Law Department Management Blog
Courtesy of a recent Rand report, we have the number of attorneys for five European Union countries, according to the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe in 2008: UK (155,323 for 62 million population), Germany (146,910 for 82 million), France (47,765 for 62 million, The Netherlands (14,882 for 17 million), and Sweden (4,503 for 9 million). The data comes from page 7 of Rand’s “Innovations in the Provision of Legal Services in the United States.
Previous posts have taken up estimates for the number of legal departments in the UK and France. Based on these number, if on average one out of ten lawyers practices in-house and there are three lawyers per department, then Germany supports nearly 5,000 legal departments (See my post of Dec. 31, 2010: estimates of total number of worldwide law departments with 9 references from 2010; and April 30, 2011: since concentration of companies is not increasing, the number of law departments is not decreasing.). We need better data than crude derivatives from total lawyer populations.