Where are the Best Lawyers in Texas? A Yelp Review.

As we oftentimes work with members of the legal profession, we decided to conduct a city-by-city analysis of the profession across Texas. We started with a birds-eye view of the industry by pulling aggregate data from the U.S Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns for “law offices”. Interestingly, we found that Dallas is a much more litigious city than the other cities with 67.2 legal workers per 10,000 people — more than twice that of San Antonio, and significantly higher than Austin and Houston.

Legal Workforce & Salaries

Dallas leads the state not just in legal density but also in compensation. With 67.2 legal workers per 10,000 residents, it dwarfs San Antonio’s 29.4. On the salary side, Dallas attorneys average $120,134 annually, compared to $74,115 in San Antonio — the lowest of the four cities studied.

Figure 1 — Lawyers per 10,000 people (left) and average annual salary (right) across the four largest Texas cities.

Online Presence: Who’s on Yelp?

We dug deeper to see if there was a difference in how lawyers were rated by their clients on online review websites. According to the ReviewsTracker.com blog, about one-third of all legal consumers turn to online resources first to find information on attorneys. And while people may think Yelp is just for restaurants or barbers, a 2014 survey conducted by Austin-based SoftwareAdvice.com found that Yelp was actually the most popular and trusted website for legal reviews.

To analyze Yelp data, we used an API pull to collect all Yelp reviews for law firms with an online presence in the four largest cities in Texas in January 2019.

Figure 2 — Percent of legal establishments with a Yelp page by city. Austin stands out at 29%.

Review Averages & Volume

Austin clients also rate their lawyers higher, with an average Yelp rating of 4.2 out of 5 — the highest of any city studied. San Antonio comes in second at 3.4, followed by Houston at 3.5 and Dallas at 3.1.

Figure 3 — Average Yelp review rating (out of 5) for law firms across the four largest Texas cities.

Interestingly, across the whole state the average number of reviews per establishment is very low — roughly between 3 and 4 reviews per page.

Figure 4 — Average number of Yelp reviews per law firm listing by city.