Methodology

How this directory is built, sourced, and kept honest.

NY Attorney Records exists to make one thing easy: looking up a New York attorney in the public record. Everything on this site is built on a single principle — show the official data as the state publishes it, and never get between the reader and the source.

Where the data comes from

Every attorney record is compiled from the public attorney registration dataset published by the New York Office of Court Administration (OCA) through the State of New York open data portal at data.ny.gov. This is the same registration system every New York attorney is required to participate in, updated by the courts themselves.

We do not buy data, scrape third-party directories, or accept listings submitted by attorneys or marketers. There is exactly one source, and it is the official one.

What each record contains

For each attorney, the official dataset provides the registration number, name, year of admission, judicial department of admission, law school, registered address, and current registration status. We display these fields as they appear, with light normalization only to make them readable — for example, standardizing capitalization and grouping variant spellings of the same law school.

We do not add information the state does not publish. The registry contains no area of practice, no fee data, no ratings, and no reviews, so this site contains none of those either. Anyone claiming to rank or score New York attorneys is using something other than the official record.

How we process it

The raw dataset is read in full, cleaned, and organized into searchable records grouped by city, law school, judicial department, and registration status. Currently 183,760 records are published and browsable. The processing is mechanical and repeatable: the same input always produces the same output, with no editorial judgment applied to individual attorneys.

How current it is

Registration status can change at any time — an attorney may be newly admitted, suspended, reinstated, or disbarred. We refresh from the official source on a periodic basis, so a record here reflects the data as of our most recent update and may briefly lag the live registry.

For this reason, every record on the site links directly to the official New York Attorney Search. When a current, authoritative answer matters, that live tool is always the final word.

How we stay neutral

This site is supported by contextual display advertising and nothing else. Attorneys cannot pay to appear, to rank higher, to change their status, or to be removed for promotional reasons. Advertising never influences which records are shown or how they are presented.

Corrections

If you believe a record is inaccurate, out of date, or misattributed, contact us with the registration number and we will cross-check it against the official OCA source. Because the underlying record is maintained by the state, the authoritative correction is always the one made at the source — but we will promptly fix any error in how we display it.

In short

One official source, shown faithfully, always linked back for verification, with no pay-to-play. That is the whole method, and it is deliberately simple.