Sydney Lawyers

Lawyers as a profession are surprisingly one of the more popular for the state of NSW with 23,334 registered practicing lawyers as at 2nd April 2009.

Sydney lawyers make up approximately 51 percent of NSW's total numbers of lawyers, which equates to 11,925 practicing lawyers.

What has traditionally been seen as a male dominated field, Sydney lawyers are actually divided between the sexes fairly evenly with 54 percent being male and 45 percent female. However, this does not reflect the field of law accurately as the number of females practicing Sydney lawyers has outnumbered men for the last ten years.

When it comes to age ranges, figures from early April 2009 show that the majority of lawyers in Sydney, 50 percent in fact, are aged from under 29 to 39 years of age.

What is important to note is that the majority of lawyers in Sydney actually work within or for a private law firm, 51 percent in fact, while only 11 percent work for the Government and 18 percent for Corporate law. As a result of this private practice focus, the average income of a Sydney lawyer is estimated to be approximately $106,000 and higher the larger the firm they are working within.

For those interested in need of a lawyer in Sydney, there are a large number of private practice law firms or Sydney solicitors that specialize in all avenues of the Australian legal system.

Sydney Law Firms

Sydney lawyers working within the private Sydney law firms are the ones that the public will typically use in their dealings with the law. Sydney lawyers in private practices will cover everything from family law such as divorce law to civil rights law to criminal law. Although what is surprising is that 85 percent of private practices in NSW are a sole practitioner while only 0.51 percent are large law firms with more than 21 lawyers, although 93 percent of these are located in Sydney CBD.

There are a surprising extensive number of different avenues of law in Australia, the most prominent being Commercial Law, Corporate Law, Criminal Law, Family Law, Personal Injury Law and Taxation.

Sydney lawyers are divided into areas of specialty, areas of the law for which they have chosen to represent, within NSW the most dominant area of law that lawyers are Commercial Law with 29.3 percent, Conveyance/Real Property Law with 28.7 percent and Corporate Law with 17.8 percent.

However, these figures represent the state average, as Conveyance/Real Property law is typically confined to suburban areas and not Sydney itself where Commercial law and Civil Litigation are far more dominant due to the far greater demand for this type of lawyer. In fact, lawyers in Sydney have reported in the 2008-2009 Practicing Certificate Survey that 34.2 percent of them work on Commercial law, that being the of greatest need by the public and businesses who use a lawyers services.