The professions nobody counts together
7 legal professions in England and Wales are regulated by somebody other than the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Bar Standards Board or CILEx Regulation. Each has a register. None of the regulators publishes a figure you can compare with another’s, none of the registers links to any other, and none of them says what any of the others may lawfully do. This site reads all of them.
- 9,151 practitioners collected, across 5 registers
- 19 professions covered, including the 12 with no register to read
- 6 reserved legal activities, and who may do each
- 233 towns with three or more practitioners
Every profession, and how big it is
| Profession | Regulator | Collected here | Reserved activities |
|---|---|---|---|
| Notaries public | Faculty Office | 817 | 4 |
| Costs lawyers | CLSB | 789 | 3 |
| Licensed conveyancers | CLC | 2,410 | 3 |
| Patent and trade mark attorneys | IPReg | 3,924 | 4 |
| Certificated enforcement agents | HMCTS | at least 1,211 | none |
| Claims management companies | FCA | not collected | none |
| Regulated immigration advisers | IAA | not collected | none |
“Collected here” is what this site counted, not what the regulator says. The two differ and the difference is the point — the comparison table puts them side by side and attributes every published figure, and methodology says how each register was read.
Two registers are not collected, and the reason is not that they are empty.
- Claims management companies — no rows in the cache: not collected yet
- Regulated immigration advisers — no rows in the cache: not collected yet
A comparison table that printed “0” for these would be a false statement, so it prints the reason instead. See sources and licences.
What this site does that the registers do not
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Who may do what
The six reserved legal activities under the Legal Services Act 2007, and every profession permitted to carry on each one — including the three that are unregulated and may carry on none.
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One table, eight regulators
Population, statutory basis, protected title, entry route and disciplinary transparency, per profession, sourced cell by cell.
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What the regulators report
Every figure in these regulators' annual reports, with the sentence it came from: what regulation costs per head, what each body publishes and what it quietly stopped publishing.
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What can be asked, and of whom
Five of these six regulators are outside the Freedom of Information Act. What that leaves, and what has been obtained anyway.
Analysis
- There are 817 notaries, or 777, and nobody tells you which one you are looking at — Every one of these professions has two sizes: the number of entries in the public register, and the number in the regulator's annual report. They differ every time, by between 3% and 18%, and neither document says so.
- Fifty-one sittings of an entrance exam, assembled from eight FOI answers — The regulator published one pass rate a year, for three years. Its replies to individual requests give every sitting from 2013 to 2016 — 1,663 candidates at Level 1, 426 passes, and a rate that swings from 0% to 68% between one month and the next.
- Fifty-two, counted two ways that had never met — The CLSB says 52 people entered the costs lawyer profession in 2025. Counting qualification dates on its register gives 52. Nobody published the second number, and nothing was adjusted to make the two agree.
- Five of these six legal regulators cannot be made to answer a question — The Freedom of Information Act reaches exactly one of the regulators whose annual reports this site reads — and it is the one regulating the profession whose register is hardest to get.
- Most people who sit the immigration adviser entrance exam fail it — Twenty-five per cent passed in 2015/16, 36% in 2016/17, 38% in 2017/18. In 2017/18, 519 people sat the Level 1 assessment and 321 of them did not get through. No other legal profession publishes a comparable rate.
- Notaries are last of the legal professions for women — and past parity at the entrance — Women are 36% of notaries against 38.5% of barristers, 52% of solicitors and 76.9% of chartered legal executives. Among notaries with under five years' experience they are 55%.
The professions with no register
Will writing, acting as a paid McKenzie friend and giving expert evidence are not reserved activities and are not regulated by anybody. There is no register to read, no qualification to hold and no route to complain to a regulator, and that is a fact about the sector rather than a gap in this site.