Birth Injury Marketing
Market intelligence · free, sourced, gaps left empty

Legal market capacity

By Kevin Schwaner, Founder; Chief Marketing OfficerUpdated

County Business Patterns counts 164,561 Offices of Lawyers establishments across the United States. Set against births, that produces a market map nobody else has assembled — and a measure that is much weaker than it looks, which is the more important half of this page.

Births per lawyer office, by county

Births per Offices-of-Lawyers establishment, by county, 2024 A county choropleth of births divided by lawyer establishments; counties with no lawyer establishments are hatched because the ratio is undefined.
Births per office ≤ 15.0 > 80.0 withheld / not published (854)

Counties are drawn from Census cartographic boundary files (2023, 1:20,000,000) and projected to an Albers equal-area conic at build time. This map contains no JavaScript mapping library, loads no external resource, and makes no network request. Hatched counties are withheld at source — they are not zero and they are not estimated.

Figure 1. Hatched counties have no Offices of Lawyers establishments at all, so the ratio is undefined rather than infinite or zero. There are 854 of them.

Offices of Lawyers, national
164,561CBP 2023, NAICS 541110, all practice areas
Median births per office, counties with 500+ births
34.3across 1,036 counties
Counties with no lawyer office
854853 of them recorded births
Births in counties with no lawyer office
74,3392024

The thinnest counties

Highest births per lawyer office, counties with 500+ births. The fifteen counties with at least 500 annual births and the highest ratio of births to lawyer establishments. Webster, MO 204.7 · 614 / 3 Franklin, WA 202.4 · 1,417 / 7 Waller, TX 194.0 · 776 / 4 Frederick, VA 191.8 · 959 / 5 Loudon, TN 187.3 · 562 / 3 Mississippi, AR 172.0 · 516 / 3 LaGrange, IN 171.8 · 687 / 4 Douglas, WA 168.7 · 506 / 3 Coryell, TX 165.8 · 995 / 6 Pinal, AZ 160.2 · 5,128 / 32 Madera, CA 159.2 · 2,070 / 13 Van Buren, MI 134.5 · 807 / 6 Clark, WI 134.2 · 537 / 4 Hardin, TX 134.0 · 670 / 5 Median (500+ births) 34.3 · national median
Figure 2 — an order of magnitude apart. The median county with 500 or more births has 34.3 births per lawyer office. The counties above run to six times that. Read the limits below before drawing any conclusion from it. Sources: Census Bureau, Vintage 2024 county population estimates (components of change), released June 2025; Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 541110 Offices of Lawyers, released May 2025.
Thirty counties with at least 500 annual births and the thinnest legal establishment density.
CountyStateBirths 2024Lawyer officesBirths per officeDelivering hospitals
Webster CountyMO6143204.70
Franklin CountyWA1,4177202.40
Waller CountyTX7764194.00
Frederick CountyVA9595191.80
Loudon CountyTN5623187.30
Mississippi CountyAR5163172.01 +1?
LaGrange CountyIN6874171.80
Douglas CountyWA5063168.70
Coryell CountyTX9956165.80
Pinal CountyAZ5,12832160.23 +1?
Madera CountyCA2,07013159.20 +2?
Van Buren CountyMI8076134.50
Clark CountyWI5374134.20
Hardin CountyTX6705134.00
Tooele CountyUT1,0628132.81
Mason CountyWA6445128.80 +1?
Caldwell CountyTX6425128.40
Adams CountyIN6375127.41
Sherburne CountyMN1,1399126.60
Hoke CountyNC8847126.30
Augusta CountyVA5044126.01
Holmes CountyOH7366122.71
Geary CountyKS8567122.31 +1?
San Patricio CountyTX8437120.40
Lyon CountyNV6025120.40 +1?
Ionia CountyMI5945118.80
Prince William CountyVA6,22554115.31
Apache CountyAZ6856114.22 +2?
Bronx CountyNY16,901155109.05
Guadalupe CountyTX2,06819108.81

What an establishment count cannot tell you

This is a market map, not a merit map, and it is a coarse one. Four specific limits, all of which we would rather state than have a reader discover:

1. NAICS 541110 does not distinguish practice areas. A fourteen-attorney medical malpractice practice and a solo doing residential closings are one establishment each. A county with forty offices may contain nobody equipped to fund a birth injury matter through years of litigation.

2. An establishment is a location, not a firm. A firm with four offices counts four times. Multi-office firms are concentrated in metropolitan counties, so urban density is overstated relative to rural.

3. Employment is noise-infused in every county. CBP applies noise to employment values to protect confidentiality, flagged G, H or J by magnitude. We therefore use establishment counts, which are not noise-infused, and we do not publish county employment at all rather than publish a number with an undisclosed error band.

4. Zero means zero establishments reported, not zero legal services available. Residents of a county with no lawyer office are served from elsewhere, exactly as residents of a county with no hospital deliver elsewhere.

Definition and treatment.
ElementTreatment here
Establishment count (est)Published as reported. Not suppressed, not noise-infused.
Employment (emp)Not published on this site. Noise-infused in every county at this NAICS level.
Counties absent from the NAICS 541110 fileTreated as zero establishments, which is what absence means in CBP — not as a suppressed value.
Ratio where offices = 0Undefined. Hatched. Never rendered as infinity or as a large number.

A limit we will not cross. Nothing on this page links a clinical outcome rate to a legal claim. Adverse-event rates measure medicine. Litigation measures a legal process. They are different quantities, they are collected by different agencies for different reasons, and correlating them would be the fastest way to publish something false. Where we present clinical data and legal data together, it is to describe a market — never to imply that one causes, predicts, or justifies the other.

Sources

  1. U.S. Census Bureau — County Business Patterns, 2023 — NAICS 541110, Offices of Lawyers; establishment counts by county
  2. U.S. Census Bureau — County Population Totals and Components of Change, Vintage 2024 — births by county, 2021–2024
  3. U.S. Census Bureau — Cartographic Boundary Files, 2023 (1:20,000,000) — county and state polygons; projected to Albers equal-area at build time

Cite this analysis

Free to reproduce with attribution, including commercially. Charts may be embedded as published.

Birth Injury Marketing. “Legal market capacity.” 24 August 2026. https://birthinjurymarketing.com/intelligence/legal-market/

Journalists and researchers: we will cut this data to your specification — by state, by county, by hospital, by year — and send the underlying CSV, free and without conditions. Ask for a custom cut. We will also tell you what the data cannot support.

Elsewhere in the intelligence layer

Births & delivery volume

Where babies are actually born — county-complete, no suppression.

Obstetric delivery capacity

Which hospitals deliver, which do not, and the 971 CMS does not say.

Outcome measures: the blackout

CMS published zero hospital obstetric outcome scores for 2024. All of them.

Malpractice climate

Incomplete, and the page says why rather than filling the gap.

How this was built, and what we could not get → · Model your own market → · All states →

Authorship & review

Author
Kevin Schwaner, Founder; Chief Marketing Officer. Credentials.
Last reviewed
Corrections
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