Frequently Asked Questions

PlainAttorney includes 429,620 attorney registrations from New York State, sourced from the New York Office of Court Administration's open data portal. Coverage is currently limited to New York; additional state bar registries are under research.

All data comes from the New York Office of Court Administration (OCA), published as open data via data.ny.gov. This is the official registry of all attorneys admitted to practice in New York. Each detail page includes a 'Verify with NY OCA' link directly to the official record.

Currently, PlainAttorney covers New York State only. The 'Cities' index is sorted by office location of NY-licensed attorneys, many of those offices are outside New York, but the underlying license is still NY. We are exploring expanding to additional states as their bar data becomes available in machine-readable formats.

Search by the attorney's full name or last name using the search bar. You can also browse attorneys by city, law school, or alphabetically from the /state/ny page. Every attorney's profile includes their bar number, current status, year admitted, and a link to verify with the NY OCA.

Disbarred means the attorney's license to practice law has been permanently revoked. Suspended means the license has been temporarily revoked, usually pending disciplinary proceedings or for specific violations. Both statuses come directly from NY OCA records. See our /discipline page for the full searchable list and our 'Understanding Bar Status' guide for the complete classification taxonomy.

We update our database when the NY OCA releases updated data, typically quarterly. For the most current status of any attorney, verify directly with the official NY Attorney Search at courts.state.ny.us. Every detail page surfaces both the dataset's last-refresh date and a one-click 'Verify with NY OCA' button.

No. PlainAttorney is an independent data portal presenting public information. We do not provide legal advice, referrals, or endorsements. Always verify attorney credentials with the state bar before making legal decisions, and consult a licensed attorney for legal questions specific to your situation.

The NY OCA stores law-school names as raw text, meaning the same school can appear as 'HARVARD', 'Harvard Law School', 'HARVARD UNIVERSITY', 'HARVARD LAW SCHOOL', and so on. We maintain a canonical alias map (scripts/etl/law-school-aliases.json) that collapses known variants into a single canonical institution. Aggregate counts on /law-school/[slug] sum across all variants. Variant URLs (e.g. /law-school/harvard) 301-redirect to the canonical (/law-school/harvard-law-school).

New York divides the state into four Judicial Departments, administrative regions of the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court that supervise attorney admission, discipline, and registration. Each registered attorney is assigned to a Judicial Department based on their primary office location. The department appears on every attorney's profile.

Email hello@plainattorney.com with the attorney name, registration number, and the specific field that needs correction. We treat the NY OCA registry as the source of truth, if our record diverges from the official OCA listing, we'll correct it on the next data refresh. For lawful removal requests under privacy or safety grounds, see our removals policy in /about.

The Cities page lists every city that appears in the NY OCA's office-address field. NY-licensed attorneys can maintain offices anywhere, many work at firms with offices in California, Florida, DC, or even abroad. The license is still issued by the NY OCA, but the office location reflects where the attorney practices. We label this clearly on the page header.

Active registration confirms the attorney has met the bar's administrative and educational requirements and is currently authorized to practice, but it does not speak to competence in your specific legal matter, fee fairness, current caseload availability, or fit for your case. Use this directory as the first step in due diligence: confirm the attorney's status, review any discipline history, request references, and get the fee structure in writing before any engagement.

Each attorney profile shows a 'Report inaccuracy' mailto link so visitors can flag data errors directly. We treat such reports seriously and reconcile against the source dataset on each refresh. We never sell or share contact information collected through these reports.

No. CFPB consumer complaints (which we surface in some firm-context blocks) are not bar discipline. CFPB tracks consumer financial complaints, debt collection, mortgage, lending, and the volume of complaints against a firm is one signal of consumer friction in that line of business, but it is NOT a bar disciplinary action. Discipline (disbarment, suspension, resignation-with-discipline) is a distinct category, sourced from NY OCA's status field.

PlainAttorney data is always derived from public NY OCA records. Best practice: cite the underlying NY OCA dataset (https://data.ny.gov) and link to the relevant PlainAttorney page. Example citation: 'NY OCA Attorney Registry (via data.ny.gov), retrieved through PlainAttorney.com on YYYY-MM-DD.' Our /methodology page documents the full ETL pipeline.