The total number of lawyers in the United States has seen a steady increase over the last few years. In 2024, there were approximately **** million active lawyers. This total was slightly lower when compared to the previous year, and not much above the 2015 figure of *** million. Lawyers in the U.S. 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. In the United States, however, terms such as lawyer and attorney can refer to either profession. Oversupply in the U.S. legal industry 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.
As of 2021, the law firm with the highest number of lawyers in the United States (U.S) was Kirkland & Ellis, with *****. Latham & Waktins and Morgan, Lewis followed, with ***** and ***** lawyers employed in the United States respectively.
In 2023, the state with the highest number of lawyers in the United States was California, with a figure of approximately ******. In the same year, roughly ****** lawyers were employed in the state of New York.
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Number of Businesses statistics on the Law Firms industry in the US
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The graph displays the number of law firms operating in the United States from 2006 to 2025. The x-axis represents the years, starting at 2006 and ending at 2025, while the y-axis shows the total number of registered law firm businesses each year. The number of firms ranges from a low of 401,100 in 2008 to a high of 463,590 in 2025. Despite minor dips in some years, such as 2008 and 2022, the overall trend shows steady growth in the legal industry over the two-decade span. The data highlights a resilient and expanding market for legal services in the U.S.
UniCourt provides legal data on law firms that’s been normalized by our AI and enriched with other public data sets to connect real-world law firms to their attorneys and clients, judges they’ve faced and types of litigation they’ve handled across practice areas and state and federal (PACER) courts.
AI Normalized Law Firms
• UniCourt’s AI locates and gathers variations of law firm names and spelling errors contained in court data and combines them with bar data, business data, and judge data to connect real-world law firms to their litigation. • Avoid bad data caused by frequent law firm name changes due to firm mergers, named partners leaving, and firms dissolving, leading to lost business and bad analytics. • UniCourt’s unique normalized IDs for law firms let you quickly search for and download all of the litigation involving the specific firms you’re interested in. • Uncover the associations and relationships between law firms, their lawyers, their clients, judges, and their top practice areas across different jurisdictions.
Using APIs to Dig Deeper
• See a full list of all of the businesses and individuals a law firm has represented as clients in litigation. • Easily vet the bench strength of law firms by looking at the volume and specific types of cases their lawyers have handled. • Drill down into a law firm’s experience to confirm which judges they’ve appeared before in court. • Identify which law firms and lawyers a particular firm has faced as opposing counsel, and the judgments they obtained.
Bulk Access to Law Firm Data
• UniCourt’s Law Firm Data API provides you with structured, cleaned, and organized legal data that you can easily connect to your case management systems, CRM, and other internal applications. • Get bulk access to law firm Secretary of State registration data and the names, emails, phone numbers, and physical addresses for all of a firm’s lawyers. • Use our APIs to create tailored legal marketing campaigns for law firms and their attorneys with the exact practice area expertise and the right geographic coverage you want to target. • Power your case research, business intelligence, and analytics with bulk access to litigation data for all the court cases a firm has handled and set up automated data feeds to find new cases they’re involved in.
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Number of Businesses statistics on the Personal Injury Lawyers & Attorneys industry in the US
This statistic depicts the leading law firms in Chicago in 2019, by number of lawyers. In that year, the law firm with most lawyers in the city was Kirkland & Ellis, who employed *** Chicago-based lawyers.
The 2014 Survey of State Attorneys General (SAG) collected information on jurisdiction, sources and circumstances of case referrals, and the participation of attorneys general offices in federal or state white-collar crime task forces in 2014. White-collar crime was defined by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) as: "any violation of law committed through non-violent means, involving lies, omissions, deceit, misrepresentation, or violation of a position of trust, by an individual or organization for personal or organizational benefit." SAG sought to analyze how attorneys general offices as an organization in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories respond to white-collar offenses in their jurisdiction. BJS asked respondents to focus on the following criminal and civil offenses: bank fraud, consumer fraud, insurance fraud, medical fraud, securities fraud, tax fraud, environmental offenses, false claims and statements, illegal payments to governmental officials (giving or receiving), unfair trade practices, and workplace-related offenses (e.g., unsafe working conditions). Variables included whether or not offices handled criminal or civil cases in the above categories, estimated number of cases in each category, and what types of criminal or civil sanctions were imposed on white-collar offenders. Researchers also assessed collaboration with partners outside of state attorneys offices, whether cases were referred for federal or local prosecution, and what circumstances lead to referring cases to state regulatory agencies. The extent to which state attorneys offices maintain white-collar crime data was also recorded.
