Solicitors' income hits 10.5bn record

Solicitors' income has broken through the 10 billion barrier after a year which saw gross fess rise by 11%, authoritative research has found.

The Law Society's annual statistical report for 2001 - which records turnover figures for 1999-2000 - put the profession's income at 10.5 billion.

Slightly more than half - 5.3 billion - came from the 130 firms with 26 or more partners.

There are 8,306 law firms in total.

Almost 1 billion came from law firms' overseas earnings, while 1.4 billion was legal aid payments, a slight decrease on the year before.

Growth was strongest in the larger firms, with practices of 11-25 partners achieving the biggest rise over the year, 15%.

By contrast, firms of five to ten partners saw gross fees rise 5%.

The 10.5 billion figure is an increase of 52% in five years.

But allowing for the rapid growth in the number of solicitors, and inflation, real gross fees per solicitor rose just 8.3% in the five years to 2000.

A separate study of profitability contained in the report shows that 25% of sole practitioners earned less than 19,000 from operating their practices; however, sole practitioners at the top end earned more than 75,000.

Median profits for sole practitioners stood at 40,000, compared to 50,000 per equity partner at firms of two to four partners, 57,000 at firms of five to ten partners, 83,000 at firms of 11-25 partners, and 154,000 at firms of 26-80 partners.

The few firms larger than this were not surveyed.

Nonetheless, the report found that the number of solo practices has risen 14% to 3,496 over the decade to 2001.

There has been a 17% decline in the number of five-to-ten partner firms in that time, however, to 942.

Overall, there has been a 9% drop in the number of firms over the past five years.

As of 31 July 2001, there were 109,553 solicitors on the Roll, a 5% increase on the year before.

Some 86,603 had practising certificates, of whom 21% were in the employed sector.

More than a quarter of women solicitors were in the employed sector, compared to 18% of male solicitors.

If the profession continues to grow as it has in recent years - around 50% a decade - then by the year 2055, there will be a million solicitors on the Roll.

By then, the majority are likely to be women - more than 37% of the practising profession is currently female, while the proportion of women law undergraduates has risen to 63%, and on average they also get higher quality degrees than men.

The proportion of women admitted to the Roll reached an all-time high of 55% last year.

The average age of a female solicitor is 36.5 years compared with 43.1 for men.

However, serial problems for women remain: while 52% of men are partners, just 24% of women are.

And nationally there is pay inequality for female trainees, who on average earn 17,944 compared to 18,807 for male trainees.

Ethnic minorities make up 8% of solicitors on the Roll, of whom nearly a third are resident abroad.

Two-thirds of those on the Roll hold practising certificates, but only a quarter of the 2,472 Chinese solicitors do so; most are probably Hong Kong practitioners who could requalify with ease when they worked at English firms in the days before the colony was returned to China.

The number of training contracts fell slightly for the first time in five years to 5,162.

Neil Rose