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Data · Search demand

How many people search for a lawyer, practice by practice

Monthly Google searches for a lawyer in every practice area and niche we track, in English and in Spanish, for the whole US, all 50 states and DC, from Google Ads Keyword Planner. Each family lists the words people type, the busiest months, Google Trends interest by state, the suggestions Google offers, and how many searches there are for each firm already advertising the practice.

Checked October 30, 2026 · CC BY 4.0 · Not legal advice

What is in this dataset?

How many people search Google for a lawyer each month, practice by practice: 84 query families (personal injury and its niches such as truck accidents, mesothelioma and birth injury; immigration subtypes; bankruptcy chapters; estate planning; intellectual property; employment subtypes and more), each asked in the plain English and Spanish words people type. For the whole US, all 50 states and DC, the file gives the searches a month in English and in Spanish (12-month average), the head query of each language and the month-by-month series, from Google Ads Keyword Planner (October 2025 to September 2026). Google reports close variants with one combined figure, so a family total counts each distinct monthly series once, and every query's own figure is listed. A second measured source, a DataForSEO pull of the same Google Ads data for the US and 27 states, is kept as a cross-check: a record per place counts the queries on which the two agree. Free Google sources add, for the head queries with enough data, Google Trends interest by state over the last 12 months (a relative index, never mixed with counts) and the Google Autocomplete suggestions for the head queries whose suggestions pass the filter (only suggestions in which every word is a common word, so no firm, brand, person or place is named). Where our firm census holds 100 or more firm websites for a practice in a state, a ratio gives the searches a month per firm website, with both inputs.

Use it to size a market before you spend: how many people search for a truck accident or immigration lawyer each month in a state, how much of that is in Spanish, which months are busy, and how many firms already compete for each search. Search counts are Google's own estimates for the 12 months shown and are rounded by Google; read them as orders of magnitude. A family's queries are the common ways to ask; long, local and misspelled searches are not counted, so totals are a floor. Trends figures are indexes (top state = 100), and Autocomplete shows what Google suggests, not how often.

Records
4,694
Look up by
52
US, state or DC
Primary-source records
4,694

The letters are explained in what P, S, D and U mean.

Where does the data come from?

Query families written per practice in English and Spanish are measured in Google Ads Keyword Planner for the whole US, all 50 states and DC (12 months); close variants that Google reports with one combined monthly series are counted once in a family total; a DataForSEO pull of the same Google Ads data is compared query by query where it overlaps; Google Trends interest by state (monthly) and Google Autocomplete suggestions (quarterly) are read nationally for each family head query that has enough data in them; searches per firm divide the family total by the firm census count where that count is 100 or more.

Period covered
October 2025 to September 2026
Places
The whole US, all 50 states and DC
How often we refresh it
Once a year
The source's next release
October 2027
Records read
October 30, 2026

The sources the records cite most

What does a record look like?

The full records add the dates, the quoted source text and every field in the CSV and JSON files below.

What each of the 30 main columns means
jurisdiction
US for the whole country, else the two-letter code of a state or DC; together the records cover the whole US, all 50 states and DC
value
The record's main figure, in `unit` (every other measure is in the JSON record and its text)
level
family (measured searches for one query family in one place), crosscheck (agreement of the two measured sources in one place), trends (US: Google Trends interest by state over 12 months for one head query), autocomplete (US: Google's suggestions for one head query) or opportunity (searches a month per firm website advertising the practice)
practice
Practice id from the shared practice taxonomy (/data/crosswalks/)
family
Query family id: the practice id, or a niche family (mesothelioma, chapter-7, chapter-13) whose parent is in `parent`
searches
MEASURED Google searches a month, 12-month average over `period`, English plus Spanish; each distinct variant group counted once
volumes_identical
crosscheck rows: queries whose monthly volume is identical in the Keyword Planner export and the DataForSEO pull, of `queries_compared`
searches_en
Of those, the English queries
searches_es
Of those, the Spanish queries
share_es
searches_es / searches
head_en
The family's English query with the most searches
head_en_searches
Its searches a month
head_es
The family's Spanish query with the most searches
head_es_searches
Its searches a month
variant_groups_en
Distinct monthly series among the English queries (Google reports close variants as one)
queries_asked
Queries of the family sent for this place
monthly
JSON: [year, month, searches] for the 12 months
queries
JSON: [query, language, searches a month] for each query of the family that Google reports with its own figure
queries_grouped
JSON: [query, language] for the family's queries whose searches Google reports under a close variant's figure (already in the family total)
peak_month
Month with the most searches
low_month
Month with the fewest
states_interest
trends: Google Trends interest over the last 12 months for the states Google Trends reports interest for (top state = 100)
suggestions
autocomplete: the suggestions kept (every word a common word; no firm, person or place names)
firms
opportunity: firm websites advertising the practice in the state, Probative firm census (only cells of 100 or more)
firms_coverage
opportunity: the census coverage label of that cell (sample or census)
formula
opportunity: how value is computed
asOf
Date of the Keyword Planner export the figures come from (or of the DataForSEO pull, crosscheck rows)
top_state
trends: the state with the highest Google Trends interest over the last 12 months (= 100; the first by code when tied, with top_state_ties)
peak_month_ties
family: how many other months tie the busiest month (peak_month is the first of them); low_month_ties the same for the quietest
stateName
The place's name: United States, or the name of the state or DC

