Law Firm Statistics: New York Lost 646 Offices, Gained 7,979 Jobs

The two lines that diverge

Start with the doors. New York had 13,178 law offices in 2016. It has 12,532 now, and the peak was 2017.

It fell for four straight years after that peak and it has not recovered. 2025 is still 714 offices below where the state was in 2017.

Now the people.

Employment went the other way. It dipped in 2020 and 2021, which needs no explaining, then passed its old level: 123,736 people against 115,757 ten years earlier.

Put the two charts together and you get the finding. The average New York law office has grown from 8.8 people to 9.9.

That is consolidation, and it is the most useful line on this page if you are choosing a lawyer. The profession is arranging itself into fewer, larger practices, and the small firm is a smaller share of the market than it was a decade ago.

Manhattan takes 60% of the jobs

New York County has 29% of the offices and 60% of the jobs. That gap is the whole story of this market.

The offices are spread across the state. The big ones are not. An average New York County office holds 20.1 people; in Nassau County, next on the list, it holds 6.6.

A further 685 establishments are recorded statewide without a county, which the Bureau labels unknown or undefined. They are left out of the ranking above rather than assigned somewhere, because an establishment nobody could place is not a county.

The same job pays 2.9 times more in one county

A week in a New York County law office pays $4,822. The same week in Onondaga County pays $1,681. Same industry code, same state, 2.9 times the money.

Some of that is seniority and some of it is the work. The corporate deals are in Manhattan. The closings and the injury cases are everywhere.

For national context, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median annual wage for lawyers at $159,670 as of May 2025. That is a different measure again: it counts people whose occupation is lawyer, wherever they work, while everything above counts everybody on a law office's payroll including the people who are not lawyers.

There are more lawyers than legal jobs

New York's own register of attorneys holds 131,062 live registrations with a New York address. Its law offices employ 123,736 people, and not all of those are lawyers.

So New York has at least 7,326 more resident licensed attorneys than people working in its law offices. They are in-house, in government, on the bench, teaching, retired but still registered, or doing something else entirely.

If you have ever wondered how a state reports a record number of lawyers in the same decade its law firms shrink, that is the answer.

We have written separately about what that register does and does not say, including the four different answers it gives to how many lawyers the state has.

What counts as a law firm here

Nobody counts law firms. What gets counted is establishments that report payroll, and that is what every figure above is.

It is not a count of firms. A practice with four offices files as four establishments, so the real number of firms is lower than 12,532 and nothing published says by how much.

The wider industry code, legal services, has 13,629 establishments in the same year. The 1,097 that are not offices of lawyers are title abstract offices, notaries, process servers and the rest of the legal economy that is not a law practice. This page uses the narrower code throughout.

Three things this misses

It counts offices, not firms. Nothing published reconciles the two, so the number of law firms in New York is smaller than 12,532 by an amount nobody measures.

It misses practices with no payroll. A solo practitioner who employs nobody may not appear at all, which means the smallest end of the profession is the part this dataset sees least.

It says nothing about quality, and neither does any count. A county with more offices is not a county with better lawyers. What a firm publishes about itself is checkable and is a different question, which is the one this directory measures.