New changes to how people can enter the legal profession are the latest sign that entry itself is shifting, not just the numbers coming through it. But the Heron Irish Legal Sector Report finds that’s only one part of a much bigger picture. What happens in the years that follow tells a more complicated story.

Record entry, but the shortage hasn’t gone away

There were 583 first-time practising certificates in 2025, up 54 per cent on the year before, and the trainee intake reached 581 - its highest level in 17 years. On the numbers alone, entry looks solved.

But professional-services pay - the closest available measure for legal - rose 5.4 per cent last year, against 3.9 per cent across the economy, and vacancies in the wider sector ran at twice the national rate. Record entry does not appear to have translated into an evenly resourced profession.

Concentrated in Dublin, thinning everywhere else

Part of the reason is where those new solicitors are actually going. 82 per cent of trainee contracts in 2025 were based in Dublin. Leitrim recorded one new trainee contract that year. Roscommon and Sligo had two each, Donegal three, Galway seven.

At the other end of the profession, the picture is much the same. 65 per cent of sole practitioners — often the only solicitor serving a rural area are aged 50 or over, and 45 per cent of all Irish practices are a single solicitor working alone. Entry is concentrated in Dublin. In some rural areas, that raises a difficult question about who will take over when the current generation retires.

Not just where they start – whether they stay

It isn’t only about where solicitors start, either. It’s also about whether they stay in private practice at all. 27 per cent of practising solicitors - 3,442 people - now work in-house, in company legal teams or for the State, rather than at a law firm. That means more than a quarter of the profession is now building a career outside the traditional private-practice model. It also raises a broader question about where legal expertise sits, and how businesses access it.

And for those who leave private practice, there is no way to track where they go. No single published dataset follows a solicitor once they leave a firm. Where the leavers go, nobody tracks.

Women now make up the majority of new solicitors. Only a third become partners

The gap is sharpest by gender. Women make up 54 percent of practising solicitors and 65 per cent of this year’s new trainees. But only around 37 per cent of partners are women.

Entry is no longer the question this profession needs to answer. What happens between qualifying and reaching partnership is. Right now, that’s the part nobody can fully explain.

The route into law is changing

The traditional route into the profession is changing too. A new solicitor apprenticeship route means school-leavers will be able to qualify without taking the traditional college route, while earning and working as they train.

Odhran Ginnity, founder, Heron said: “If my son wanted to become a solicitor, I’d seriously question whether I’d tell him to spend four years at college first. The new traineeship route changes the calculation - you can earn, learn and qualify without taking the traditional route.”

AI may change how junior lawyers learn the job

One more shift is arriving on top of all this. Some of Ireland’s largest law firms have moved from experimenting with AI to deploying it firmwide, and enterprise AI use across Ireland has more than doubled since 2023 - though it remains far more common among large organisations than small ones. Most of these firmwide rollouts only happened this year, so their effect on how junior solicitors are trained may not be visible yet.

In the US, softer hiring for junior lawyers has already been linked to AI taking on more of that work. Ireland’s junior salaries have stayed strong so far - though it may simply be too early to see the same effect here.

That leaves a genuine question for a profession training a record cohort of new solicitors: does AI remove the work junior lawyers have traditionally learned on or could faster access to knowledge help them build competence sooner? Nobody yet knows which.

The traditional route into law is changing at both ends. You no longer necessarily need a college degree to enter the profession. And AI may change the junior work through which you learn it. So, what does becoming a solicitor actually look like in the next generation?

“Every part of this shows a profession that’s good at getting people in the door,” said Ciara Battigan, managing director of Heron. “What’s less clear is what happens once they’re through it - whether they stay, where they end up, and how far they get.”

“That’s the more interesting question - not how many people are qualifying. And right now, there isn’t a clear answer.”

“The profession is very good at bringing people in. It’s far less predictable about what happens to them afterwards.”

These figures are usually published separately, by the Law Society, the LSRA and the CSO. This report brings them together, and the pattern that emerges is different from any of them on their own.