Privacy

Who is responsible

Kiznis Studio, a one-person studio in Lithuania, owns PlainAttorney and answers for every piece of personal data this page describes. The address for any question about it is hello@plainattorney.com.

What is recorded when you visit

Each request to the site leaves a line in the logs of our server and of Cloudflare, which carries the pages to you and filters abusive traffic: the IP address, the page, the time, the browser and the page you came from. We use those lines to keep the register pages up, trace faults and block scraping, then let them expire.

We count visits with two tools. Umami tallies pages and referring sites and sets no cookie. Google Analytics 4 adds the kind of device and a rough location; if you are in the EU, EEA, UK or Switzerland its cookies wait until you say yes in the consent tool. When you search the register, Google Analytics sees that a search happened, never the name you typed. Our servers send Sentry reports of errors and slow responses, with the address of the page involved.

Cookies and your consent

Your browser keeps one setting of ours: light or dark paper. Any other cookie belongs to one of these services:

• Journey by Mediavine places and counts the ads; its consent tool asks readers in the EU, EEA, UK and Switzerland first and keeps a record of each answer.
• Google Analytics 4, once you agree, wherever your agreement is needed.
• Cloudflare may set a short-lived security cookie to tell people from bots.

From the EU, EEA, UK or Switzerland, only the security cookie is set before you answer the consent tool. Before you answer, Google Analytics may receive a cookieless signal that a page was viewed, with no identifier. Elsewhere the counting runs, and ads ask first wherever the law requires it; U.S. visitors can refuse personalized ads through the ad network’s own link. Change your answer whenever you like, or block and clear cookies in the browser: every register page still works.

Advertising

The ads on these pages keep the register free to read. Journey by Mediavine places them, with its partner vendors; they can use cookies to pick and count ads, and, where you have agreed, to base ads on sites you visited before. We do not sell attorney records or visitors’ data for money; under California law the ad network’s cookies can still count as “sharing”. To opt out, write to hello@plainattorney.com, or use the ad network’s own privacy choices where they are shown. Because the ad code loads on every page, search results included, it can read the address of the page in front of you.

Attorneys the register lists

Where your record comes from. PlainAttorney republishes the New York attorney register so that clients and others can check whether a lawyer is registered, what the status means, and what changed between the court system’s files. None of it was collected from you. It comes from the NY Office of Court Administration’s attorney registration file, published as open data on data.ny.gov (dataset eqw2-r5nb); each page names the file’s date.

What we publish. From the register: your name, registration number, year and judicial department of admission, law school, employer as you spelled it, the city of your office, your registration status, and the month your next registration is due (which follows from your birth month). The register also holds a street address and a telephone number; we do not republish them, and we do not publish any value that would reveal a health condition: a registration the register marks “Incapacitated” has no page. To these we add counts computed from the register (how many attorneys share your school, employer or city, where a firm’s former names are counted with it) and your status in each register file we hold from the last twelve months, older values being dropped.

Why, and on what basis. Transparency about who may practise law in New York, and helping people check a lawyer’s registration. We rely on legitimate interests (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)): the public’s in that transparency, and ours in publishing the reference and paying for it with advertising. We weighed them against yours: the details are professional ones the court system itself publishes for the same purpose, we leave out your street address, telephone and any health-related value, and you can object at any time.

Who sees it, and how long. The pages are public. The companies that work for the site receive the address of each page read, and a record’s address carries your name and registration number: Cloudflare and our host (delivery and security), Sentry (error reports), Umami and Google Analytics (visit counts) and the ad network (Journey by Mediavine and its vendors). Some of them are in the United States; those transfers rely on the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework or the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses. We never sell the records. A page follows the register and changes when the court system’s file changes; pages of attorneys the register records as deceased are kept out of search engines.

Your rights. Under GDPR Articles 15 to 18 and 21 you may see, correct or erase the information we hold about you, have its use restricted, or object to it being published. Write to hello@plainattorney.com with your registration number; we answer within one month. We fix our own errors straight away; a detail that comes from your registration changes when you update it with the court system. If you object, we stop publishing your page unless we have compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests, rights and freedoms; a removed page answers as gone and leaves every search and list on the site. You may also complain to a data-protection authority, in Lithuania the State Data Protection Inspectorate.

Your rights as a visitor

Whether European data law (the EU and UK GDPR) or a U.S. state law such as California’s CCPA covers you, you can learn what we record about your visit and have a copy, have it fixed or erased, object to it, refuse personalized ads, and take a complaint to a data-protection regulator. Write to hello@plainattorney.com and you will have an answer within a month.

Retention, children and changes

Log lines live only as long as running and protecting the site needs them. Google Analytics deletes its event data after 14 months at the latest, and Umami holds only totals per page. The register is not meant for children, and we collect nothing from them knowingly. Any change to this page moves the date at the top.