Approximately how many lawyers in your country practice in-house, in an organization other than a law firm?

If you have an estimate for the number of corporate counsel in any country other than the United States or Europe, please email me rees@reesmorrison.com. I am trying to figure out a plausible ratio of in-house lawyers to lawyers in private practice (See my post of Feb. 17, 2010: possibly 10,000 law departments in Europe.).

Or if you know an association of in-house lawyers in a country or a person who might know the data I seek, I would very much welcome the tip. For this inquiry, I am not differentiating between lawyers employed by private organizations and lawyers employed by government entities, but that would be even more welcome data.

Here is some fragmentary information. I was told that In Mexico approximately 400 belong to an in-house group (ANADE) and in Belgium something like 1,300 (See my post of Feb. 16, 2010 #2: mandatory to belong to in-house group. A correspondent in Japan wrote that “according to the White Paper on Attorneys 2009, the number of attorneys who practice as in-house attorneys is 354 (as of June 2009).” That number surely is too small.

Here is some more data from Wiki Answers about numbers of practicing lawyers, a much broader category than in-house lawyers: Brazil: Lawyers: 571,360; New Zealand: Lawyers:10,523. (Source for Brazil: Brazil’s ABA equivalent OAB (active) for 2007: India has around one million lawyers, about the same absolute number as the US (Source India).