From the enrolment of Sarbah in 1887 until the establishment of the LawSchool in 1958, all lawyers were trained abroad, generally, with few exceptions, in England at the Inns of Court. The numbers were thus small, but the establishment of the Law School has led to a dramatic expansion in the membership of the profession.

Today it is estimated that there are some 2,500 lawyers in practice. The figure cannot be more accurately stated because not all lawyers take the trouble to register with the Ghana Bar Association and although the records of the Judicial Secretary ought to give an accurate figure those records only indicate the number of persons who have been enrolled since 1876 when the Supreme Court Ordinance was passed,, without giving any indication as to how many have died so that one does not have an accurate figure of how many lawyers are actually in practice, but the estimate of 2,500 is thought to be largely correct making provisions for a ten percent margin of error. The bulk of these practitioners are to be found in the main cities of Accra, Kumasi, Cape Coast, Sekondi-Takoradi, Sunyani, Ho, and Tamale.

The establishment of more courts in the regions will inevitably lead to a greater dispersion of practitioners so that one day the entire country will be effectively covered by the profession, thus permitting the ordinary person to have ready access to trained legal services. Originally, the Ghana Bar Association did not exist as a formal institution in the sense in which we know it today. In those far off days there were, of course, very few lawyers at the Bar and what could be called a bar association was simply an informal meeting of gentlemen at the Bar which was more a social gathering than anything else. The tradition developed whereby the most senior member of the Bar was designated the leader of the Bar. The Bar Association in its informal existence had no officers and kept no minutes of its meetings.