Top 10 Law Schools by New York Bar Registration Volume

PlainAttorney ranks law schools by the number of their graduates appearing in the New York State Office of Court Administration public attorney registration database. Updated automatically as new data is processed.

Research period:

Compiled by PlainAttorney Editorial on 2026-05-15

Research question

Across the 2,782 law schools represented in the New York bar registration database, which produce the largest number of attorneys registered to practice in New York State?

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 Law Schools by New York Bar Registration Volume

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.

# Law school NY-registered attorneys
1 New York University School of Law 25,745
2 Fordham University School of Law 22,919
3 Columbia Law School 21,447
4 Brooklyn Law School 18,202
5 Harvard Law School 16,595
6 New York Law School 14,968
7 Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (Yeshiva University) 11,893
8 Albany Law School 8,705
9 Hofstra University School of Law 6,635
10 Georgetown University Law Center 6,427

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 University School of Law, with a value of 25,745 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 (25,745) and the 10th-ranked record (6,427) 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

Attorney counts reflect only New York State bar registration records and do not represent the full bar admission footprint of any law school across all US jurisdictions. A graduate registered with the New York bar may also be admitted in other states; conversely, many graduates of these schools practice outside New York and would not appear in this dataset. New York-area schools naturally dominate the count because their graduates disproportionately remain in the New York job market. Counts include attorneys in all registration statuses (active, retired, suspended, deceased) and are not adjusted for years in practice or current activity level. Bar registration is a licensing record, not a competence or quality assessment. This ranking is not an endorsement of any law school's educational quality.

Secondary cut from the same source

Top New York-area law schools by NY bar registration count

attorneys
Source New York State Office of Court Administration

Related data

Sources