Top 10 US Cities by Registered Attorney Count (NY Bar)

PlainAttorney ranks cities by the number of attorneys registered with the New York State bar who list that city as their primary registration address. Rendered live from the cities table.

Research period:

Compiled by PlainAttorney Editorial on 2026-05-15

Research question

Among 2,609 cities recorded in the New York bar registration database, which carry the highest concentration of registered attorneys, and how does the New York City urban core compare to other regional legal markets?

Methodology

This ranking reflects the data currently in our database, sourced from the agency referenced in the citation below and updated automatically as new filings are processed.

Coverage and exclusions: the source agency occasionally suppresses values for confidentiality, small sample size, or quality control, and suppressed rows are excluded from this ranking rather than shown as zero. If the agency later revises a figure, the revised value replaces the old one automatically the next time our data is refreshed.

Data provenance: we pull each release as it becomes available and normalize it into our database; a later release simply supersedes the one before it, so readers never see a mix of old and new figures on the same page.

Comparability across years: when the source agency revises its release schedule, definitions, or coverage, we note the affected years on the methodology page so readers can compare like-with-like rather than across a changed measurement.

Editorial governance: a named editor reviews every ranking page before publication (see the byline above). If an entity disputes a figure attributed to it, corrections are checked against the official source record before any change is made.

Every number on this page can be traced back to its source by following the entity links and the citation below, so independent verification never requires anything beyond the original public source.

See the methodology page for the complete ETL pipeline, source vintage, and column lineage.

Top 10 US Cities by Registered Attorney Count (NY Bar)

Live data: reflects the current dataset

attorneys
Source New York State Office of Court Administration

The ranked top 10

Every row below reflects the current 10-record dataset. Reload the page after new data is processed to see the latest values.

# City State NY-registered attorneys
1 NEW YORK NY 86,723
2 WASHINGTON DC 10,873
3 BROOKLYN NY 6,516
4 ALBANY NY 3,427
5 BUFFALO NY 3,235
6 WHITE PLAINS NY 3,095
7 BOSTON MA 2,601
8 LOS ANGELES CA 2,537
9 BRONX NY 2,304
10 SAN FRANCISCO CA 2,225

Source: New York State Office of Court Administration, NY OCA Attorney Registration database (public records via data.ny.gov). Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed. New York State Office of Court Administration, NY OCA Attorney Registration database (public records via data.ny.gov). Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed.

Findings

Top entity in the ranking

The top-ranked record in this dataset is NEW YORK, with a value of 86,723 on the NY-registered attorneys column. The full top-10 set is rendered in the table above. Every value comes directly from the current dataset; no number is hardcoded into this page. When the source agency publishes a revision, the ranking and the prose around it update automatically.

Distribution shape

The gap between the top-ranked record (86,723) and the 10th-ranked record (2,225) characterizes how concentrated the top of the distribution is. Where the top value is many multiples of the median value of the visible set, the population is highly concentrated, a small number of entities accumulate the bulk of the measured quantity. Where the top and bottom of the visible set are close together, the distribution is relatively flat across the top end. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.

Aggregate context

Across the full population behind this ranking, here are the summary statistics: how many records exist in total, the sum of the ranking metric across all qualifying records, and the mean per-record value. The methodology page documents the exact filter applied (records with null or zero values on the ranking metric are excluded). This aggregate row is computed from the same dataset that powers the ranking above.

Source provenance

The records in this ranking originate from New York State Office of Court Administration, specifically the NY OCA Attorney Registration database (public records via data.ny.gov). PlainAttorney ingests the source vintage published by the agency and keeps this page current, there is no static export carrying stale numbers, and a newly published dataset is reflected here within hours. The methodology page documents the source URL, the vintage date, and the steps applied to prepare the data.

Why this ranking matters

Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranking column is computed at the source.

What this analysis cannot tell us

City-level counts reflect the primary registration address each attorney provided to the New York Office of Court Administration. Address records are maintained by the attorney and updated on a biennial registration cycle; current professional addresses may differ from registration addresses. The dataset is the New York bar registry, so cities outside New York State (Washington DC, Boston, regional financial centers) appear because attorneys admitted to the New York bar often work in adjacent legal markets and maintain New York registration. Cities are not adjusted for population, large urban cores naturally accumulate more attorneys than smaller cities. This ranking measures registration count, not market size, billing volume, or specialty depth.

Secondary cut from the same source

Top 10 cities outside NY state by NY bar registration count

attorneys
Source New York State Office of Court Administration

Related data

Sources

  • New York State Office of Court Administration, Attorney Registration database via data.ny.gov - https://data.ny.gov/