Will the job still exist? The one official projection to 2035

The number

The Department for Education publishes projected employment by occupation to 2035, modelled for it by the National Foundation for Educational Research. Of the five legal occupations in the UK classification, four rise and one falls.

Solicitors and lawyers: 18.6% more jobs in 2035 than in 2021, reaching 239,398. Barristers and judges, and legal professionals not elsewhere classified, carry the identical rate. Legal associate professionals — the group that holds paralegals and chartered legal executives — grow more slowly, at 7.4%.

Legal secretaries fall. The model removes 14,472 jobs from that occupation between 2021 and 2035 — a fall of 24.1%, leaving 45,658. It is the only one of the five that shrinks, and it shrinks in every year of the series.

That is the automation question answered by an official projection rather than an opinion column: the model expects the profession to grow and the typing to go. Now the part that decides how much weight any of it carries.

Whose growth rate is this, actually?

A legal occupation's rate in this file is not a finding about law. Solicitors and lawyers sit in a block with 31 other occupations, and all of them move together: chartered accountants, actuaries, architects, quantity surveyors, social workers, probation officers, clergy, librarians, archivists, journalists and advertising account managers, alongside barristers and judges. The projection did not find that legal work grows by 18.6%. It found that that whole block does, and law was carried along inside it.

The fall works the same way. Legal secretaries are grouped with medical secretaries, school secretaries, company secretaries, personal assistants, receptionists and typists, and every one of them carries the same 24.1% fall. It is a projection about secretarial and keyboard work in general. It was never a projection about law. That does not make it worthless — a model expecting office support work to shrink by a quarter while professional work grows is making a real claim — but anyone quoting "legal secretaries down a quarter" as a finding about the legal sector is quoting a number computed for receptionists and multiplied by law's fixed share of the block.

Legal associate professionals share their path with the business and public service associate occupations: aircraft pilots, ship officers, insurance underwriters, data analysts, estate agents, buyers, human resources officers. Their 7.4% is the slowest growth of the four rising legal occupations, which is worth sitting with, because paralegal work is the route most often sold to people as the safe way in. It is still a number about that block and not about paralegals.

So what survives? The ranking between the blocks — professional work up, associate work up more slowly, secretarial work down. That is the finding, and it is the only part of this we would defend in an argument.

The decline, year by year

There is no cliff in this series and no step change: it falls by a similar amount in every single year, which is what a model does when it projects a trend rather than an event. If you were hoping the data would tell you when artificial intelligence arrives in a law firm's back office, it does not, because nothing in this projection knows what artificial intelligence is. The 2021 base year predates the public release of the tools everybody now argues about.

Something counted rather than modelled

A projection you cannot check is a projection you should not lean on. So here is the same question asked of a count: how many people are being certified as legal secretaries?

Ofqual publishes the certificates issued for every regulated vocational qualification in England, quarterly, back to 2012. In 2012 the legal secretary qualifications issued 1,635 certificates. In 2024 they issued 80. In 2025 they issued none — a published zero, not a suppressed cell.

Read the shape rather than any single year: the middle of this record is lumpy, because the counts are small, awarding organisations come and go, and Ofqual rounds to the nearest 5 and publishes cells below 5 as "fewer than 5", which we exclude rather than guess. The end of it is not ambiguous. No legal secretary qualification regulated in England is still operating; they have all closed to new registrations.

This is independent corroboration in the strict sense — a different publisher, a count instead of a model, England instead of the United Kingdom. That is what makes it a check on the projection rather than a restatement of it, and it is also why it is not proof: certificates measure a training route, not jobs, and plenty of people do the work without one. What it does show is that the direction the projection expects by 2035 is already visible across the entire run of this record.

We have no equally clean count on the growing side. So this page corroborates the fall and leaves the rise as what it is: an output of a model.

Does the model already match the present?

One honest check is available, because the projection has a figure for a year that has happened. It puts 213,323 solicitor and lawyer jobs in the UK in 2025. The Office for National Statistics' Annual Population Survey, which counts the same occupation by asking people what they do, found slightly more than that in the year to March 2026.

The model's near-term level for the biggest legal group is therefore close to what a survey actually finds. Take that as a reason to treat its direction seriously, not as a reason to trust 2035: being close a few years after your base year is the easiest thing a projection ever does. And the occupation carrying this page's headline is the one we cannot check this way — the survey cut we hold has no row for legal secretaries at all. The claim we can best test is the claim we did not have to make.

What this projection cannot tell you

• Anything about one nation. The whole file is the United Kingdom. Scottish and Northern Irish jobs are inside these totals and cannot be read out of them, and if you are qualifying in Scotland or Northern Ireland you are entering a separately regulated profession that nothing on this page describes.
• Anything about the self-employed Bar as a career. It counts jobs in an occupation. Most barristers practise self-employed, holding a tenancy rather than a post, and the model neither separates them out nor projects pupillage places, which are the actual bottleneck.
• Anything about getting in. This file holds the stock of jobs, not the flow of new entrants. A growing occupation can still offer fewer training contracts and pupillages than it did last year; those are different quantities, and only one of them is here.
• Anything about the software. The base year predates the tools the argument is now about. The projection has no view on them, and its silence is not reassurance any more than its optimism is evidence.
• Anything about any individual. A projection of a national occupation total says nothing about your prospects, and anyone presenting it as though it does is selling something.

What nobody publishes at all

There is no official projection of legal employment for England and Wales separately, none by practice area, none by firm size and none by region. There is no open cohort survival series either: nothing published tells you what share of the people admitted in a given year are still practising three, five or ten years later, because the regulators publish the stock each year and overwrite it. We think that is the most useful missing series in this market, and it is the one we are building.

What this page is dated to

The projection is a 2021-based series covering the calendar years 2021 to 2035, published once by the Department for Education under the Open Government Licence. The Ofqual certificate counts run to the second quarter of 2026; the chart above shows complete calendar years, so it ends at 2025. The survey check is the Annual Population Survey for April 2025 to March 2026. Our copies of all three refresh hourly; the underlying publications do not, and the dates above are the ones to quote.

Assize Careers is not a regulator, professional body, university, law school or official careers service, and it is not part of or endorsed by one. Nothing on this site is legal advice.

Assize Careers is not affiliated with, authorised by or endorsed by the Department for Education, the National Foundation for Educational Research, Ofqual, the Office for National Statistics or any awarding organisation whose qualifications are counted here. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Office for National Statistics.