Among other findings from the report, the top five areas with the largest number of active attorneys in residence are New York (177,035), California (170,044), Texas (90,485), Florida (78,244) and Illinois (63,422).
NO. LAWYERS PER CAPITA BY STATE (2018) | ||
---|---|---|
RANK | STATE | NO. ACTIVE AND RESIDENT LAWYERS |
9. | Puerto Rico | 14,008 |
10. | California | 170,044 |
11. | Louisiana | 18,918 |
May 10, 2022 · With more than 225,000 attorneys, The State Bar of California is the largest state bar in the country. Nearly 170,000 lawyers actively practice law, while the rest retain their licenses as inactive members.
California, which has the largest population in the nation, ranked second in the number of lawyers (167,709) behind New York State (185,076), even though New York has half the population of …
May specialize in a single area or may practice broadly in many areas of law. National estimates for Lawyers ... California: 90,120: 5.45: 1.13 $ 84.91 $ 176,610: Massachusetts: 19,050: 5.61: 1.16 $ 80.76 ... Metropolitan areas with the highest employment level in Lawyers: Metropolitan area Employment Employment per thousand jobs Location ...
Source: Harvard http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/Ramseyer_681.pdf
NO. OF LAWYERS PER CAPITA BY STATE (2013) | ||
---|---|---|
RANK | STATE | NO. LAWYERS PER 10,000 RESIDENTS (2013) |
8. | California | 42.57 |
9. | Missouri | 40.41 |
10. | Louisiana | 40.06 |
Attorney Status | Population | % of Attorneys |
---|---|---|
Active | 194,665 | 68.33% |
Inactive | 71,458 | 25.08% |
Judge | 2,150 | 0.75% |
Not eligible to practice law in CA | 16,617 | 5.83% |
Region | Total number of solicitors | Number of solicitors per 1,000 population |
---|---|---|
Greater London | 43,788 | 9.33 |
South East | 12,112 | 1.44 |
Eastern | 7,330 | 1.27 |
South West | 5,660 | 1.08 |
According to the Current Population Survey, 1.1 million attorneys were working in the United States in 2012, but the Labor Department’s Employment projections program places the figure at 759,800.
To give you a comparison: For the 1.3 million attorneys on the rolls in 2013, between 1970 and 2012 the ABA conferred just over 1.6 million law degrees and state bars issued nearly 2 million lawyer licenses.
This creates a statistic I call “Idle Attorneys”: licensed attorneys who are not directly employed in the profession. They may be judges, legislators, or businesspeople whose careers advanced due to their law degrees; or, they may be people who were unable to find careers as lawyers, are working in fields that don’t require law degrees, are choosing not to work, or are unemployed yet still maintaining active licenses.
There’s probably a correlation between active and resident status and bar authorities requiring high fees, CLE requirements, and mandatory pro bono work that might be worth investigating in the future.
Similarly, 4.8% of all lawyers were Hispanic in 2021– up nearly one percentage point from 3.9% a decade earlier. The U.S. population is 18.5% Hispanic.
The largest increase in lawyers occurred in the 1970s, a decade when the number of lawyers jumped 76% – from 326,000 in 1970 to 574,000 in 1980.
According to the survey, approximately 11% of white lawyers – roughly 1 in 9 – left law firms in 2019. That is much lower than the attrition of Black lawyers (21%), Hispanic lawyers (21%) and Asian lawyers (18%). At the same time, approximately 10% of male lawyers left their law firms, compared with 13% of female lawyers.
The 2020 survey found 3,187 LGBT lawyers at 837 law offices across the country. That represents 3.3% of the 96,202 lawyers at those firms. Ten years earlier, in 2010, the same survey found 2,137 LGBT lawyers at American law firms, or 1.9% of all lawyers.
The number of lawyers at American law firms who report having disabilities remains small – slightly less than 1% of all lawyers. Because the number is so small, it is difficult to draw any conclusions about trends, according to a 2020 survey by the National Association for Law Placement.
There are two reasons. First, very few lawyers are younger than 25, but roughly 12% of all American workers are younger than 25. Second, many lawyers work past age 65. Roughly 14% of all lawyers – that’s 1 in 7 – are 65 or older. Only 7% of all U.S. workers – about 1 in 14 – are 65 or older.
Approximately 70% of law firm leaders were white men in 2020, according to the report. In addition, 20% were white women, 7% were male lawyers of color and 3% were female lawyers of color. Small firms of 20 lawyers or fewer were more likely to have leaders who were men of color or women.
The total number of lawyers in the United States has seen little increase in the last few years; in 2020, there were 1.33 million lawyers in the U.S. – virtually unchanged from the previous year, and not much above the 2015 figure of 1.3 million. Unlike many other common law countries, the United States does not differentiate between lawyers who ...
Despite continuous growth of the U.S. legal services market since the great recession, there is an oversupply of lawyers relative to the number of jobs. An overproduction of law graduates is one cause of this oversupply; consequently the number of law graduates shrunk in recent years. Increasing automation is another cause, with around half of law firms admitting to replacing human resources with technology in the last two years.
Statista has been my savior on several occasions. The site is easy to maneuver and the data is in a format that can go right into a report or presentation.
Unlike many other common law countries, the United States does not differentiate between lawyers who plead in court and those who do not. For example, in the United Kingdom the former are titled barristers and the latter solicitors. However, in the U.S., terms such as lawyer and attorney can refer to either profession.