What's Happening to the UK's Physical Law Libraries

We don't run a research team, and we don't have a database of every law library in the country. What follows is published, citable research from courts administration data, industry M&A analysis, and the Law Society's own surveys — brought together in one place because, individually, each explains a piece of the same story: English law libraries are moving out of offices faster than most people realise, for reasons that have nothing to do with whether anyone still wants the books.

Courts: over half closed since 2010

Between 2010 and 2018, 162 of England and Wales's 323 magistrates' courts closed — just over half — according to evidence submitted to the House of Commons Justice Committee. The same period saw 90 of 240 county courts close, along with 28 of 83 tribunal buildings, 17 of 185 family courts, and 8 of 92 Crown Court buildings. The Law Society's own account of the period puts it plainly: over half of all courts across England and Wales closed between 2010 and 2019.

The Bar Council's own research extended the picture to 2022, finding 239 court closures over 12 years, leaving only 57% of the original estate still open, and 373 parliamentary constituencies without an active local court at all. Each of those buildings held a working legal library — and each closure meant a decision about where those books went.

Firms: fewer of them, merging faster

The number of solicitors' firms in England and Wales fell by almost 1,100 over the five years to December 2024, down to 9,179 — even as the number of individual solicitors holding practising certificates grew by 14% over the same period, according to legal market analysis reported by Legal Futures. Fewer firms, more solicitors: consolidation, not contraction.

That consolidation shows up directly in merger activity. Research from Hazlewoods, the accountancy firm that tracks the legal sector specifically, recorded law firm mergers rising from 99 in 2021 to 122 in 2022, with the pace continuing at 121 in 2023 and 114 between November 2023 and October 2024. Separate M&A analysis from Saffery found transaction volume up 25% in 2024 alone, with Legal Futures reporting over 150 transactions that year — a clear upward trend across every source tracking it independently.

Working from anywhere, needing a library nowhere

A Law Society survey found that flexible working is now embedded in the profession: 96% of respondents use remote or hybrid working in some form, and nine in ten have a formal or informal arrangement of some kind. Separate industry analysis has suggested the office-space implications are substantial — one estimate put the potential for space reduction under full hybrid adoption at 35–40%, a number with obvious implications for anything a firm needs to physically store.

Worth being honest about the other side of this: the trend isn't universal or one-directional. Some firms have gone the other way entirely — Winn Solicitors, a Newcastle-based practice, brought staff back to full-time office attendance and has publicly credited the decision with contributing to a period of strong financial growth. The overall direction is clearly toward less office space per firm, but it isn't a straight line for every firm, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.

What this actually looks like from our side

None of the above is our data — it's published research we've read and cited properly. What we can add honestly is our own experience sitting downstream of exactly these trends: seven years buying libraries from exactly the kinds of firms and institutions these statistics describe, over 10,000 books collected in that time from more than 100 chambers and firms, and — a specific, real fact rather than a general claim — over 1,000 of those books shipped onward to firms in Nigeria alone.

We don't have a breakdown of how many of those libraries came from a closure versus a merger versus a firm simply going hybrid. What we can say is that the three trends above are the same three reasons that show up, again and again, in the enquiries we actually receive.

What we're not claiming

We're not going to present this as proprietary research, because it isn't. Every statistic above is attributed to where it actually came from — courts data via the Justice Committee and the Bar Council, firm and merger figures via Hazlewoods, Legal Futures, and Saffery, and working-pattern data via the Law Society's own survey. If we ever build a genuine internal dataset — real numbers on collection sizes, common editions, or geographic spread — we'll publish it as exactly that, and not before.

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