Not surprisingly, the increase in central court litigation between 1550 and 1640 had a profound impact on the court bureaucracies and on the lawyers who worked within them. For a start, it contributed to a complete transformation in the size and shape of the legal profession. During the later sixteenth century, there was a dramatic rise in the number of practitioners qualified to work within the royal courts. Looking first at the upper branch, we find that admissions to the four inns of court increased steadily from around 50 per annum in the early sixteenth century to a high point of 300 in the later years of King James I, and between 1590 and 1639 as many as 2293 men were called to the bar and hence technically qualified to practise at Westminster. Many of these men may not have become career lawyers, and there are no precise figures for the numbers practising at various dates during the course of the period, but W. R. Prest has calculated that in 1640 there was an active bar which numbered at least 400 people, a figure probably four times greater than that for the size of the upper branch in 1560.

Within the lower branch of the profession, this picture of growth was even more startling. Between the 1590s and the 1620s, the number of underclerks in the offices of the six clerks in Chancery rose from about 60 to as many as 200, and there were similar increases, though on a smaller scale, in the size of the bureaucracies of Wards, Star Chamber, and Requests.