New York Bar Membership
Coverage status: New York only. Other state bar registries are under research.
Navigating PlainAttorney by State
The state index is the best place to start if your question is geographic ("Which state leads in X?", "What does this look like in my state?"). Each state page drills down into the full set of records for that jurisdiction, along with summary statistics and comparisons across the country. Data coverage can vary by state — some states publish richer underlying datasets, some refresh more often, and a small number of states lag the national median. We flag coverage gaps on the state page itself.
State-Level Data Quality
Because each state operates its own reporting pipeline, subtle format differences show up across the dataset. We normalize obvious discrepancies — title casing, leading zeros on zip codes, abbreviation expansions — without altering the underlying data. When two states use incompatible category codes for the same real-world concept, we map them to a common taxonomy and document the mapping on the methodology page. Where a mapping is imperfect, we leave the original category visible on the record.
Interpreting State Comparisons
Raw totals by state can be misleading if you do not account for population. Whenever we present a count-based ranking, we also publish a per-capita variant when meaningful. Per-capita comparisons should be read with care in small states and sparsely populated states: the denominator is small, so one or two records can swing the rate substantially. For consequential comparisons, always click through to the state page and look at the underlying count, the time frame, and the methodology note before concluding that a difference is real.
When State Data Disagrees With Federal Data
Occasionally the state-level number you see on PlainAttorney will differ from a federal aggregate. This is usually because the state reported its data on a different cadence, used a slightly different population, or applied a narrower definition of the measured concept. We cite the exact state dataset on the state page; if you need to reconcile with a federal source, the methodology page links both and explains the differences. We do not silently "correct" state data to match federal data or vice versa.
Coverage Roadmap — States Under Active Research
PlainAttorney's MVP shipped with New York coverage because the NY Office of Court Administration publishes the most accessible state-bar registry in the country (CSV download via Socrata, no API key, no rate limits). That accessibility is rare. Most other state bars expose their attorney lookup through HTML interfaces with anti-scraping defenses that prevent simple ETL.
Our research path for adding states is published openly. California (175,000+ attorneys) is being approached via sequential lookup against the State Bar of California's public licensee search; the work is bottlenecked by per-record latency, not data unavailability. Georgia (34,000) has an undocumented REST API powering its Member Directory; we are reverse-engineering the pagination semantics. Illinois (60,000+) and Texas (90,000+) require parsing their HTML registries page by page. Florida (108,000+) and Pennsylvania (50,000+) require formal public-records requests for the full underlying dataset.
States we have not prioritized — Ohio, North Carolina, New Jersey — exhibit such poor accessibility that the cost-per-record exceeds the visitor value at our current scale. We revisit those each quarter as the data landscape evolves; if a registry suddenly becomes accessible, it goes to the top of the queue.
If you are an officer of a state bar association reading this and you have an open-data feed of your registry, please email hello@plainattorney.com. We respect ToS strictly and gladly publish any state that wants to be in the public-data record. The end state for PlainAttorney is full 50-state coverage with NY-equivalent breadth on each jurisdiction.
How to Verify a Specific Attorney Right Now
For any individual attorney lookup that requires real-time accuracy (employment decisions, court filings, professional engagements), the official source is always the state bar of the jurisdiction in which the attorney is admitted — not any third-party directory, including ours. Our methodology page links the official lookup tool for every U.S. state bar plus the District of Columbia and the federal patent bar. Use those links. PlainAttorney's value is in aggregation, search, and historical context; the state bar's value is in real-time authority.