Browse Attorney Data

Three ways to navigate the dataset

PlainAttorney organizes the NY OCA registry along three axes you'll see throughout the site: state (where the attorney's registered office is located), city (the specific municipality of the office address), and law school (the institution where the attorney earned their JD). Each axis answers different questions and surfaces different patterns.

The state axis is most useful for understanding where NY-admitted attorneys actually practice. Roughly two-thirds work from a NY office; the remaining third spread across DC, MA, CA, IL, FL, NJ, PA, and a long tail of other jurisdictions. The city axis goes deeper: New York City alone holds the majority of NY's in-state attorney population, with Brooklyn, Albany, Buffalo, White Plains, and Rochester rounding out the upstate concentration. Out-of-state cities like Washington DC and Boston appear in the city ranking because thousands of NY-admitted attorneys work in federal-government or interstate-commercial roles based there.

The law school axis reveals institutional pipelines into the NY bar. Manhattan-based schools (NYU, Fordham, Columbia, Brooklyn Law, Cardozo, NY Law) dominate by virtue of geographic and curricular alignment with the NY bar exam and NY-bar legal-employment market. Out-of-state schools that produce many NY-admitted alumni, Harvard, Penn, Georgetown, Cornell, appear because their graduates frequently relocate to NY for Big Law, federal-court clerkships, or in-house corporate roles.

A-Z attorney browse

For systematic name-based browsing, the alphabetical attorney pages let you walk the registry one letter at a time. Each letter page lists attorneys whose last name starts with that letter, sorted alphabetically, with state and bar status visible at a glance. This is the most useful route when you have a partial name (just the first initial of last name) and want to scan for matches by city or status.

Search vs browse

Use the search page when you have a specific name, bar number, or law firm in mind. Use this browse page when you're exploring the dataset structurally, comparing cities, looking for school pipelines, or understanding the geographic distribution of NY admission. Both surfaces draw from the same underlying SQLite database; search is optimized for lookup, browse is optimized for discovery.

Following an entity to its detail page

Each card and link in the browse grids takes you to a detail page. State pages aggregate every NY-admitted attorney whose registered office is in that state, with status breakdowns, top cities within the state, top schools represented, and recent discipline cases. City pages drill one level deeper: per-firm distributions, per-school alumni concentrations, and per-attorney listings filtered to that city. Law-school pages aggregate alumni across all states, year-of-admission distributions, and city concentrations of graduates.

Each detail page also surfaces "related" entities, neighboring cities (geographically), other schools with overlapping alumni bases, or other firms in the same city. These cross-links form a navigation graph that supports both linear browsing and exploratory research workflows.

Why no national rankings yet

PlainAttorney currently covers only the NY-admitted attorney population. National rankings, comparing the largest firms or schools across all 50 states, would require us to have data from California (~175k attorneys), Texas (~90k), Florida (~108k), and the other major-market state bars. Each of those state bars publishes its registry under different access conditions: some are open data, some require sequential public-record lookup, and some are gated behind anti-scraping defenses. We track the accessibility of each state on our states page; coverage expansion happens in the order data becomes accessible, not in the order of state population.

Once we add a second state's data, the homepage and ranking pages will adapt automatically to show multi-state comparisons. Until then, every count on this site refers to NY-bar membership only.