Do legal recruiters publish their fees?

What the sites say

2

Publish a number (0.7%)

47

Say how they are paid, no number (16.5%)

236

Say nothing about fees (82.8%)

This is less odd than it looks. On most searches the hiring firm pays the recruiter and the candidate pays nothing. In my experience the number lives in a fee agreement with the hiring firm, and the website is written for the lawyer looking for a job. Pye Legal Group states the usual arrangement on its own site: its placement fee “is typically a percentage of the hired candidate’s first-year compensation, excluding equity and discretionary bonuses.” It doesn't say which percentage.

So the most common fee statement on these sites is addressed to the person who doesn't pay. 11 firms say only that candidates pay nothing, and 6 more say the employer pays without saying what.

The one placement fee figure we found is on Mission Recruiting, LLC's page for law firms, which states a range as a percentage of first-year compensation. The other number is a starting hourly rate at Hire Remote Legal Staff, which prices managed remote legal staff as a single monthly cost that includes management and benefits. That is a different product from a placement fee.

Contingency and retained

Among firms that say what triggers the fee, contingency is the default. 10 describe contingency only, meaning they are paid when a hire is made. 3 describe retained search only. 10 offer either, depending on the search, and 1 charges a flat fee without stating it.

Retained firms are quieter about money than their listings suggest. 29 of the scanned firms say on their own site that they run retained searches, and only 9 of them say anything about the money side: a retainer, a retained basis, an upfront payment. A retainer is the one fee a client pays before anything happens, which you might think would get a sentence.

Voll Recruiting, which runs this directory, is in the middle group. Its site says contingency by default and gives no number.

Firms whose sites say something about fees

49 firms, grouped by what the page says. Each firm links to its listing; the page link is the firm's own page where it says it. The CSV has every listed firm, including the 236 that say nothing.

How this was counted

What was read. The pages this directory fetched from each listed firm's own website when building its listing: the home page and up to seven linked pages, fetched October 1, 2026 to October 8, 2026. That is 1,602 pages from 285 of the 289 listed firms (98.6%). The other 4 had no fetched pages and are left out of every count. Percentages on this page are of the 285 firms read.

First pass, a script. Fixed patterns, sentence by sentence. One set looks for a figure near a fee word: a percentage, a dollar amount or an hourly rate. The other looks for fee or payment wording without a figure, such as contingency, retainer, “only pay when”, “no cost to candidates” and “fee structure”. 74 firms had at least one match.

Second pass, in context. Every match was read against the page it came from, and 49 firms survived. The rejects were things like referral bonuses paid to people who send candidates, bar admission fees on a page about the Georgia bar, partner billing rates in a job description, commission plans for the firm's own recruiters, a firm donating a share of its fees, replacement guarantees with no fee terms, and articles about what staffing agencies in general charge. A firm that only describes the industry is counted as saying nothing about its own fees.

Limits. A fee on a page we did not fetch, in a PDF or behind a contact form counts as saying nothing, so the share that publish a number could be a little higher. It should not be lower: every firm counted was checked against its own page. Sites change; the dates above are when each was read.