Do you think that Americans sue everything and everyone? Then you don’t know Brazil, which has the world’s highest ratio of lawyers per inhabitant: there is one lawyer for every 164 inhabitants.
The total number of 1.3 million lawyers in the country is equal to that of the United States, which has a population of 329.5 million, while Brazil has 212.7 million inhabitants.
In absolute numbers, Brazil is behind India with 2 million lawyers but has a much higher ratio, 700 lawyers for every citizen.
According to Leandro Piccino, former president of OAB/São Bernardo do Campo and current president of the OAB/PREV-SP Advisory Board, the numbers are startling.
“But not everyone who signed up works. It is common for someone to pass the bar exam, be admitted to the bar, but then decide to work elsewhere,” he confirms.
He points out the importance of the OAB exam, which is required to obtain admission to the bar. “This mechanism is why we don’t see chaos in the legal profession because it has a history of less than 20% approval,” he adds.
Still, the country produces about 140 thousand new professionals each year due, among other things, to the large number of law schools that have sprung up in the last ten years.
In 2022 alone, more than 9,000 portfolios were handed out in the state of São Paulo, and 15,000 new registrations were made by July 15.
This is the opinion of OAB/São Paulo Vice President Leonardo Sica. “We have an oversupply of law students; a recognized and installed problem. There are more lawyers than the market can absorb,” he says.
Others say Brazilians are among the top per capita fraud victims worldwide. They basically trust no one and nothing and therefore sue everyone and everything if they can somehow afford it.