Lawyer Names
Want your child to grow up to be an attorney? Name him John…..or maybe Elizabeth, says guest blogger Conrad Saam, who’s done a groundbreaking new study on lawyer’s names over the past 200 years.
If you have aspirations that your kiddo will someday grow up and earn his Juris Doctorate, the time to start planning may be now – with the right name. Through nameberry, you now have access to the most comprehensive analysis on lawyer names ever completed.
I run marketing for an online legal directory called Avvo where we help people make an informed decision when hiring an attorney by rating and profiling over 90% of the lawyers in the country. As such, I have access to the most comprehensive data on lawyer first names ever assembled – data culled from state bar records from across the country and reaching back as far as 1808. That’s about 1.5 million lawyers overall.
I grouped the names for each decade going back through the 1950’s. Because our data gets more sparse with age, I built two more groups, one from the first half of last century and one for the 1800’s. I then compiled lists of the top 20 names for each time period. The date associated with each name is when the attorney was accepted by the state bar – which in general is about 25 years after the baby-cum-lawyer was named (so you need to really be thinking ahead).
All-Time Top Lawyer Names
Obviously, these lists correlate with popularity of names over time, but the actual results are amazingly consistent and defy many overall name trends. Eight of the top twenty names show up in all the groups: every decade starting in the 1950s, the 1901-1950 group and even the Top 20 list from the 1800s. These are, in order of overall frequency:
1. JOHN
2. ROBERT
3. JAMES
4. DAVID
5. WILLIAM
6. RICHARD
7. THOMAS
8. JOSEPH
Of this list, John is the persistent leader, showing up in the Top 5 of every list going back through the 1800’s. The top names for the past decade are:
Top Lawyer Names 2001-2010
1. MICHAEL
2. DAVID
3. JOHN
4. JENNIFER
5. MATTHEW
6. CHRISTOPHER
7. JAMES
8. ROBERT
9. DANIEL
10. BRIAN
11. JASON
12. WILLIAM
13. ANDREW
14. JOSEPH
15. ELIZABETH
16. THOMAS
17. JEFFREY
18. MARK
19. SARAH
20. RICHARD
Top Lawyer Names 1971-1980
Before the 1980s, all the Top 20 names were male, as in this list from the 1970s, which represents the first generation of Baby Boom lawyers.
1. JOHN
2. ROBERT
3. JAMES
4. WILLIAM
5. MICHAEL
6. RICHARD
7. DAVID
8. THOMAS
9. CHARLE
S10. JOSEPH
11. STEPHEN
12. STEVEN
13. PAUL
14. MARK
15. EDWARD
16. DONALD
17. GEORGE
18. PETER
19. GARY
20. RONALD
Top Attorney Names 1951-1960
The 1950s list, whose members were named mostly in the mid-1920s through the 1930s, is even more sedate.
1. JOHN
2. ROBERT
3. WILLIAM
4. JAMES
5. RICHARD
6. CHARLES
7. JOSEPH
8. THOMAS
9. GEORGE
10. DONALD
11. EDWARD
12. DAVID
13. PAUL
14. FRANK
15. ARTHUR
16. JACK
17. HAROLD
18. WALTER
19. HARRY
20. HERBERT
Top Female Attorney Names
The first time a female name shows up in the Top 20 was in the 1980s when Susan (15), Mary (16) and Patricia (20) broke through. Even in the past decade, when a much higher percentage of attorneys were women, there were only three female names, Jennifer (4), Elizabeth (15) and Sarah (19), in the Top 20. This may be explained by greater concentration of a few names among males than females. The top 20 female names for lawyers in the past decade are:
1. JENNIFER
2. ELIZABETH
3. SARAH
4. AMY
5. JESSICA
6. LISA
7. MELISSA
8. LAURA
9. MICHELLE
10. MARY
11. HEATHER
12. REBECCA
13. STEPHANIE
14. SUSAN
15. KATHERINE
16. KIMBERLY
17. NICOLE
18. ERIN
19. KELLY (this includes both genders)
20. AMANDA
Conrad Saam runs marketing for Avvo, where he oversees Online Marketing, PR and Search Engine Optimization. Avvo has grown from concept to the world’s most popular legal directory and free legal Q&A forum in three years. He is a native of Australia, father to Lars and Scarlett, husband and son to Jennifers (paging Dr. Freud) and has until July to settle on another distinctive-but-not-strange-masculine boy name for baby #3. He writes on www.Avvoblog.com and tweets @conradsaam.