I know Wellingtonians stressed out about the wild weather don’t need any more bad news, but you need to be told.

According to the Law Society, 2153 lawyers working in Wellington hold practising certificates. That accounts for 19.8% of all practising certificates held by New Zealand resident lawyers.

But it’s even scarier than that, Wellington City has one lawyer for every 91 inhabitants.

Think about it. If you’re on a packed bus that means it probably contains at least one lawyer.

If you’re in a busy bar there could be a lawyer only metres away.

Lawyers could even be going to pick up their kids at the same child daycare centre you or your family-members use.

If you’re in a packed crowd watching a Hurricanes home game, then not only do you have the prospect of watching a rubbish team under-perform. You may well find that hundreds, yes hundreds, of lawyers are all around you. That perfectly friendly couple in the seats next to you could be just two of them. They may have lawyer friends nearby. The seat you are in has probably been sat on by at least one lawyer.

And as you go through the turnstiles, just imagine how many lawyerly fingers have touched it.

The national average works out at one lawyer for every 405 New Zealanders. So to say that Wellington has a lawyer crisis is an epic understatement.

Auckland, the centre of the universe and of all things good and true, by contrast has a mere one lawyer per 293 people. And the lawyers there are of a different sort: good, decent people.

But, while it’s all bad news for Wellington people, there is some hope. Upper Hutt has a miserly one lawyer per 1629 people, so Wellingtonians don’t have that far to go to seek refuge from this lawyer plague. The trouble with that, of course, is that it’s Upper Hutt.