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“I loved being a lawyer and I love the legal industry. I want to see our industry become more inclusive and more agile so we can make smarter life/work choices ”

Mary, CEO and Co-Founder

hello

About Flex Legal

At Flex Legal we pride ourselves on connecting you to the best interim paralegals and lawyers through our quick, flexible on-demand service.
Founded in 2017, Flex was born with the simple idea of connecting busy law firms and in-house counsel with the brightest experience-seeking law graduates. Today we support hundreds of clients to embrace the benefits of flexible resourcing, with over 6,000 interim paralegals and lawyers on our online platform. In 2021 we took our mission to make the legal industry more diverse, inclusive, and representative a step further by launching Flex Trainee - a brand new SQE qualification programme designed to empower talented aspiring lawyers selected on social mobility criteria.
How it began

Mary's story

"I remember walking around the city while I was doing the GDL and the LPC, desperate for work. Eventually, I managed to find work experience as a secretary for a shipping arbitrator, but it wasn’t easy to get there. Fast forward a few years and I was a qualified solicitor working in litigation. I was staring in the face of an imminent court deadline with forty huge bundles to make. I remember sitting at my desk and looking out of the window, and seeing a group of Kaplan law students exactly where I had been a few years ago.
I knew from experience that those students would have jumped at the chance to get legal work experience, and I knew associates like myself were desperate for their help. Suddenly, the idea for Flex Legal was born.
Shortly after I met James, an experienced software developer, and we began working together on a tech platform that could connect law students to firms and in-house teams as efficiently as possible. We analysed what was taking too long in traditional recruitment, and how we could use tech to make it easier.
Fast forward several years and Flex Legal is an award-winning platform with a huge roster of clients including magic circle law firms and many large in-house legal teams. We have over 5,000 paralegals on our platform and have since expanded to offer lawyers on a flexible basis. We have very ambitious plans to help improve retention in the profession and ensure people can work as they want, when they want.”
Awards
flex legal story

The journey so far

We are proud of everything the Flex team has achieved working with our clients, paralegals, lawyers and trainees. Some of our numbers so far:
  • 5,000+ paralegals
  • 300+ lawyers
  • 300+ law graduates helped to obtain training contracts
  • 350+ clients
  • 3,000+ paralegals and lawyers found work to date
  • Over 15,000 timesheets
  • 15 Flex Trainees placed so far
In the press
flex legal story

Our future vision

Our work to date has focused on helping legal professionals find flexible roles and helping legal teams easily scale up during peaks of work. Here at Flex Legal, we live and breathe the legal industry, so we understand how important this work is. It is and will always remain our main focus.
However, we want to do more. As legal professionals, we understand first-hand the unique pressures placed on those in our industry. This is reflected in alarming statistics, such as junior lawyers being worked so hard that 83% are having mental health problems. Horror stories about poor diversity and inclusion are all too common. Lawyers are leaving the profession they’ve spent years training for in droves. Something is clearly wrong, and it’s something we want to help fix.
We believe the new SQE route to qualification offers a huge opportunity to help break down the barrier of access to the profession. Our digital Qualifying Work Experience diary already allows paralegals to record their work experience against the SRA competencies, and our new Flex Trainee programme is now up and running to empower talented aspiring lawyers (selected on social mobility criteria) to qualify through the SQE.
We passionately believe that the solution involves working flexibly to get the right talent into the right places at the right time. We imagine a world where you are empowered to choose:
  • When you work
  • Where you work 
  • How you work 
  • Who you work for 
  • What you work on
We know that smarter life/work decisions will help transform our industry for people, for their clients, and for businesses alike. Our mission is to redesign the way we work so that we are empowered to make these smarter life/work choices, and help bring the legal sector into the 21st century.
Who we are

Our values mean a lot to us

Positive

We believe that positivity is key and nothing is impossible. We will always try to go above and beyond.

Human

We care about you, your story, ambitions and how you're doing today.

Responsive

We will always try to reply to you within an hour and try to be helpful.