JOSEPH JACOBS found that in a London directory of 1883 there were forty-seven Jewish solicitors out of a total of 4,920; that is, slightly less than 1 percent of solicitors were Jewish, a proportion smaller than the Jewish proportion of the population of London, where the vast majority of these Jewish practitioners would have been located. Manchester had four Jewish solicitors in 1871, and a similar number were practising in Birmingham in the 1870s and 1880s; the small Swansea Jewish community could not boast a single solicitor until the end of the 1880s, and that of Leeds not until 1890.

At that time Jewish solicitors had been practising in England for a hundred years or more, the first Jews to be admitted as solicitors by the Society of Gentlemen Practitioners (later the Law Society) being Joseph Abrahams in 1770 and Joshua Montefiore, the uncle of the great philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, in 1784. In addition, Jews had frequently acted as notaries in London, where they were much in demand for attesting the validity of commercial and testamentary documents. Indeed, one of the oldest firms of notaries in London, H. de Pinna and John Venn, was founded by Jacob Sarfaty, who was granted a notarial faculty in 1772.

The novelty of a Jew successfully establishing himself as a solicitor in an English provincial area at the beginning of the twentieth century is well illustrated in the career of Isadore Isaacs (1865‒1901), who died prematurely, aged 36, from an illness brought on by overwork. ‘Without any influence or substantial financial backing, Isadore Isaacs became one of the Town's [Sunderland's] leading solicitors, and was well known in the whole County of Durham; he had what is known as genius—“the infinite capacity of taking pains”. He was a brilliant and fearless advocate, popular with his colleagues, and respected by the Bench’, wrote his brother-in-law in a tribute. ‘At first he elected to practise in the outlying districts of Sunderland, and though he had to combat considerable prejudice on account of his religion, he speedily made headway.’ In 1894 he was elected as solicitor to the Durham Miner's Federation, carrying with it the responsibility for all their legal work, and rapidly built up a considerable practice.