How we built the cross-border legal needs data
This data counts the requests people send to lawyers through Lawzana. Here is how each figure is made, and what the numbers can't tell you.
What we count
A request is a message a person sends through Lawzana to find a lawyer: they choose a practice area and a place, describe their case and give their contact details. We count requests that passed our checks and were sent to lawyers; spam and requests our checks turned down are left out. A request counts once, however many law firms receive it. Some people send more than one request, so we give both numbers: requests and people.
What "cross-border" means
A request is cross-border when the client's internet connection, when they sent it, was in a different country from the lawyer they chose. That is where they were connecting from, not their nationality or where they live, so a cross-border request is not necessarily from a foreigner or an expat. People using a VPN or writing while travelling show up in the country of their connection. About 1% of requests have no country; they count in the totals but in no cross-border figure. The lawyer's country is the country of the city or region the client chose.
Practice areas and specialties
Lawzana groups legal needs into 20 practice areas, each with specialties (Work Permit sits under Immigration, for example). A request filed under a specialty also counts in its practice area. We rank specialties only when they have more than 300 requests.
How we tested the findings
Lawzana reaches some countries and languages much better than others, so a raw count says as much about Lawzana as about demand. We publish only what held up when we redid the analysis on English-language pages alone and on each half of the year separately: the same legal needs stayed at the top and at the bottom of the ranking, while the exact percentages moved with the mix of languages. That is why we show rankings and comparisons rather than country totals, and nothing month by month.
Privacy
Every figure combines at least 50 requests. A share is shown only when at least 50 requests are on each side of it. Counts are rounded to the nearest 10 and shares to the nearest whole percent. We never publish names, contact details, what anyone wrote, the firms they contacted, figures for single countries or cities, or the dates of individual requests. We also hold back figures that would give a hidden one away by subtracting it from a total. Our privacy policy says we publish anonymous statistics like these.
Editions and corrections
Each edition covers 12 months and keeps its own address, so the figures you cite stay as they were. If we find a mistake, we correct it and say so on this page.
Reusing the data
The data is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You may copy, adapt and publish it, commercially too, as long as you credit "Lawzana Cross-Border Legal Needs" and link to this page.
Edition 2026-10, published 3 November 2026.