US law firm universe, mapped
There are 437,839 law firms in the US. We map each one and the partner who actually buys.
For legaltech, e-discovery, billing software, and CLE teams selling into legal. The name on the door is rarely the buyer. The managing partner in the corner office is.
The market, in three numbers
A long tail of solos and small partnerships.
work in a solo or two-attorney firm
Nearly half of US lawyers in private practice work in a firm of one or two attorneys. Not Big Law. Not a regional shop. One name, one shingle, a bookkeeper part-time.
work at a firm with 500+ attorneys
Kirkland, Latham, DLA Piper, Baker McKenzie and the rest of the AmLaw top tier employ only about a sixth of private-practice lawyers. By firm count, they are a rounding error.
attorneys at the largest firm
Kirkland & Ellis runs roughly 3,500 attorneys and around 4 billion dollars in gross revenue. Against 437,839 firms and 1.33 million lawyers, still a sliver of the market.
Sources: American Bar Association National Lawyer Population Survey 2024 and Profile of the Legal Profession; ALM AmLaw 100, 2024 financials; US Census County Business Patterns 2023.
Methodology
Why our law-firm count moves and the published estimates do not.
The headline figures you usually see, 437,839 firms or 1.33 million lawyers, come from annual reports. They are accurate the day they ship and stale eighteen months later. We work firm by firm, in the open, and refresh.
How the 437,839 figure is built
- Start with every active US legal-services establishment. Cross-referenced against the US Census County Business Patterns NAICS 5411 (Offices of Lawyers) series, the Bureau of Labor Statistics QCEW industry data, and ALM's AmLaw 200 firm directory.
- Resolve each firm to a real operating business. The name on the door is often a brand. The operating business is the PLLC, the LLP, or the sole proprietorship that holds the malpractice policy, signs the office lease, and pays the firm's payroll.
- Find the partner. Roughly 49 percent of US lawyers in private practice work at a one or two-attorney firm. That managing partner is the decision-maker for software, insurance, marketing, and staffing. We find them by name, with a verified email and a direct dial, the same way we do for every other long-tail vertical.
- Drop the dead pins. Dissolved partnerships, retirements, in-house transitions, firms that merged into another shop, attorneys who let their bar membership lapse. The annual reports keep them on for a year. We do not.
- Refresh on a rolling schedule. Firm-level signals run continuously against state bar rolls and secretary-of-state filings, so what you query in June is not what shipped in January.
If you want the source breakdown for a specific state, practice area, or attorney-count band, ask. We do not hide the working.
By state
Where the law firms actually are.
The five largest states carry around 37 percent of the universe. Per capita, the picture flips: D.C., New York, and Massachusetts run far more firms per resident than the national average, because legal work concentrates around courts, regulators, and corporate headquarters.
| # | State | Law firms | Per 100k residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 49,000 | 125 |
| 2 | New York | 39,000 | 198 |
| 3 | Texas | 31,000 | 99 |
| 4 | Florida | 27,000 | 117 |
| 5 | Illinois | 17,000 | 137 |
| 6 | Pennsylvania | 15,500 | 120 |
| 7 | Ohio | 13,200 | 112 |
| 8 | New Jersey | 12,800 | 139 |
| 9 | Georgia | 12,100 | 108 |
| 10 | Massachusetts | 11,500 | 165 |
| 11 | Virginia | 11,000 | 126 |
| 12 | North Carolina | 10,400 | 96 |
| 13 | Michigan | 9,700 | 97 |
| 14 | Washington | 8,900 | 114 |
| 15 | District of Columbia | 3,200 | 472 |
Counts rounded to the nearest hundred for display. The dataset itself is exact, down to the office address. Source: US Census County Business Patterns NAICS 5411 2023, cross-referenced with state bar rolls; per-capita math against US Census 2024 population estimates.
The largest firms
The biggest names in US law, and how little of the market they hold.
