How the Index is counted
Build dated 2026-09-06 · 7,641 firms · 15 states · 254,446 attorneys.
1. What is counted
One number per firm per state: how many attorneys holding a live licence in that state name that firm on their own bar record. The state bar publishes the field; the attorney fills it in. Nothing is bought from a data broker, appended, or inferred from an email domain.
Firm names are grouped after normalising case, punctuation and entity suffix, so “Jones Day, LLP” and “JONES DAY LLP” are one firm. The fullest spelling seen is the one displayed.
2. What it is not
Three things keep an attorney out of a firm's count:
- They left the firm field blank. Between 3% and 25% of active licensees do, depending on the state.
- Their licence is not active. Retired, inactive, suspended, disbarred and deceased records are excluded from every number on the site.
- They are licensed elsewhere. An attorney at a New York firm who holds only a New Jersey licence is not in the New York table.
So a firm ranking above another means it employs more state-licensed, actively practising attorneys who said so on their bar record. Every count is a floor.
3. Why firm by state, and why seven states are missing
The unit has to be one where every row is measured the same way, and firm name is a field each registry chooses whether to publish. Ten do:
| State | Source | Firm field on |
|---|---|---|
| New York | New York (OCA) | 75% |
| California | State Bar of California | 79% |
| Illinois | Illinois ARDC | 89% |
| Texas | State Bar of Texas | 76% |
| Pennsylvania | Pennsylvania Disciplinary Board | 85% |
| Florida | The Florida Bar | 84% |
| Ohio | Ohio Supreme Court | 89% |
| Georgia | State Bar of Georgia | 78% |
| Michigan | State Bar of Michigan | 76% |
| Colorado | Colorado OARC | 85% |
| Utah | Utah State Bar | 97% |
| Indiana | Indiana Roll of Attorneys | 81% |
| Oregon | Oregon State Bar | 53% |
| Kentucky | Kentucky Bar Association | 61% |
| Arizona | State Bar of Arizona | 85% |
5 do not publish an employer field — Massachusetts, North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee, Washington — so no firm table can be built from them at any threshold. We name those states as absent rather than publish a partial count that would rank their firms far too low. Illinois and Indiana were absent in earlier builds: their search results omit the employer, but their per-attorney records carry it, and reading those moved both into the Index at 89% and 81% coverage.
4. Thresholds
- A firm needs 10 attorneys in a state to be ranked there. Below that the number is noise, and a two-attorney presence is not a market position.
- A state needs 15 ranked firms before it gets a page.
- Below 75% firm-field coverage a state's page says so, rather than quietly ranking every firm in it too low.
5. How to cite it
“US Law Firm Index, US Attorney List, build 2026-09-06.” Link to the state page you took the number from. The Index is free and sells nothing — the counts are published so they can be quoted and checked. If a number looks wrong, the underlying record is a public bar registration and can be verified against the state bar directly.