Where The Most People Lawyer Up

The United States is often thought of as the country where it’s most normal to sue. So it might come as a surprise that residents in several European countries are even more diligent when it comes to having their backs covered legally.

As data from Statista’s Consumer Insights shows, Austrians are the keenest of the selected countries to lawyer up, with more than half of the respondents who use insurance opting for legal expenses insurance. When looking at a breakdown of age groups, this figure is even higher, increasing to 61 percent for 60-64 year olds. The rest of the DACH region is also high, with 45 percent of insured Swiss respondents opting for legal expenses insurance and 41 percent of Germans. Personal liability insurance is also popular among these markets (in Germany 64 percent of respondents with some kind of insurance use it, while in Switzerland it’s 52 percent and Austria 38 percent, versus in the United States where it’s 17 percent and the United Kingdom 10 percent).

In the UK, the share of respondents with legal expenses insurance is significantly lower, used by only one in ten people. However, this is still higher than the rate of people in the United States, which is only 6 percent, and double that of neighboring Ireland (5 percent). By contrast, Hungary has the lowest share of people with legal expenses insurance of the selected countries, at only 2 percent, which is matched by Serbia (2 percent) and Romania (2 percent) in the Balkans.

In terms of Latin American urban populations, figures are also at the lower end of the spectrum, including: Brazil (6 percent), Argentina (2 percent), Colombia (2 percent), Chile (3 percent) and Peru (1 percent).