The letterhead is loud. The math is quiet. The ten firms below together employ around 36,000 US attorneys, less than three percent of the 1.33 million licensed in the country. The other 97 percent sit at solo shops, regional firms, and mid-market partnerships.
| # | Firm | Attorneys / Revenue | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kirkland & Ellis | ~3,500 / $8.8B | The revenue leader of the AmLaw 100. Chicago-founded, dominant in private equity, restructuring, and high-stakes litigation. Highest profits per equity partner in the industry. |
| 2 | Latham & Watkins | ~3,400 / $6.5B | Los Angeles-founded global firm. Capital markets, M&A, and finance powerhouse with offices across the US, Europe, and Asia. |
| 3 | DLA Piper | ~4,500 / $3.7B | Largest by global attorney headcount. Offices in over 40 countries. US verein structure, with a deep mid-market and corporate practice. |
| 4 | Baker McKenzie | ~4,800 / $3.4B | Chicago-founded, verein-structured global firm with the broadest country footprint in the industry. Strong cross-border tax and corporate practice. |
| 5 | Hogan Lovells | ~2,700 / $2.7B | Anglo-American verein. Regulatory, life sciences, and government investigations. Strong D.C. and London anchor offices. |
| 6 | Norton Rose Fulbright | ~3,000 / $2.3B | Texas-anchored global verein. Energy, infrastructure, and disputes. Large Houston and London hubs. |
| 7 | Jones Day | ~2,500 / $2.7B | Cleveland-founded, single-partnership global firm. Famously rejects the verein model. Litigation, antitrust, and corporate. |
| 8 | Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom | ~1,700 / $3.5B | New York-anchored. M&A, capital markets, and white-collar defense. The original Wall Street powerhouse, with high revenue per lawyer. |
| 9 | Sidley Austin | ~2,000 / $3.1B | Chicago-founded. Healthcare, life sciences, capital markets, and disputes. Deep regulatory bench in D.C. |
| 10 | White & Case | ~2,500 / $3.4B | New York-anchored global firm. Project finance, cross-border M&A, international arbitration. Heavy presence in emerging markets. |
Counts marked "~" are approximate, drawn from each firm's most recent AmLaw 100 or Global 200 disclosure (revenue in USD, attorney counts global). Order reflects a blend of revenue and US attorney footprint. Source: ALM AmLaw 100 and Global 200, 2024 financials. For US-only attorney counts, subtract the share of headcount in international offices, which ranges from under 10 percent at Kirkland to over 60 percent at DLA Piper and Baker McKenzie.
Our take
If you only sell into AmLaw 200, you are walking past 437,000 firms.
We believe
The whole AmLaw 200, every firm on the list, employs roughly seven percent of US lawyers. Build for the other 93.
The standard vendor motion in legal is to chase the logo. Sell into Kirkland, sell into Latham, win a big-firm reference, ride it into the rest of the AmLaw 100. We have watched a legaltech founder run that motion for three years, sign two AmLaw 50 firms, and then look at the math. The whole AmLaw 200 list employs roughly 95,000 US lawyers, about seven percent of the 1.33 million the ABA counts in private practice. The other 93 percent sits at solo shops, two-partner firms, and regional mid-market practices that never came up in his pipeline because his data tool indexed by "named firm" and skipped everything without a Chambers ranking.
One of those firms called us last quarter. A four-attorney plaintiff-side employment shop in Atlanta. The managing partner had not been pitched by a practice-management vendor in two years. His CLE budget got spent on whoever showed up at the state bar conference. His malpractice carrier called once a year at renewal. Every time he looked for new software, he started from a Google search. That is the market most legaltech vendors are missing, not because the firms are hiding, but because the data tools are searching for "Skadden" instead of for the PLLC that signs the office lease.
Who buys this data
B2B vendors selling into 437,839 firms.
This page is for the teams selling into law firms, not the firms themselves. The buyer for this dataset usually falls into one of these categories.
Practice management software
Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther, Smokeball, and the next wave of cloud PMS vendors selling into solo and small firms still on a desktop tool from 2009. The buyer is the managing partner, not the firm administrator.
