It's not like each person has a unique lawyer - One lawyer serves many clients. Especially since most people will only need legal help occasionally.

But yes I do agree, it's probably a minority of people that regularly use a specific lawyer.

Yeah, I think took that into account in my estimation. Not every lawyer will be willing to work for free for a friend (it's like doctors constantly being bombarded for free medical advice, or software engineers constantly asked to provide free IT services to fix people's computers/phones/routers/network). I also assume that law is highly specialized, so a lawyer specialized in Constitutional or Patent law may not want to handle Family law, Contract law, Employment law, or Personal Injury law.

I figure the number of lawyers willing to do such small favors is in the range of 1% to 10% of the 1.3M (wild guess). So if each of them had 100 friends-and-family "clients", it still wouldn't add up to "pretty common".

Yeah. I have three lawyers amongst very good friends and family. They are all up for general discussion about law or a bit of basic research. I don't think any would go as far as writing a letter on my behalf.

But there's a much smaller number of people from the social class likely to have lawyers as friends.

Also further reduce your number for adults in the name age bracket as practising lawyers.