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The American Bar Association’s annual Survey on Lawyer Discipline (SOLD) reports complaints and charges regarding lawyer misconduct, the caseload per disciplinary attorney, and each state’s budget for attorney discipline. From these reports, we develop five measures of attorney discipline: 1. COMPLAINTS – the percent of attorneys in the state who receive complaints from the public. 2. CHARGED – the percent of attorneys that are charged with some form of misconduct during the year; 3. CHARGED/ COMPLAINTS – the percent of the attorneys receiving COMPLAINTS that are eventually CHARGED with malpractice; 4. BUDGET (in dollars) – the state’s annual budget for implementing attorney discipline relative to the number of attorneys; and 5. CASELOAD – the number of AD cases per state disciplinary attorney per year.
In our study "ATTORNEY DISCIPLINE, THE QUALITY OF LEGAL SYSTEMS AND ECONOMIC GROWTH WITHIN THE UNITED STATES" we use these measures to examine the quality of legal systems within the United States and the relation between this quality and state economic growth. The panel data set, included here, contains the values of the 5 attorney discipline measures for each state from 2000-2017. We use these data in our study.
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Number of Businesses statistics on the Corporate Law Firms industry in United States
In terms of staff, the international law firm Dentons occupied the first place in international rankings in 2021. This firm employed more than 11,300 lawyers throughout the world during that year. Denton's Chinese contestant, Yingke, was ranked second with about 10,600 lawyers employed during the same period.
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Forecast: Number of Employees in Lawyers' and Patent Attorneys' Offices in Japan 2024 - 2028 Discover more data with ReportLinker!
The purpose of this data collection was to establish a current name and address listing of state and local government prosecution and civil attorney agencies and to obtain information about agency function, jurisdiction, employment, funding, and attorney compensation arrangements. The data for each agency include information for any identifiable local police prosecutors. Excluded from the study were private law firms that perform legal services periodically for a government and are compensated by retainers and fees. Variables cover agency functions and jurisdiction, agency funding, number and types of employees, compensation and employment restrictions for attorneys, agency's geographical jurisdiction, number of branch offices, and number of branch office employees.
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Number of Businesses statistics on the Business Lawyers & Attorneys industry in United States
In 2023, the region with the most lawyers representing White & Case was Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. This region has represented the most lawyers for White & Case since 2018. The region with the lowest number of lawyers since 2018 for White & Case was in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2023, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa had over 1,000 more lawyers than the Asia-Pacific region. Big in the United States and beyond White & Case is based in New York but has expanded in recent years to take control of 45 offices in 31 countries globally. The law firm is now one of the leading in the world by gross revenue, and accumulated approximately 2.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2021. As well as this global reach, White & Case in the United States were amongst the law firms with one of the most diverse teams of attorneys in 2021. German outreach In June 2000, White & Case completed a merger with the German law firm Fedderson Laule Ewerwahn Scherzberg Finkelnburg Clemm, and since then has become one of the most popular employers amongst legal professionals in Germany, and the most popular American Law firm in the country. As a result of this, they were entered into the “top ten” firms in Germany, the first American company to do so. Clifford Chance was the most successful non-German law firm in the country, and have remained as one of the
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Estate lawyers and attorneys are legal practitioners that specialize in providing estate, probate, inheritance and trust law services. Over the five years to 2023, a growing senior population and overall economic growth proved beneficial to estate lawyers. The outbreak of COVID-19 also helped raise demand for industry services. As a result, revenue is estimated to have increased at a CAGR of 1.4% to $17.8 billion. In 2023, revenue is estimated to increase 1.7%. Profit, which is high in this industry, has remained stable over the past few years.As baby boomers age and eventually pass away, they will leave their estates to their beneficiaries. This shift is expected to constitute the largest generational transfer of wealth in history. The number of adults aged 65 and older has grown over the past five years, and as a result, demand for estate lawyers, attorneys and those specializing in elder law has grown. The growing senior population has also driven more estate attorneys to diversify their practices to provide elder law services. Elder law services include a wide range of legal matters that affect older people or those with disabilities, such as legal issues related to healthcare, long-term care planning, retirement, estate planning, wills, trusts, taxes and protection against elder abuse. Amid the pandemic, increased mortality has driven individuals to seek out lawyers for estate planning, estate administration, probate and power of attorney services.Revenue is anticipated to continue its growth trajectory at a CAGR of 1.2% to $18.9 billion over the five years to 2026. The industry is expected to continue to experience strong demand for services from an aging baby boomer population. Growth in per capita disposable income as the economy recovers from the coronavirus pandemic is also anticipated to support demand for legal services, because individuals are more likely to engage in estate planning during periods of economic growth and low unemployment. More millennials will enter peak earning years during the outlook, making them more likely to engage estate planning services.