E-discovery and document review
Relativity, Everlaw, DISCO, Logikcull, and the review platforms selling into litigation boutiques and mid-market firms. The buyer is usually the head of litigation or a partner in charge of e-discovery operations.
Legal billing and time-tracking
TimeSolv, Bill4Time, LeanLaw, and the billing-only tools selling against the all-in-one PMS vendors. Often the office manager is the day-one user, but the partner signs.
Legal staffing and contract attorneys
Axiom, Hire Counsel, Latitude Legal, and the regional staffing shops placing temp-attorneys for doc review and overflow work. The buyer is the partner running the matter.
CLE and continuing education
National providers and state bar accredited shops selling required CLE credits and specialty programming. The buyer is the individual attorney, but firm-wide deals close at the partner level.
Legal marketing and SEO agencies
Specialty agencies running SEO, paid search, and intake automation for personal-injury, family-law, and immigration firms. The buyer is the firm owner who writes the cheque, not the marketing manager.
Court-filing and e-signature
File & ServeXpress, One Legal, and the e-signature tools wired into court systems. Buyers are the litigation paralegals, but procurement still routes through the managing partner.
Malpractice insurance carriers
ALPS, CAMICO, the bar-association affinity programs. Sold by direct underwriters and by retail brokers. The buyer is the founding partner or the firm administrator, and renewal lives in their calendar.
Legal research databases
The challengers to Westlaw and LexisNexis, like Casetext, Fastcase, vLex, and the new wave of AI-native research tools. Buyers are partners replacing a contract they have held for fifteen years.
Adjacent universes built the same way: the attorney email list, the by-industry email lists, and the broader Orbital data library.
Plain-spoken
When the law-firm dataset is the wrong fit.
Do not buy this if any of the following are true.
You only sell into AmLaw 100 firms. If your motion is one enterprise contract with Kirkland and one with Latham, you do not need 437,839 records. You need a Chambers ranking and a Friday lunch in Manhattan. Save your budget.
You sell to consumers looking for a lawyer. Avvo, FindLaw, LegalZoom, Martindale-Hubbell do consumer-facing directories. The data here is operator-side, not consumer-side. Different shape, different licence.
You need court docket or case data. PACER, CourtListener, Bloomberg Law, and Lex Machina cover docket-level intelligence. We map the firm and the partner, not the matters they are litigating.
You are recruiting individual lawyers. If your motion is moving senior associates between firms, you want a bar-roll search and a legal recruiter, not a firm-level dataset. The two jobs do not overlap.
The honest version
Why most law-firm vendor data is wrong.
If you Google "how many law firms in the US," the top result is usually a Statista chart or an IBISWorld market-size summary. Both are accurate snapshots of an annual data release. Neither is built to drive an outbound campaign next Monday. The defensible US law firm count is 437,839, sourced from the US Census Bureau's County Business Patterns NAICS 5411 series. The American Bar Association's roughly 1.33 million licensed lawyers is a different measure and a different decision. Most published estimates collapse the two, which is fine for a market-size slide and useless for picking up the phone.
The next problem is the brand. Enterprise data tools index by company, so "Latham & Watkins" looks like one customer with 30 offices. It is. But the partner who signs your contract in Houston is not the partner who signs in San Diego, and neither is the operations lead in New York. Each is a different buyer, with a different decision-maker, on a different cycle. The big database returns one row. The reality is several dozen, and once you step past the AmLaw 200, the reality is a third of a million PLLCs and LLPs none of which show up in a logo search.
This is exactly the gap Orbital was built for. We map the universe of US small and mid-market businesses, find the owner of each one, and validate the contact before it reaches you. Nothing about that is law-firm-specific, which is why we can also map dentists, HVAC contractors, med spas, restaurants, and accounting firms the same way. What is specific to law firms is the layer on top: practice area, attorney-count band, AmLaw or solo classification, and whether the partner runs one shop or fifteen offices.
