Market sizing: how many lawyers are licensed and practicing across the United States

Estimate how many attorneys there are in the United States. Explain your method as you go, label every assumption, show the arithmetic, and end with one number and a check of whether it is reasonable. ```hint Who buys legal work Think about who pays for legal work. Groups with very different needs are easier to estimate one at a time than the whole country at once, and you will need a way to turn an amount of legal work into a number of people. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Should the count cover everyone admitted to practice law, or only people currently working as attorneys? Many licensed lawyers work in other fields or have retired. - Do judges, prosecutors, public defenders, government agency lawyers, in-house corporate counsel and law professors count? - Should a lawyer admitted in several states be counted once? - Is the target today's total head count, rather than the number of new attorneys each year? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A definition of who counts as an attorney, agreed before any numbers. - A segmentation of where legal work comes from (or of where attorneys come from), rather than a single remembered ratio. - Round, clearly labeled assumptions and arithmetic that is easy to follow and correct. - At least one sanity check from an independent angle, a final range, and the assumption the answer is most sensitive to. ### Follow-up Questions - Which assumption in your model is weakest, and what happens to the total if it is off by a factor of two? - How would you adapt the method to estimate the attorneys in a single large city? - If you had ten minutes and internet access to check your estimate, which sources would you look at and why?