The scariest chart in the world

Admittedly, I try to come up with some funny and not so serious statistics and observations every Friday, but sometimes I encounter something so scary that I have to share it with my readers as a public service announcement. 

I recently read somewhere that the number of lawyers in the United States doubles every 25 years or so. I found that hard to believe since it would mean that the population of lawyers grows much, MUCH faster than the overall workforce. So, I did what I always do in these situations and looked up the source data. 

The American Bar Association collects data about the total “lawyer population” in the United States since 1878. But they live up to the reputation they have with me. I am constantly frustrated by the lack of numeric skills in lawyers. The moment they see a number that isn’t printed on one of their invoices they seem to recoil in horror, persistently unable to find any meaning in these strange symbols. The stories I could tell you about lawyers (and especially US lawyers) trying to regulate finance…

In any case, I was glad to find some basic statistics on their website about the number of lawyers. But while every public website I know tends to provide data in the form of an Excel, csv or at least a web table that allows the user to copy the data into a spreadsheet, the American Bar Association provides a pdf. And not just any pdf. Unlike most pdf files their file doesn’t allow the user to copy data from the pdf into a spreadsheet. So, I had to sit down and copy each data point by hand going back to 1955.

To top it all off, the American Bar Association has the tenacity to put the following sentence at the bottom of their publication:

“The ABA hereby grants permission for copies of the materials herein to be made, in whole or in part, for classroom use in an institution of higher learning or for use by not-for-profit organizations, provided that the use is for informational, non-commercial purposes only and any copy of the materials or portion thereof acknowledges original publication by the ABA, including the title of the publication, the name of the author, and the legend "Reprinted by permission of the American Bar Association. All rights reserved." Requests to reproduce portions of this publication in any other manner should be sent to the Copyrights & Contracts, American Bar Association.”

How am I supposed to use your data if you are unable to provide it in a usable format? It is beyond parody.

Anyway, after an endless session of mind-numbingly typing numbers off a screen and into a spreadsheet (and my computer crashing in the middle of it), here is the final result. I consider this the scariest chart I have ever seen. The share of lawyers in the American workforce since 1955. 

Share of lawyers in the American workforce

Source: ABA National Lawyer Population Survey. Historical trend in total national lawyer population 1878-2020. Reprinted by permission of the American Bar Association. All rights reserved. 

The share of lawyers in the US workforce has more than doubled between 1955 and 2020 and today almost one in 100 actively employed people in the United States are lawyers. At the end of the movie “Philadelphia” a dying Tom Hanks jokes with his lawyer played by Denzel Washington: “What do you call a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean?” – “I don’t know.” – “A good start.”

PS: I can already hear the lawyers I offended with this post claiming that there are too many financial analysts around as well. So, here is the comparison with financial analysts. It’s not even close…

Share of lawyers and financial analysts in the American workforce

Source: BLS, ABA National Lawyer Population Survey. Historical trend in total national lawyer population 1878-2020. Reprinted by permission of the American Bar Association. All rights reserved.