One more piece of context worth pricing in. The American Bar Association publishes its National Lawyer Population Survey annually. US Census County Business Patterns ships the establishment-level firm count once a year with an 18-month lag. ALM's AmLaw 100 and Global 200 publishes the big-firm revenue rankings every spring. All three are excellent and we cite them. They are also annual or quarterly. For a vendor doing outbound this quarter, the question is which firms are open this Monday and which partner is on the phone. That is the gap a firm-by-firm, partner-by-partner map closes.
Questions
Before you ask sales about the law-firm dataset.
How many law firms are there in the US?
There are 437,839 active law firm establishments in the United States, based on the US Census Bureau's County Business Patterns NAICS 5411 series cross-checked against Orbital's April 2026 firm-by-firm map. The American Bar Association counts roughly 1.33 million licensed lawyers, but that is a headcount of attorneys, not a count of firms. The two numbers measure different things.
Who has the most law firms or biggest firm in the US?
By revenue, Kirkland & Ellis sits at the top of the AmLaw 100 with around 4 billion dollars in annual gross revenue and roughly 3,500 attorneys. Latham & Watkins and DLA Piper follow. By attorney headcount, DLA Piper, Baker McKenzie, and Hogan Lovells lead because of their global footprints. Even so, the entire AmLaw 200 accounts for only a small share of US firms. The market is structurally a long tail of solo practitioners and small partnerships.
Are most law firms solo practitioners or Big Law?
Solo. The American Bar Association reports that roughly 49 percent of US lawyers in private practice work in a solo or two-attorney firm. Big Law firms with 500 or more attorneys employ around 16 percent of private-practice lawyers. By firm count, the skew is even more extreme. Most US law firms are one partner with a bookkeeper, an associate or two, and a paralegal. That is the buyer most legaltech vendors are actually trying to reach.
What is the difference between a law firm and a lawyer count?
A law firm is the operating business. A lawyer count is the headcount of licensed attorneys. The ABA tracks roughly 1.33 million licensed US lawyers. The US Census tracks roughly 437,839 law firm establishments. The same lawyer can be one of three partners at a small firm, and the same firm can have 4,000 lawyers across 30 offices. For vendors selling firm-level software or services, the firm count is what matters. For vendors selling individual subscriptions or CLE seats, the lawyer count is closer.
Which state has the most law firms?
California has the most, with around 49,000 active firms, driven by the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and the state's outsized litigation volume. New York follows at roughly 39,000, then Texas at 31,000, Florida at 27,000, and Illinois at 17,000. Per capita, Washington D.C., New York, and Massachusetts have far more law firms per resident than the national average. D.C. alone has more lawyers per resident than any state by a wide margin.
How accurate is the US law firm count?
It depends on what you count. The US Census County Business Patterns figure is the authoritative establishment count and ships annually with a lag of about 18 months. The ABA lawyer count ships annually as well. ALM and IBISWorld publish their own variants. Orbital builds the working count from the Census base, then refreshes against state bar rolls, secretary-of-state filings, and a firm-by-firm map, so it captures new partnerships and dissolutions the annual report misses.
Who actually buys law firm data?
Vendors selling into legal. Practice management software vendors like Clio, MyCase, and PracticePanther selling into small and mid firms. E-discovery and document review platforms. Legal billing and time-tracking tools. Legal staffing and contract-attorney placement. CLE and continuing-education vendors. Legal marketing and SEO agencies. Court-filing and e-signature platforms. Malpractice insurance carriers. Legal research databases. The common thread is that they need the managing partner or office administrator, not a generic firm name.
Can I get a sample of the law firm partner data?
Yes. Tell us the practice areas, attorney-count bands, or states you want and we send a sample of around 100 verified partner records so you can check them against your own pipeline before anything changes hands. There is no charge for the sample.
See the law firm partner dataset before you pay for it.
Tell us the practice areas, attorney-count bands, or states you want. We send a free sample of around 100 verified partner records you can check against your own pipeline, no commitment, no email-list back-and-forth.
Get the sample