Start with the part that is openly licensed and counted the same way everywhere: legal aid. There are 4,700 offices holding a legal aid contract, and 14.2% of them are in a London postcode.
That is the lowest London share of any part of the profession we can count under an open licence, and it is the part with the least written about it. 23.6% of located law firms on Companies House give a London registered office, by contrast — which is itself a figure about registered offices rather than workplaces.
The postcode areas, and why this is not a city ranking
The numbers behind this chart
| Postcode area | Offices |
|---|---|
| B | 169 |
| M | 139 |
| E | 129 |
| SE | 120 |
| S | 113 |
| CF | 111 |
| NG | 91 |
| NE | 91 |
| N | 89 |
| L | 82 |
| LS | 81 |
| W | 81 |
| EC | 81 |
| LE | 78 |
| DN | 73 |
| BD | 71 |
| SW | 71 |
| BS | 68 |
| SA | 64 |
| BN | 61 |
| PE | 60 |
| PO | 59 |
| BB | 57 |
| TS | 56 |
| IG | 54 |
| LU | 54 |
| LL | 53 |
| YO | 53 |
| CH | 51 |
| WF | 51 |
Birmingham's B postcode holds more legal aid offices than any single London area, and it is tempting to read that as Birmingham outranking London. It does not. London is split across E, SE, N, W, EC, SW, NW, WC, IG and more, and Birmingham is one area. Add the London areas up and you get the 14.2% above.
Read the chart instead as a list of the places with enough publicly funded legal work to sustain a career: Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff, Sheffield, Nottingham, Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Swansea all appear in the top twenty areas, and Birmingham appears above every individual London area in the country.
What applying outside London actually means
It means a different kind of work, not a smaller version of the same work. The category data makes this concrete. Of the offices contracted for public law, 48.6% are in London. Debt and housing are each 32.3% London, immigration and asylum 30.4%, modern slavery 31.6%. Those are national specialisms run from the capital.
Crime is 19.1% London across 387 towns. Family is 12.9% across 458 towns. Family mediation is 7.8% across 546 towns. If you want to do that work, the question is which town, not whether you can leave London.
And the fragility is the other half of the picture. 925 towns have at least one legal aid office. Of those, 487 have exactly one office and 499 have exactly one category of law. In more than half the towns with any legal aid provision, one office closing removes the category from the town.
That is a fact about access to justice first and a fact about your career second, but it is both. A town with one crime office is a town with one crime employer.
The composition changes, town by town
The professions are not spread in the same pattern as each other. The Bar is overwhelmingly London and then a short list of circuit centres. Patent and trade mark attorneys cluster where the science is, which is why most of Cambridge's legal population is patent and trade mark attorneys. Chartered legal executives are spread far more evenly across England and Wales than solicitors are, and in some cathedral and county towns they are the largest group of legal professionals in the town.
Those are shapes, not numbers, because the numbers behind them come from registers whose publishers reserve re-use. The per-town comparison across every register is in the member area; what you can take from this page for free is the direction, which is that choosing a town is choosing a profession as much as the other way round.
What we cannot map, and will not pretend to
There is no region on any of these registers. They record a free-text town, spelled however the organisation spelled it, and five sources spell the same place five ways. We join them on an exact match of the lowercase string, which means Newcastle upon Tyne and Newcastle, or Salford and MediaCityUK, come apart.
The consequences are honest and worth stating:
- No regional totals. Nothing here can tell you how many legal professionals are in the North West, because no register says "North West".
- No map above town level. There is no postcode-to-region lookup in this data, so a regional map would be our invention rather than the registers' content.
- No reliable figures per head of population. We hold a published population for only a minority of the towns in these registers, so a practitioners-per-100,000 table would quietly exclude most of the country.
- Two different town counts. 925 towns with a legal aid office by one count and 856 by another, from the same source, because the two were computed from different files. We publish both and are reconciling them rather than picking the one we prefer.
We publish nothing below town level. Registered offices are sometimes home addresses, and a postcode table of law firms would publish where people live.
Nothing here covers Scotland or Northern Ireland
Every register behind this page is England and Wales. If you are applying in Scotland or Northern Ireland, the geography on this page does not describe your market and we hold no substitute for it.
Assize Careers is not a regulator, professional body, university, law school or official careers service, and it is not part of or endorsed by one. Nothing on this site is legal advice.
Assize Careers is not affiliated with, authorised by or endorsed by the Legal Aid Agency, Companies House, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Bar Standards Board, CILEx Regulation or IPReg.