Law firms in South Carolina: where they are and how big they are

There were 2,585 law firms with paid employees in South Carolina in 2023, counted as offices of lawyers (NAICS 541110) in the U.S. Census Bureau's County Business Patterns. Those offices reported 16,253 employees in the March pay period and $1.45 billion in annual payroll, an average of 6.3 people per office and about $89,260 in payroll per employee.

Against the Census Bureau's Vintage 2024 estimate of 5,478,831 residents, that is 4.72 law offices per 10,000 people, or one office for every 2,119 residents. Summing the same code across all U.S. counties gives 164,612 offices and a rate of 4.84, so South Carolina is about 2.5 percent below the national figure. Unlike several other professional services, the state's overall supply of law offices is close to the U.S. norm. The difference is in where those offices are.

CBP counts locations with at least one paid employee. A firm with offices in Columbia and Charleston counts twice, and a solo attorney with no staff is not counted. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook reports 863,700 lawyer jobs nationally in 2025 and a median pay of $159,670 in May 2025.

Charleston County has the highest density of law firms in the state at 11.51 offices per 10,000 residents, followed by Hampton, Richland, Georgetown, Beaufort and Greenville. Eight counties are at or above the U.S. rate. Richland's figure reflects Columbia's role as the state capital, and Charleston and Greenville are the state's two largest business centers.

Small counties can post high rates when a handful of firms serve a small population. Hampton County has 18 law offices for 18,172 residents, which produces a rate of 9.91. Barnwell (11 offices) and Colleton (19) follow the same pattern. These firms often draw clients from surrounding rural counties, so the per-resident figure overstates how crowded the local market is.

Law offices are more concentrated than people. Charleston, Richland and Greenville hold 1,254 law offices, 48.5 percent of the state total, while they are home to 26.1 percent of South Carolina's residents. The five counties with the most offices (adding Horry and Beaufort) account for 61.8 percent.

The large suburban counties around those centers have far lower rates. York (3.83), Lexington (3.73), Dorchester (3.44) and Berkeley (2.57) all grew faster than the state from 2020 to 2024, and many of their residents look for a lawyer in the neighboring metro county. Pickens County has the lowest published rate in the state: 14 law offices for 138,207 residents, or 1.01 per 10,000.

• McCormick and Saluda counties have no published count of law offices. CBP publishes a county cell only when it covers three or more establishments, so each has zero, one or two.
• Union (1.12), Abbeville (1.22), Chester (1.24) and Laurens (1.28) round out the lowest published rates.
• The six counties that grew 10 percent or more since 2020 (Jasper, Horry, Lancaster, Berkeley, Edgefield and Spartanburg) average 3.10 law offices per 10,000 residents. Remove Horry and the figure drops sharply: Lancaster is at 1.52, Jasper at 1.68 and Edgefield at 1.70.

Most South Carolina law firms are small. Of the state's 2,585 law offices, 66.2 percent have fewer than five employees and another 18.7 percent have five to nine. Only 4.1 percent have 20 or more. Nationally, 71.5 percent of law offices have fewer than five employees, so South Carolina has a slightly larger share of mid-sized offices in the 5 to 19 range.

A firm with three to eight people usually has no dedicated intake team. Calls, web forms and consultation scheduling fall to a paralegal or office manager who is also working cases, which is where response times slip and prospective clients call the next firm on the list.

Use them to decide where your next clients are likely to come from. The BLS projects lawyer employment to grow 5 percent from 2025 to 2035, with about 28,700 openings a year nationally, and South Carolina's population grew 7.0 percent from 2020 to 2024. The growth is in the suburbs, while the firms are in the urban cores.

Practice area matters as much as geography. A personal injury or family law firm draws clients from a wide area and competes with every firm advertising in the region, while an estate planning or real estate closing practice tends to serve people close to the office. Read the county figures with that radius in mind: a low rate in a county you already serve from next door is an opening, while a high rate in a county with a courthouse may simply reflect regional demand.

• If your office is in Charleston, Columbia or Greenville, you compete with hundreds of nearby firms. A clear practice-area page for each service, a fast intake response and a steady flow of client reviews do more than a bigger ad budget.
• If you serve York, Lexington, Dorchester, Berkeley or Lancaster from a metro office, create a useful page for each county you serve and make it easy to book a consultation by phone, form or video.
• If you are in a small county seat with a high rate, your market is regional. Make sure people in neighboring counties can find you when they search for your practice area.
• Before opening a satellite office, compare the county's rate and growth with the state figures here, then check court locations and commuting patterns.

Firm counts show where competition sits; intake data shows whether a firm is winning its share. Monvell's Consulting and Marketing teams combine both to help legal practices choose which counties and practice areas to focus on and to fix the intake gaps that lose consultations.

Dataset: U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns 2023, county file (cbp23co.txt), NAICS 541110 (offices of lawyers). CBP covers establishments with paid employees. Employment is for the pay period including March 12 and payroll is annual. CBP data from 2017 to 2023 use 2017 NAICS codes.

Population: Census Bureau Vintage 2024 county estimates (co-est2024-alldata.csv), POPESTIMATE2024; growth is POPESTIMATE2024 divided by ESTIMATESBASE2020, minus one. The U.S. population (340,110,988) is the sum of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Method: we filtered CBP to South Carolina (state FIPS 45) and NAICS 541110, joined county population by FIPS code and computed establishments per 10,000 residents, then ranked all 46 counties. The U.S. rate sums the same code across every county record. Size shares sum the published employment size class columns; cells marked N are excluded and reported as not allocated.

Limits: CBP excludes attorneys with no employees and counts office locations, not firms or lawyers. Employment and payroll carry noise for disclosure protection (flag G means a change under 2 percent, H 2 to 5 percent, J 5 percent or more). County cells with fewer than three establishments are not published. Vintage 2025 population estimates are now available; we used Vintage 2024 to stay closer to the 2023 business data.