NY OCA registry · ranked
New York Attorney Rankings
Direct rankings from the NY Office of Court Administration attorney registry: most attorneys by city and law school, top firms, and discipline rates. No editorial weighting, just the public counts.
- 429,620
- Registered attorneys
- New York
- Top city by offices
- 5
- Ranking axes
Top cities (by office count)
- New York, NY 86,723
- Washington, DC 10,873
- Brooklyn, NY 6,516
- Albany, NY 3,427
- Buffalo, NY 3,235
- White Plains, NY 3,095
- Boston, MA 2,601
- Los Angeles, CA 2,537
- Bronx, NY 2,304
- San Francisco, CA 2,225
- Rochester, NY 2,185
- Garden City, NY 1,991
Top law schools (by alumni)
- New York University School Of Law 25,745
- Fordham University School Of Law 22,919
- Columbia Law School 21,447
- Brooklyn Law School 18,202
- Harvard Law School 16,595
- New York Law School 14,968
- Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law (Yeshiva University) 11,893
- Albany Law School 8,705
- Hofstra University School Of Law 6,635
- Georgetown University Law Center 6,427
- Boston University School Of Law 6,396
- Brooklyn 5,464
Most Attorneys by State
States ranked by total registered NY-licensed attorney population, with active vs. inactive breakdown. Surfaces NY's outsized concentration of legal talent.
Discipline Action Rates
Discipline categories (disbarred, suspended, resigned-disciplinary) ranked by frequency. Currently 24,037 attorneys with active discipline records.
Top Law Firms by Attorney Headcount
Firms ranked by the number of NY-registered attorneys on file. Useful proxy for firm size and footprint in the state.
Top Law Schools by NY Alumni
Law schools ranked by the number of graduates registered to practice in NY. Reveals dominant feeder schools and pipelines into the state bar.
Cities by Attorney Office Count
2,609 cities ranked by NY-licensed attorney office locations. Sortable by name, state, or count; filterable by state and starting letter.
Browse All Law Schools
Full alphabetical and ranked browse of every law school whose graduates are registered with the NY bar, paginated and sortable by name or alumni count.
Discipline Records (Searchable)
Searchable directory of 24,037 disciplined attorneys, filterable by discipline type. Each record links to the full attorney profile.
New York State Attorney Profile
Single-state deep dive: status breakdown, top cities, top law schools, recent discipline cases, and an A-Z attorney browser. The complete picture of NY bar membership.
All Coverage States
Full list of state bar registries currently covered by PlainAttorney. Coverage is being expanded; subscribe to updates to learn when new states come online.
Why these rankings exist
Most attorney directories rank by marketing budget - pay-to-play tiers, sponsored placement, "verified" badges sold to firms that purchase advertising. We don't do that. The rankings on PlainAttorney rank by verifiable counts from the NY OCA bar registry, recomputed at request time directly from the database. Nothing is pinned, sponsored, or boosted. Kirkland & Ellis ranks at the top of the firm list because the OCA database records more Kirkland-employed NY-registered attorneys than any other firm, full stop. If that count drops below the next firm tomorrow, the ranking flips automatically.
The trade-off: our rankings are about scale, not quality. A firm with 900 NY attorneys is not necessarily "better" than a 100-person boutique; it is bigger. A law school with 25,000 NY-admitted alumni is not necessarily "better" than a school with 5,000; it has more historical pipeline into the NY market. We surface these counts because they are the only objective signals available in the public dataset, and because they answer real questions: "What law school produces the most NY attorneys I might encounter?" "Which firms am I most likely to find a NY-licensed lawyer at?"
What you cannot infer from these rankings
Quality of representation. Bar registration counts say nothing about case outcomes, malpractice history, client satisfaction, or area of practice expertise. A firm at the top of our list has many NY-registered attorneys; that does not make any individual attorney within that firm a fit for your specific legal need.
Current employment. NY OCA registration captures the office address an attorney reported at their most recent registration cycle. Attorneys move between firms frequently; the registry catches up at the next biennial renewal. For real-time employment, contact the firm directly or check the firm's website.
Per-firm discipline rates. We have not yet computed firm-level discipline rates because the OCA's discipline data is recorded at the individual-attorney level without firm linkage at the time of the disciplinary act. Implementing this requires longitudinal tracking of firm affiliations across registrations, on the roadmap but not shipped.
Cross-jurisdiction caveat
PlainAttorney currently covers only the New York bar. Rankings on this page reflect only the NY-registered portion of any firm or institution. A national firm's "NY headcount" can be a fraction of its total attorney population, Latham & Watkins has 800+ NY-registered attorneys but several thousand globally. A NY-bar law school's "NY admissions" can be a fraction of its total alumni, Harvard has 16,000+ NY-admitted alumni and many more never sat for the NY bar.
When we expand coverage to other state bars (see the coverage roadmap), these rankings will update to reflect multi-state populations. Until then, treat every count above as "NY-bar membership" and not as "total scale".
How often these rankings refresh
Rankings are computed at request time directly from the SQLite database. Each request runs a fresh SQL aggregation against the live tables, there is no precomputed cache. The underlying data refreshes when the NY OCA publishes a new CSV (typically quarterly). Status changes (suspensions, disbarments, address moves) propagate to all rankings within one OCA refresh cycle.