme and something you wouldn’t dream of doing, this is precisely why it can be so effective at finding legal jobs in the UK. Most people are simply unwilling to take this action, yet in my experience this is the kind of thing that gets you ahead with your career.

•   LinkedIn – The same pretty much as walking up your high street, LinkedIn can give you access to jobs simply by contacting law firm staff directly and asking them. Tailored searched would be essential and you may also need to invest in some access to in-mail, which is one of LinkedIn’s ways of making serious amounts of money out of users.

As you can see from the above there are lots of different ways of finding legal jobs in the UK, but of course once you’ve found them does it necessarily follow that you are going to be suitable for particular posts or will the post be suitable for you? It’s always worth looking at a number of different options on keeping yourself updated with anything new coming up.

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and a non-practising Solicitor. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment provides online Legal Recruitment for Solicitors, Legal Executives, Licensed Conveyancers, Legal Cashiers, Fee Earners, Support Staff, Managers and Paralegals. Visit our Website to search our Vacancy Database.

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