2021 ABA Profile of the Legal Profession highlights how the pandemic affected lawyers

The American Bar Association on July 29 will release its third annual Profile of the Legal Profession report, with a new chapter on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected lawyers.

The 2021 ABA Profile of the Legal Profession is a 140-page compilation of statistics and trends among lawyers, judges and law students, gathered from within the ABA and from courts, the federal government and nonprofits. The report includes sections on demographics, wages, law schools and law students, student debt, judges, pro bono work, legal deserts, women in the profession, legal technology, lawyer well-being and lawyer discipline.

“The 2021 Profile is a comprehensive, authoritative reference for lawyers, academics, journalists and the public,” said ABA President Patricia Lee Refo. “This year’s additional material reveals in detail the profound impact of the pandemic on the legal profession.”

This year’s Profile includes findings on how the pandemic affected many subsets of lawyers, including older lawyers, female lawyers, big-firm lawyers and solo practitioners. The findings are from a survey of more than 4,000 ABA members and a follow-up survey of senior lawyers. Among the findings:

• One-third of lawyers age 62 and older changed their retirement plans because of the pandemic.

• More than half of lawyers in big firms of 250 attorneys or larger worried more during the past year about pay cuts. Many also worried about layoffs and furloughs.

• Three times as many female lawyers took on additional childcare responsibilities during the pandemic compared with male lawyers.

Among the many facts in the rest of the Profile report:

• There are 1.3 million lawyers in the United States. One-fourth of them are in two states (New York and California). One out of seven is a lawyer of color. Roughly one-third of all lawyers (37%) are women.

• Lawyers are, on average, older than the general working population: 14% of all lawyers are age 65 or older. That’s double the percentage for the nation’s general working population.

• For the 10th year in a row, the number of men attending law school declined. But for the fourth year in a row, the number of women attending law school rose.

• There are 114,000 law school students in the U.S. and a majority (54%) are women. In fact, there are 25 law schools where women are 60% or more of the student body. There are no law schools where men are 60% of the student body.

• Nearly half of all law school graduates take jobs at law firms after graduation, but 10% go to work for the government. Less than 1% start a solo practice.

• Nearly 80% of all federal judges are white. That’s virtually unchanged since 2016. On the state level, 83% of all justices on the state’s highest courts are white, and 62% are men.

• More than a quarter of all lawyers (29%) say their firm has suffered a security breach and more than a third (36%) say their firm has cyber liability insurance. Nearly half of all lawyers (49%) still use a desktop computer as their primary work computer, rather than a laptop.

The complete ABA 2021 Profile of the Legal Profession will be available online July 29 at ambar.org/profile.