This survey queried chief prosecuting attorneys of state prosecutorial districts (district attorneys, commonwealth attorneys, etc.) about the prosecution of felony cases within their jurisdictions during 1989-1990. Questions regarding the prefiling, filing, and pretrial stages of felony prosecution asked about policies limiting the time for plea negotiations, the role of the grand jury, how felony cases were screened, and the amount of time that usually elapsed before the prosecutor was notified of persons arrested for a felony. Prosecutors were also asked to report the percentage of court case filings by grand jury indictment, by information following a preliminary hearing, or by other means, and the percentage of felony cases processed by a court of general jurisdiction, a felony court, or other court(s). The trial stage of felony prosecution was covered by questions about the conduct of voir dire examination of prospective jurors, limits on time allowed to commence trial, the number of permitted peremptory challenges, who was responsible for notifying government witnesses to appear in court, whether the prosecution had the right to request a jury trial, whether the jurisdiction's felony court discouraged motions on trial date that would delay trial, and whether the felony court normally granted a continuance on trial date to permit additional time for plea negotiations. Questions on felony sentencing and appeals asked whether the prosecutor was usually present at felony sentence proceedings, whether the judge usually ordered a presentence report, whether victim information was requested or provided by the court, whether the prosecutor normally recommended a type or duration of sentence to be imposed, whether police, victims, or witnesses were notified of the disposition of felony cases, whether the prosecutor was involved in various types of appellate work, and whether the prosecutor had any right of appeal from rulings on motions, from sentences, and from determination of guilt or innocence. General information gathered by the survey includes the number of jurisdictions contained in the prosecutorial district, the number of attorneys and investigators employed in the sampled jurisdiction and in the prosecutorial district as a whole, the length of the prosecutor's term of office, the number of law enforcement agencies that brought arrests into the jurisdiction's court, how much of the prosecutor's felony caseload was assigned on a vertical basis, the kinds of nonfelony matters the prosecutor had responsibility for or jurisdiction over (e.g., family and domestic relations, mental commitments, environmental protection, traffic, etc.), whether the office of prosecutor was an elective position, and whether it was a full- or part-time position. Other general items include whether any felony defendants were provided an attorney on the grounds of indigency, whether, in criminal cases involving both state and federal jurisdiction, the prosecutor would ordinarily be cross-designated to represent the prosecutor in both courts, whether the prosecutor's office contained a "career criminal" unit, whether the state's attorney general was entitled to try cases in the jurisdiction's felony court, which types of criminal history data normally were of practical value in felony prosecution, and who supervised the probationer in most cases of adult felons sentenced to probation.
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Number of Businesses statistics on the Bankruptcy Lawyers & Attorneys industry in United States
The total number of lawyers in the United States has seen a steady increase over the last few years. In 2024, there were approximately **** million active lawyers. This total was slightly lower when compared to the previous year, and not much above the 2015 figure of *** million. Lawyers in the U.S. 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. In the United States, however, terms such as lawyer and attorney can refer to either profession. Oversupply in the U.S. legal industry 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.