The profession the Bar does not reach
Wakefield has 70 chartered legal executives and one barrister. Southport has 50 and one. On the map, CILEX and the Bar are barely the same country.
The Bar is a London profession. Of 18,307 practising barristers, something over half sit in chambers within a mile of the Royal Courts of Justice, and the provincial Bar thins out fast beyond eight or nine regional centres.
The CILEX profession is not shaped like that at all. Its top ten towns hold 34% of located practitioners; London holds 775 of 7,032, or 11%. The rest are spread across 436 towns with three or more practitioners each.
Put the two registers side by side and the divergence is stark.
| Town | Legal executives | Barristers |
|---|---|---|
| Wakefield | 70 | 1 |
| Bolton | 69 | 2 |
| Salford | 57 | 7 |
| Southport | 50 | 1 |
| Coventry | 41 | 3 |
| Worthing | 31 | 0 |
| Birkenhead | 26 | 0 |
| Poole | 25 | 0 |
These are not small places. They are towns with courts, high streets and legal need, where the resident advocacy and litigation capacity is substantially CILEX and barely Bar at all.
What that implies
Two things follow, and they point in opposite directions.
The first is about access. Where a town has fifty chartered legal executives and one barrister, the question of who conducts litigation there answers itself. The professional-services map that trade bodies and policymakers work from — chambers, silks, circuits — describes a profession that is largely absent from these towns.
The second is a caution. The register records where a practitioner’s employer is, not where they practise, and a large share of the profession works in volume personal-injury and insurance defence for national firms. Bolton’s 69 are substantially Keoghs; Southport’s 50 are substantially Fletchers. That is a town with a large legal employer in it, which is not quite the same as a town well served by lawyers.
Both readings are in the data. Neither is visible from the register’s own search form, which will not tell you how many practitioners are in a town at all.
geographythe bardata