Registry field guide
Reading NY Attorney Registration Fields
According to the New York Office of Court Administration attorney registration file, every public attorney record carries a fixed set of fields. This guide defines those fields as they appear in the registry, not hiring advice.
- Status
- OCA code
- Admitted
- date on file
- Discipline
- formal actions
Read the NY OCA registration fields - status, admission date, law school, and discipline - before treating any directory listing as a hiring signal.
This guide explains what each public registration field means on the OCA row PlainAttorney mirrors. It is a field decoder, not legal advice and not an attorney recommendation.
- OCA fields status · admission · school
- Discipline public flag first
PlainAttorney mirrors the New York Office of Court Administration (OCA) attorney registration dataset published via NY Open Data. The fields below are the ones the registry exposes. They are provenance labels, not recommendations about whom to retain.
Registration status
OCA assigns each registrant a status code (for example active, inactive, suspended, or disbarred). According to the registry schema, status is the authorization flag for practice in New York state courts. An active code means the registrant is current on OCA registration requirements as of the file vintage; a suspended or disbarred code means OCA records a prohibition. Status alone does not encode practice-area skill, case outcomes, or fees.
See the bar status field guide for the code list, and verify any named registrant on the lookup.
Admission date
The admission date is the calendar day OCA records for first bar admission in New York. PlainAttorney derives years-since-admission from that date for peer comparisons within an office city. The field measures tenure on the New York roll; it does not measure hours of courtroom work or specialization depth.
Law school
Where present, the law-school field is the institution string carried on the registration row. Aggregations such as alumni counts in the NY roll are joins over that string. OCA does not publish bar-passage rates on this file; school quality rankings from other publishers are outside this registry.
Discipline history
Discipline entries on PlainAttorney are formal actions linked to a registrant in the public discipline sources PlainAttorney ingests alongside the registration file. Absence of a row means no formal action appears in those sources for the vintage, not that no complaint was ever filed. Severity labels (reprimand, suspension, disbarment) follow the source wording. Step-by-step verification paths are in how to check attorney discipline records.
Office city and peer placement
Office-city strings come from the registration address fields. PlainAttorney computes city-tenure ranks among peers sharing that city so a profile can show where a registrant sits in the local admitted cohort. That placement is a derived statistic from the same public file; it is not a referral ranking.
What the registry does not carry
- Client reviews, fees, or consultation availability
- Malpractice claims that never became formal discipline
- Practice-area certification beyond what the registrant listed (when present)
- Authorization to practice in other states
Official verification remains available on the NY Courts Attorney Online Services search.
Understanding the data
Figures and field definitions on this page follow the New York Office of Court Administration attorney registration release PlainAttorney ingested for the site vintage documented on /methodology. Derived ranks are SQL joins over that file; they are not authored opinions.
Registry notice: This page describes public OCA registration fields. It is not legal advice and does not endorse, recommend, or rate any attorney.