Los Angeles law firm size: most firms have one lawyer

Most Los Angeles law firms are one lawyer, who often does the legal work, the intake and the marketing at once. That changes what a sensible plan looks like. We counted firm sizes from public records so the point rests on numbers, not on our impression.

The counts come from the State Bar of California's public attorney profiles, read August 10 to 12, 2026. We publish totals only. No attorney or firm is named.

How many Los Angeles law firms are solo practitioners?

10,300 of 13,578, or 76%. But because big firms hold many lawyers each, solo attorneys are only 28% of the attorneys we could place in a firm. Firms of 21 or more hold 36%.

The largest firm had 315 attorneys at Los Angeles County addresses. The ten largest held 2,039 between them, about one in eighteen of the attorneys in the table.

Does a second method agree?

Roughly, yes. Firm names on profiles are messy, so we also counted attorneys who share one office address, down to the suite. By that measure 37% of attorneys work alone at their address, against 28% by firm name.

The address count finds more lone attorneys for two reasons. It includes 10,973 attorneys whose profile names no firm, whom the name count leaves out. It also splits large firms that spread across several floors. So the true solo share of attorneys likely sits between 28% and 37%.

For how many attorneys work in each county, not only Los Angeles, see our count of California lawyers by county.

Which practice areas are mostly solo?

Criminal law, immigration and family law. More than half the attorneys listing each of those areas work in a one-lawyer firm. In labor and employment it is fewer than one in four. Which of these case types people actually search for is in our count of Los Angeles lawyers by practice area.

Personal injury is split. Its attorneys are spread almost evenly between solo practices and firms of 2 to 20. Unlike the overall figures, the address count puts the injury solo share lower, at 34%. So injury firms are a little larger than the name count suggests.

What does firm size mean for marketing?

In a one-lawyer firm, the person who answers new inquiries is often the person in court. So the plan has to cover who picks up, not only how leads arrive.

• Intake first. A solo attorney can't take a call during a hearing. So a missed call needs a reply plan before any ad money goes in. Our guide to legal answering services compares the options.
• Fewer channels, run properly. One channel with tracking beats four channels nobody has time to check.
• Owned accounts. A small firm should keep its ad accounts, Google profile and website in its own name. Then it can change vendors without starting again.

Firms of 21 or more are a different buyer, more likely to have someone whose job is marketing. In criminal law, immigration and family law, that buyer is rare in Los Angeles.

How does Los Angeles compare with the country?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted about 863,700 lawyer jobs in the United States in 2025.^[3] That is a count of jobs, while ours counts active licenses with a Los Angeles County address, so the two cannot be divided into each other. The federal page gives no split by firm size, so we can't say whether Los Angeles firms are smaller than the national average.

Whatever the firm size, the plan starts with the cases you want and how you will count them. Our law firm marketing plan guide walks through it, and our page on working with Los Angeles law firms explains how we start.

How we counted

We used public State Bar attorney profiles, read in August 2026, and kept the active ones. We placed each California address in a county by its ZIP code, using the Census Bureau's 2020 ZIP code area file.^[1] That gave 58,645 active attorneys in Los Angeles County. The State Bar's own county table showed 58,866 on October 20, 2026, so our count is within 0.4% of it.^[2]

Our first filter marked 52,839 of them as not working for government or a company legal department.

Of those 52,839, we put 36,206 into law firms by the firm name on the profile. We matched names after removing endings such as LLP and APC, and we merged names that were cut short. We left out 5,660 attorneys whose employer is not a law practice, such as a studio, a bank or a charity. We also left out 10,973 whose profile names no firm.

We checked the 6 or more attorney groups that had no law word in their name by hand. Nineteen were law firms, and we kept them in.

Limits

A few limits apply:

• Firm size here means attorneys with a Los Angeles County address and an active California license. National firms are larger than they look here, and the counts leave out paralegals and staff.
• Firm names are typed in many ways. Some firms may still be split in two, which would make the solo count a little high. The office-address check above is there to show the range.
• We left out profiles that showed no license status, so all counts are a floor.

We didn't contact any attorney or firm for this count. Everything here comes from the State Bar's public site.