Ranked - The most common first names for UK lawyers

Jason Ku • 1 July 2020

Pirical Legal Professionals is the leading database for recruitment and sales enablement, with 350,000+ legal professionals across 130+ countries.

Our unrivalled technology aggregates data from news articles, professional social media accounts, firm websites, bar representative bodies and more, to make sure our database is always up-to-date.

Using our database - just for fun - we looked at how the top names vary by seniority in the UK legal profession.

Starting with the newbies - those with fewer than 1 year of post qualification experience (PQE) - our visualisation tracks the top names all the way through to 40 years PQE.

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The most popular name among new recruits is Charlotte . You quickly get a sense from the data that the class of 2019/20 has more women than men. In fact, the latest cohorts of newly qualified solicitors are some of the most gen der diverse the legal profession has ever seen, with 61.3% women.

The most popular name among senior lawyers is David . This is true for both PQE 35-40 lawyers and for partners with any number of years PQE.

At partnership level, there are more than twice as many Davids than Sarahs .

With both ends of the profession looking so different, it seems likely that tomorrow’s law firms will look very different to today’s.

Pirical are the market leaders in people analytics at UK legal and professional services firms.

While our database is the most popular by UK market share, some of our other products include:

  • BAME Benchmark - a pioneering collaboration that analyses ethnicity data across firms to help you focus your diversity and inclusion initiatives. There’s a new round starting now. See which firms signed up last year.
  • Gender in Partnership - one of our longest-standing diversity products. Deep-dive into the inequalities at the top of your firm and see how you compare to the market. Identify high-impact levers for improvement. Contact us to learn more.
  • Graduate Recruitment Reporting - A constant companion for operational decision-making, focusing on what you need to know when you need it. Explore diversity, performance and common characteristics of high-performing trainees. Graduate recruiters will not find a more comprehensive or cost-effective option. Contact us to learn more.


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