Data · Board-certified lawyers
Board-certified lawyers by practice area and state
How many lawyers hold a board certification in each practice area, state by state. The counts come from the official lists that Tennessee and Minnesota publish, and they are counts only: no lawyer is named.
What is in this dataset?
How many lawyers hold a board certification in each practice area, state by state, counted from the official lists of certified specialists that Tennessee's Commission on Continuing Legal Education and Minnesota's Board of Legal Certification publish. Each row is a state, a practice area and a certifying body, with the number of certified specialists. Minnesota's rows run by year; Tennessee's are the roll as read on the date shown. Counts only: no names or personal details.
Use it to see how thin or crowded the board-certified tier is in a practice area and state, as context for how a firm positions a certification, how many certified competitors it faces in a market and which areas have few specialists. Agents can look up a state, compare several, or search by practice area or year.
- Records
- 115
- Look up by
- 2
- state
- Primary-source records
- 115
The letters are explained in what P, S, D and U mean.
Where does the data come from?
Each state's official list is read as a count per practice area and nothing else. Tennessee's Commission publishes its roll on a page whose own Expand All control lists the attorneys under each area; the build counts them in memory and keeps no names, then checks each area against the size of the same area on the collapsed page. Minnesota's Board of Legal Certification prints a table of certified specialists by certifying body and area each year; the build checks that the rows add to the report's own total and to its sentences for each body. A gate re-reads both sources and compares every count.
- Period covered
- December 31, 2019 to October 31, 2026
- Places
- States
- How often we refresh it
- Every quarter
- Records read
- October 31, 2026
Official sources
- Tennessee Commission on Continuing Legal Education, by official web pages. An official list published by the Tennessee courts on a public page with no login; only counts per practice area are used.
- Minnesota Board of Legal Certification, by official PDF files. A state board's annual report, published as a public PDF with no login; only the counts are used.
The sources the records cite most
- Tennessee Commission on CLE, roll of certified legal specialists: 17 records
- Minnesota Board of Legal Certification, 2025 annual report, Number of Certified Specialists (2019): 14 records
- Minnesota Board of Legal Certification, 2025 annual report, Number of Certified Specialists (2020): 14 records
- Minnesota Board of Legal Certification, 2025 annual report, Number of Certified Specialists (2021): 14 records
- Minnesota Board of Legal Certification, 2025 annual report, Number of Certified Specialists (2022): 14 records
What does a record look like?
-
Minnesota, 2019: 3 certifications in consumer bankruptcy through American Board of Certification.
Status P · checked October 31, 2026 · source: Minnesota Board of Legal Certification, 2025 annual report, Number of Certified Specialists (2019)
-
Tennessee, 2026: 6 certifications in business bankruptcy on the Commission's roll.
Status P · checked October 31, 2026 · source: Tennessee Commission on CLE, roll of certified legal specialists
The full records add the dates, the quoted source text and every field in the CSV and JSON files below.
What each of the 10 main columns means
jurisdiction- Two-letter state code
level- practice (one practice area and certifying body) or state (all areas together)
year- Year of the count: Minnesota's year end, Tennessee's read date
practice- Our practice-area id (all-areas on state rows)
practiceLabel- Practice area in plain words
specialty- The area as the source words it
certifier- The certifying body, as the source names it
status- P: the official list's own figure
value- Certified specialists (certifications held)
unit- What value counts
How do I use it in my own tools?
specialists_lookup- For one two-letter state code: the number of board-certified specialists by practice area and certifying body, and the state total, for each year the official list gives.
specialists_compare- The records of up to 10 states side by side: certified specialists by practice area.
specialists_search- Records whose text matches the words given, such as a practice area ("civil trial") or a year ("2025").
How to cite this dataset
You can reuse, adapt and republish this data, including commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0). The only condition is that you credit Probative and link to the source.
- Version
- 1.0.0, released November 1, 2026
- Every version
- 10.5281/zenodo.23850650 (always points to the newest)
- License
- CC BY 4.0
Download the data
- CSV: certified-specialists.csv 70 KB · one row per record (columns in README.txt)
- JSON: certified-specialists.json 147 KB · every record with its sources
Free, no email or login. The files are hosted on this site and Zenodo, a public research archive.
Suggested citation
Probative. (2026). Board-certified lawyers by practice area and state: specialist counts from official state lists (Tennessee and Minnesota) (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23850651
Credit line for a chart, table or article
Source: Probative, Board-certified lawyers by practice area and state: specialist counts from official state lists (Tennessee and Minnesota), version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23850651, licensed CC BY 4.0.
Add to a reference manager (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote)
Not legal advice. Not a recommendation of any lawyer. These are counts of certifications on official state lists, as the lists stood on the dates shown; a lawyer can hold more than one certification, and certification is voluntary, so the counts say nothing about the quality of lawyers who are not certified.
What changed recently?
- 2026-10-31 · Counts of board-certified lawyers by practice area from official state lists: Tennessee (239 certifications on the Commission's roll) and Minnesota (560 at the end of 2025). (source)
The full log is in changes.json.
What are the limits?
- This table covers Tennessee and Minnesota, whose official lists are public and countable by practice area.
- Each row counts certifications. A lawyer who is certified in two areas is counted once in each.
- Certification is voluntary and each certifying body sets its own standards, so a count is not a measure of how many good lawyers work in an area.
- Minnesota's counts are the Board's year-end figures for each year; Tennessee's are the roll as read on the date shown. Areas appear when they have at least one certified specialist.
- Records older than 200 days since their last check are marked
stalein the files until we re-check them. Every confirmed error we fix is listed in the data corrections log.
Found a wrong value? Report an error with the record id and the source that shows the right value.
Running a firm? You don’t need the raw data: we handle your state’s ad rules for you. See where your firm stands first.
Free
Get your free review.
Send us your firm’s website. Probative Growth records a 90-second video of what clients see when they look you up, and emails it with a one-page summary within 2 business days. No logins, no call needed.
Not sure where to start? Answer 7 questions Ready to talk? Talk to us Or see what AI says about your firm
Your free review: It covers your Google listing, website, phone and ads, from public information.