What Percentage of Americans are Attorneys?
Here’s a graph showing the number of attorneys as a share of the US population:
The increase seems pretty inexorable starting around 1970, doesn’t it?
For grins and giggles, here’s snide graph on which I will make no comment:
If you’re wondering where the lawyers live, a quick google search turned up this post which shows attorneys by state.
Needless to say, the share of attorneys as a percentage of the population is greater in the District of Columbia than any of the states, by far and that’s why lawyers need to learn how to stand out in these business and is when a law firm marketing expert can really help in this area. If you are here looking for the best legal service we can lead you to the firm with the law experts you need to hire, see it here by just clicking.
Data for (“resident active”) attorneys used in these graphs comes are from the American Bar Association. The ABA’s website seems insistent that anyone referencing their data should state it is “Reprinted by permission of the American Bar Association. All rights reserved.” I am afraid to argue with them.
Data and estimates for the US population originates with the Census, but I’m using the set cleaned up by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission since its in an easy to use format. Real GDP per capita comes from NIPA Table 7.1.
If you want my spreadsheet, drop me a line at my first name (mike) dot my last name (that’s kimel with one m) at gmail with a dot com.
It’s getting so bad in DC, pretty soon there will be more lawyers than people.
Interesting. I recently finished Ages of Discord by Peter Turchin which used this as a metric for what he calls “intra-Elite Competition”.
Lawrence:
Welcome to Angry Bear.
Corresponds with the Ford Pinto and GM Corvair lawsuits. Is that .45 of 1%?
Warren,
Be nice. Or at least be afraid. Don’t mock people who control the taxpayer financed legal system.
Lawrence,
I think number of attorneys & amount of litigation filed can be a proxy for a number of things. I wish the government made available more statistics on the legal system, like it does with economic data. I can’t find anything like the BEA or the BLS that doesn’t require me to pay a lot to access.
Run,
Yes.
Mike,
Unfortunately, you are right about the difficulty of finding good data on this. Myself, I wonder how much of this is tied to intellectual property and the recent rise of the “patent troll” IP litigation rackets.
Why are you using a little known source for population data?
What are they trying to achieve with their adjustment of the population data?
Spencer,
Maybe its me but I don’t find that the data at the Census site is organized in a way that is user friendly. Since time is really scarce for me these days, and the good folks at the Texas State Library and Archives commission went through the effort of cleaning up precisely the data I needed, I figured I’d save myself a lot of time and piggy-back off their work.
Mike
Now how about a chart correlating GDP with investment bankers, or hedge fund managers?
Good Idea. Welcome to AB.
Doug Weinfield,
Good idea. I can look for the data but pointers are always welcome.
Matt Levine at Bloomberg linked to AB here
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-24/public-markets-and-hedge-fund-closings
at the bottom for related posts list
DC is, by far, the easiest place to become a lawyer by reciprocity, and also accepts law degrees from non-ABA schools, as long as you take a minimum number of core hours at an ABA school (about two semesters).
But it’s also like saying that the Vatican has a lot of priests. That’s where they are in demand, you’d be surprised if there weren’t a large number of lawyers in a place where laws are written and interpreted.
Those that can, do. Those that can’t, teach. Those that can’t teach become politicians.
Sometimes it is so hard to find good and useful posts out there when doing research. Now I will send it to my colleagues as well. Thank you for being one of them.