Sources and methods

Every figure is computed from a public register or an official statistic in the company’s own warehouse, and nothing is published unless it names a source and a licence: the script that builds the figures refuses to emit one that does not. The values below were last computed on 12 October 2026 and are refreshed hourly from that warehouse.

Every source, with its licence

The two kinds of licence here, and why it matters to you

Open Government Licence v3.0

Of the 21 sources above, 10 are published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which allows commercial reuse, including inside a paid product, on condition that the source is acknowledged and that nothing implies official status or endorsement. So, as that licence requires:

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Which also means the opposite of what some careers products imply: no part of this site is official, approved, endorsed or connected to any government department, court, regulator or public body, and the licence on the data would not permit us to suggest otherwise even if we wanted to.

Those are the figures you may take and reuse yourself, on that licence’s terms. The CSV downloads on the Pro plan carry the licence in a column on every single row for exactly that reason, because a file gets separated from the web page that explained it.

The regulators’ own registers, which are not open data

The other 11 are public registers published by a regulator under its own website terms. These are not Open Government Licence, whatever a third-party dataset of them may claim: the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Bar Standards Board, CILEx Regulation, IPReg, the Council for Licensed Conveyancers, the Faculty Office and the Costs Lawyer Standards Board each reserve rights in their own register, and several expressly prohibit systematic downloading, republication or derivative works without written consent.

One line in the table adds five of the smaller registers together into a single total. Where a figure combines sources, it carries the most restrictive of their licences rather than the friendliest, which is why a total that includes an Open Government Licence register is still listed under the regulators’ terms.

What follows from that, and it shapes what this site can be:

• We publish counts and proportions computed from a register, attributed to it, with the date. A count is a fact about the world and not the register’s own expression.
• We do not republish a register, or any part of it as a list. If you need to know whether a named person is authorised today, go to the regulator. Each one is linked above.
• A register-derived figure does not become reusable because you have paid to see it. It is in the Pro downloads, with the regulator’s terms named in its own licence column, and those terms and not ours govern what you may do with it next.
• Where a feature needs more than a count, it waits for written consent from the publisher, and if consent does not come the feature launches smaller. We would rather ship less than claim a licence we do not have.

What we will not take from anybody

• Another publisher’s ranking table. We will name a commercial league table, describe how it is built, say what we think of its method and quote a single position in a sentence. We will not reproduce its table, and we will not rebuild it from its own numbers.
• Salary surveys. The trainee and newly-qualified pay tables you have seen elsewhere are private surveys owned by the publishers who run them. We link to them. We do not copy them, and we do not launder them through an average.
• A test publisher’s questions, items or norms. Our practice material is written by us in the published formats, and your result is never converted into anybody else’s score or percentile.
• Anything by mining a commercial database. The copyright exception for text and data analysis is limited to non-commercial research, and a subscription site is not that. We do not crawl competitors, and we do not cache their tables on any schedule, however small.

What nobody publishes, and we will not invent

This is the part of a sources page that usually goes missing. These gaps are real, we have looked, and where a page needs one of them it says that nobody publishes it:

• No open table of trainee or newly-qualified solicitor pay. There is a Law Society recommended minimum, which is a recommendation and not a regulatory requirement, and there are private surveys. There is no official series.
• No pass rate by training provider for the Solicitors Qualifying Examination. The regulator does not publish one. Any provider-level figure in circulation is self-reported and unverified, and we decline to rank providers on outcomes until a verified figure exists.
• No count of practising paralegals. Paralegal work is not a reserved activity and there is no mandatory register, so nobody knows the number, including us.
• Suppressed cells stay suppressed. The Office for National Statistics withholds estimates it considers unreliable, including the highest earnings percentile for some legal occupations. Where a cell is suppressed we say so instead of modelling a replacement, which is why you will not find a “the top 10% of solicitors earn” claim here.
• A register counts authorisations, not jobs. Someone on the roll may have left practice a decade ago, and someone doing legal work every day may be on no register at all. We say which we are counting, every time.

How a figure gets here

1. The register or statistic is collected in the company’s warehouse, which is never exposed to the internet.
2. One script computes every figure from that warehouse, with the source, the licence and the date the figure describes attached to it, and fails rather than emitting a figure whose query broke.
3. The result is committed with the site, so each page is correct and readable on its own, with scripting off.
4. An hourly job refreshes the figures from the analytics database. Each page of figures says when that last ran, so you can see how fresh the number in front of you is.

Figures are printed as the source states them, including its rounding. Where we have computed something ourselves — a share, a median, a count of distinct employers — the page says so and says what the denominator was.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, tell us: enquiries@assizedata.co.uk. We answer in two working days. We fix it, and we say on the page that we have, with the date. A sources page that never records a correction is not being checked by anybody.

The company’s wider principles on choosing and licensing data are on its data sources page, which covers every Assize brand, including how it handles personal data that appears in a public record.

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.