Law firms in Phoenix: 2,339 offices, nonlawyer-owned firms and how to check who you're hiring

This report is for anyone who needs to find, vet or sell to law firms in the Phoenix area: a person or business hiring a lawyer, a lawyer or paralegal looking for an employer, an investor curious about Arizona's open ownership rules, or a vendor that sells to firms. It covers Maricopa and Pinal counties, the two counties in the Census metro area.

Arizona's different rules

Alongside lawyers, the Arizona Supreme Court licenses two other kinds of legal provider.

For a client, an ABS can look exactly like a law firm. Asking who owns it isn't rude; it tells you whose interests sit behind the lawyer and whether, for example, the firm is part of a larger company that also sells you something else.

Phoenix's law offices in Census data

County Business Patterns 2023, offices of lawyers (NAICS 541110), Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ Metro Area (CBSA 38060):

Phoenix has no law office of 500 or more employees in this data; the two top classes are unpublished, but the rest already sum to 2,339. In three tiers, the metro has 2,206 offices with under 20 employees, a thin middle of 119 with 20 to 99, and 14 with 100 or more.

The metro has 75.7% of Arizona's 3,088 law offices and 82.2% of their employees. Pay averages $112,613, a little above the Arizona figure ($106,842) and below the national one ($125,580).

How to read these numbers. They count establishments with paid staff, not firms: one firm with offices in Phoenix and Scottsdale counts twice. Employees include support staff as well as lawyers, and owners aren't employees. Practices with no staff are excluded; Nonemployer Statistics add 3,625 legal services businesses in the metro with no employees and $311.0 million in receipts, a broader code (NAICS 5411) that includes paralegal and document preparation businesses. The data doesn't separate ABSs from other firms.

The Maricopa County Bar Association, Arizona's largest voluntary bar since 1914, puts the number of attorneys in Maricopa County at more than 12,000.

Checking a Phoenix lawyer, LP or ABS

The State Bar of Arizona's legal professional search covers all three kinds of provider:

• Lawyers. Search by name or firm, or by legal need, county, city, certified specialization or language. Profiles show membership status, whether the lawyer carries professional liability insurance, board certified specializations and law school, though some details require signing in.
• Legal paraprofessionals. Profiles show status, approval date, insurance status, areas of law and, for some, typical fees.
• ABSs. An organization lookup lists licensed ABSs.

Discipline is a separate search on the same site ("Check Legal Professional Discipline"). If you need a referral rather than a name check, the Maricopa County Bar's Lawyer Referral Service is the county bar's own.

1. Are you a lawyer, a legal paraprofessional, or a business licensed as an ABS?
2. If you're an ABS: who owns the business, and who is your compliance lawyer?
3. Is your license active, and do you carry professional liability insurance? (Check the State Bar directory.)
4. How many matters like mine have you handled in the last year, and in which court?
5. Who will do the work, and at what rate or fixed fee?
6. Do you have any connection to the other side or to a company that referred me to you?

Selling to Phoenix law firms

Two things are different here. First, at an ABS the buyer may not be a lawyer: a nonlawyer owner, CEO or operations head can sign, and they tend to buy like any services business, on return and scale. Second, the mid-size tier is thin: only 119 offices have 20 to 99 employees, so most vendors either sell to the 2,206 small offices one at a time or to a handful of large ones through IT and procurement.

Illustrative example. The company, percentages and results are invented.

Saguaro Ledger (saguaro-ledger.example) sells trust accounting and payment software. It targets the 470 metro offices with 5 to 19 employees (300 + 170) and the licensed ABSs from the State Bar's organization lookup, with a separate message for each. For the small offices it keeps those taking client deposits for consumer matters, an illustrative 40%, or 188 offices, and writes to the managing lawyer. For the ABSs it writes to the CEO and copies the compliance lawyer, leading with the trust account records a compliance lawyer can review at any time. A 4% reply rate on the 188 gives seven or eight conversations.

Sorting offices by practice type and finding the operations lead at each ABS is the slow part; Bebop finds organizations that match a description and researches each account. The selling to law firms guide covers the confidentiality questions that come next.

Phoenix sources

Next step: see the NAICS code for a law firm if you need to classify a legal business, ABS included, for a form or a target list.