The professions in law and in Parliament
Every one of these professions exists because an Act says so. This is the other direction: what the statute book and the parliamentary record actually say about each of them, counted from legislation.gov.uk and the Hansard search API. Both are open, and neither offers this cut of itself.
- 5,734 documents mentioning a legal profession
- 1,146 of them Acts rather than instruments
- 73,132 contributions in Hansard
- 10 professions, searched by 32 phrases
The regulator you have heard of is not the one in the Act
Ask the statute book about the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Bar Standards Board — the two bodies that actually discipline solicitors and barristers — and it barely knows them. Ask it about their parents, which are the approved regulators the Legal Services Act 2007 names, and it knows them well.
| Body | What it is | Legislation | Hansard |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solicitors Regulation Authority | Delegate | 4 | 303 |
| Bar Standards Board | Delegate | 0 | 101 |
| Law Society | Approved regulator | 477 | 10,746 |
| General Council of the Bar | Approved regulator | 232 | 274 |
Documents on legislation.gov.uk containing the body’s name, and spoken contributions in Hansard containing it. “Law Society” also catches the Law Society of Scotland and of Northern Ireland, which are different bodies regulating a different profession; the per-profession pages say so beside every figure.
Every profession, counted
| Profession | Documents | Acts | First | Hansard | Debates |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solicitors | 3,597 | 688 | 1640 | 59,643 | 280 |
| Barristers | 830 | 155 | 1640 | 9,989 | 33 |
| Notaries public | 423 | 100 | 1533 | 415 | 0 |
| Certificated enforcement agents | 332 | 89 | 1297 | 1,884 | 25 |
| Regulated immigration advisers | 182 | 44 | 1967 | 257 | 4 |
| Chartered legal executives and CILEX paralegals | 142 | 19 | 1971 | 161 | 0 |
| Licensed conveyancers | 94 | 21 | 1974 | 298 | 4 |
| Patent and trade mark attorneys | 74 | 15 | 1949 | 327 | 3 |
| Claims management companies | 49 | 12 | 1990 | 154 | 11 |
| Costs lawyers | 11 | 3 | 2003 | 4 | 0 |
“Documents” is a deduplicated union across every phrase a profession is searched by, so an Act naming both the profession and its regulator is counted once. Hansard figures are summed across phrases and are therefore an upper bound: one speech naming both is counted twice.
The oldest document the search returns for each
These are the least trustworthy figures on the page, and they are here with that said rather than left off.
An old document is the likeliest to use the word in another sense. The Taxation Act 1640’s only “solicitor” is “Solicitor Generall to the Kings most excellent Majestie”. And a hit is not always enacted text: the revised statute book carries legislation.gov.uk’s own editorial annotations, and the Ecclesiastical Licences Act 1533 is returned for “notary” because of the note “S. 11 applied by Public Notaries Act 1843”, not because the 1533 text says it.
The column is the oldest document the search returns, which is not the oldest law about the profession. This is the revised statute book, so a long-repealed Act is generally absent altogether.
And the sector itself
Three phrases belong to all of these professions and to none of them in particular: the reserved legal activities that make a profession a profession, the oversight regulator, and the complaints body.
| Phrase | Legislation | Hansard | Debates |
|---|---|---|---|
| reserved legal activity | 70 | 39 | 0 |
| Legal Services Board | 150 | 394 | 0 |
| Legal Ombudsman | 5 | 85 | 0 |
How this was collected, and what it is not
Legislation from legislation.gov.uk's full-text search; Parliament from the Hansard search API. Both are searched by quoted phrase, and both indexes are stemmed, so one phrase covers its plural. The legislation index is the English-language text: legislation.gov.uk holds Welsh versions of Welsh legislation separately, and a nil return here is a nil return in English. Document counts are a deduplicated union across a profession's phrases. Hansard contribution counts are summed across phrases and are therefore an upper bound, because one speech can match two phrases; the quotations kept are a sample of the total, never the whole of it. Nothing is filtered for relevance -- each phrase carries a caveat naming what it wrongly catches. The oldest hits are the least trustworthy: they are the likeliest to be the word in an older sense, and the legislation index reads legislation.gov.uk's editorial annotations as well as the enacted text, so a document can be returned because a note recording a later amendment mentions the phrase.
A hit is a document containing the phrase somewhere — a section, a schedule, a heading or a footnote. Neither service says where, and nothing here pretends to. A sample of the documents returned for each phrase is re-downloaded and checked to contain it; where a document could not be confirmed, the profession’s own page says so and names it. Collected 29 September 2026 from two Open Government Licence sources.