Editorial & Corrections Policy

PlainAttorney publishes profiles for every attorney registered with the New York State Unified Court System, alongside firm and law-school summaries, built entirely from official public records. This page explains how those pages are produced, what standards they are held to, and how to report a record that looks wrong so we can fix it at the source.

How these pages are produced

Every figure on PlainAttorney originates in a public dataset. We download the raw New York Office of Court Administration (OCA) attorney registration file from the state's open-data portal, load it through a documented, version-controlled data pipeline, and render it into attorney, city, firm, and law-school pages using shared templates. No profile is hand-written, and no name, status, or registration field is typed in by an editor. Each value you see is read directly from the official source record at build time.

Our editorial team is responsible for the parts a pipeline cannot decide on its own: which datasets to use, how each metric is defined and labeled, what the methodology says, which derived measures (such as city-level discipline rates and tenure percentiles) are computed and how, and what we will not publish. The pipeline then applies those decisions uniformly across the whole dataset, so the rule that governs one attorney governs all of them.

Sourcing standards

We publish only data that comes from official government sources, and we name the source on every page. Our datasets are:

  • NY OCA Attorney Registrations — the primary source: name, registration number, bar status (active, suspended, disbarred, deceased, and others), admission year, law school, and office location for 429,620 attorneys. Published via data.ny.gov.
  • U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for Lawyers (SOC 23-1011), used only for attorney-fee context on fee pages.
  • Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — Consumer Complaint Database, used only for firm-level consumer-finance complaint context.

We do not scrape third-party sites, we do not republish attorney advertising or marketing listings, and we do not generate any attorney data ourselves. Where a figure is derived from the official data (for example, a city discipline rate or a tenure percentile), the page links to our methodology, which sets out exactly how it is calculated.

Accuracy and validation

Because the data is read straight from the OCA file, the most common source of error is the upstream record itself: registration data is maintained by the court system and can lag a real status change by weeks or months. Our pipeline applies systematic checks before a value is published. It normalizes city and law-school names so the same institution is not fragmented across spellings, validates status codes against the OCA's published taxonomy, and shows a value as unavailable rather than guessing when the source omits it.

When we find that a displayed number is wrong, we fix the cause, not the symptom. We trace the value back to the data layer, correct the derivation or normalization rule there, and regenerate the affected pages, so the same class of error is resolved everywhere at once rather than patched on a single page.

Editorial independence

PlainAttorney does not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from attorneys, law firms, or law schools. No message from a covered party will move it up or down a ranking. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense; advertisers have no influence over which attorneys we cover or how their data is presented, and they receive no preferential placement. We publish no subjective ratings of any individual attorney — we present the official record, with disbarred and suspended attorneys shown just as prominently as active ones, and let readers weigh what matters to them.

Attorney status affects real-world decisions — hiring counsel, filing a grievance, or verifying credentials before a legal proceeding — so we treat this as a Your-Money-or-Your-Life (YMYL) topic. PlainAttorney provides public-record information, not legal advice, and does not endorse, recommend, or rate any attorney. Bar status can change between our refreshes; for the authoritative, live status of any attorney, always consult the NY Courts Attorney Search. If you need legal advice, consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction.

Update schedule

The NY OCA publishes registration data on a recurring basis. We refresh our database from the open-data portal and re-stamp the affected pages so the published date reflects when the content genuinely changed. Because the source is continuously maintained, there can be a lag of up to a few months between an official status change and its appearance here. The data vintage in effect is named on every data page and in our methodology.

Corrections process

If a record looks wrong, please tell us. We treat data-error reports as a priority and follow the same process every time:

  1. Report. Email hello@plainattorney.com with the page URL and the field or figure you are questioning.
  2. Verify. We check the value against the official NY OCA source record for that attorney.
  3. Fix at the source. If the figure is wrong on our side, we correct the underlying data or derivation rule and regenerate every page it affects.
  4. Note it. If the figure is correct but reflects a known upstream quirk — such as a registration lag — we explain the caveat rather than silently changing it.

Some apparent errors trace back to the OCA record itself. When that is the case, we will tell you so and point you to the official NY Courts Attorney Search so you can verify it directly. A correction to the underlying bar record must be made at the OCA first; ours follows on the next refresh.

Contact

Questions about our standards, methodology, or a specific record are welcome at hello@plainattorney.com. For more on what the data covers and how it is processed, see our About page and methodology.