India now has more than 2 million lawyers, according to a statistic cited by T.S. Thakur, chief justice of India’s Supreme Court, at a function hosted by the country’s Bar Council in January. That number is a big increase from 1.27 million just four years ago in 2011, when India already had the world’s largest population of lawyers.*
A large part of this growth has been fueled by the rapid proliferation of law schools in India. More than 400 law schools have opened in the past three years, bringing the total number to over 1,200. According to a calculation by Indian publication Legally India, in 2014 the Bar Council of India, the country’s legal education and practice regulator, approved a new law school every three days. Meanwhile, higher starting salaries for lawyers at India’s elite firms have made law school a more appealing option for Indian students.