How do I use it in my own tools?

searchdemand_lookup
For US or a two-letter state code: Google searches a month for each of 84 practice query families in English and Spanish, with the head queries, the monthly series and, for the US, Trends interest by state and Autocomplete suggestions.
searchdemand_search
Records whose text matches the words given, such as a practice ("mesothelioma", "chapter 13"), a query or a state name.

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
1.1.0, released November 2, 2026
Every version
10.5281/zenodo.23851293 (always points to the newest)
License
CC BY 4.0

Download the data

Free, no email or login. The files are hosted on this site and Zenodo, a public research archive.

Suggested citation

Probative. (2026). Google searches for a lawyer by practice area and state, English and Spanish (Google Ads Keyword Planner, Trends and Autocomplete) (Version 1.1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23877019

Credit line for a chart, table or article

Source: Probative, Google searches for a lawyer by practice area and state, English and Spanish (Google Ads Keyword Planner, Trends and Autocomplete), version 1.1.0, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23877019, licensed CC BY 4.0.

Add to a reference manager (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote)

Not legal advice. These are search counts and indexes from Google's keyword, Trends and Autocomplete data on the dates shown, kept for research and marketing planning. A search is not a client or a case, and the counts say nothing about any firm or lawyer.

What changed recently?

  • 2026-11-01 · Version 1.1.0: the Bankruptcy family's rows for the US, the 50 states and DC, and its one searches-per-firm ratio, are withdrawn because their totals counted Spanish searches only; each family sentence now names only the languages it measures. (source)
  • 2026-10-31 · First release: Google searches a month for a lawyer in 86 practice query families (English and Spanish), for the United States, the 50 states and DC (Google Ads Keyword Planner, Oct 2025–Sep 2026), cross-checked against a DataForSEO pull of the same Google Ads data for the US and 27 states, with Google Trends interest by state (12 months) for the head queries with enough data, and Google Autocomplete suggestions. (source)

The full log is in changes.json.

Where is this data used?

The practice market pages of these 50 states and DC show each place's own figures. Pick a place to see its practices.

Marketing by practice area

What are the limits?

  • Search counts are Google Ads Keyword Planner figures for October 2025 to September 2026, rounded by Google. Every record shows the date of the export it comes from; for the US and 27 states, a second pull of the same Google Ads data agrees with it on every query both carry.
  • Google rounds small monthly figures into buckets, so for a family with fewer than about 100 searches a month the 12-month average can be higher than any single month shown.
  • Google reports close variants (lawyer and lawyers, some word orders) with one combined figure. A family total counts each distinct monthly series once, so it never adds the same searches twice; the figure for each query is listed too.
  • A family's queries are the common ways to ask for that lawyer. Longer, local and misspelled searches are not counted, so a total is a floor, not the whole market.
  • Google Trends figures are indexes (the top state = 100), not counts, and are shown apart from the search counts. Autocomplete suggestions are what Google offers as people type, not how often each is searched; suggestions naming a firm, a person or a place are left out.
  • Searches per firm divide a state's searches by the firm websites advertising the practice in our firm census, only where the census holds 100 or more of them; both inputs undercount (the searches are a floor, the census is a sample in most states), so read the ratio as a relative index between states, not as a bound.
  • Records older than 400 days since their last check are marked stale in 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.

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