New York vouches for one line of its own page
This is the narrowest register we use, and it is candid about it. The Unified Court System states that the Attorney Detail Report contains information provided by the attorney — everything except registration status, which is generated from the Office of Court Administration’s database.
So on every one of these twenty-one listings, one row is the court’s own fact: Currently registered. The admission date, the law school, the business address — those are what the lawyer filed.
It goes further. The court states that good standing and any information regarding disciplinary actions must be confirmed with the appropriate Appellate Division Department. The page displays “No record of discipline” and then tells you to verify that elsewhere. We have not. That is why all twenty-one cards on this page show a dash rather than a green tick — the same treatment, for a different reason, that every listing on our Washington page carries.
New York City is the largest rideshare market in the country and the only one with its own licensing regime for drivers. It also has the register that will stand behind the least.
It does tell you which office to ask
That is the one thing New York gives you that no other register does: the department that admitted the lawyer. Fifteen of these twenty-one were admitted through the Second Department and six through the First. A reader finishing the check we could not finish would need to write to the right one, and every profile here names it.
Two records that do not say what you would expect
James Benintendi’s entry carries no business name and no business address — both fields read Not on File — and the registered email is a personal Gmail account. Everything identifying his practice on that page comes from his firm’s website. Michael Lamonsoff’s registered email is a colleague’s address rather than his own. Both fields are attorney-supplied, and New York says so; but a reader treating the register as a directory would be misled by each.
Where these lawyers actually are
Eight of the twenty-one have an address of record outside New York City: Melville in Suffolk, Syosset, Garden City, Garden City, Mineola and New Hyde Park in Nassau, and White Plains and North Salem in Westchester. All sit inside the commuter core; the furthest, Melville, is about forty miles. Every one of those cards says so on its face.
We also read three lawyers we have not published. Two are registered in Newburgh and Fishkill — Orange and Dutchess counties, roughly sixty miles out and beyond the core. The third is a different matter, and it is worth being plain about.
One record was not the man in the biography
We were given a biography describing a lawyer admitted in 1983, a graduate of the University at Buffalo School of Law, who founded a firm in 1995 and has practised for more than forty years. The attorney registration record supplied with it belongs to a lawyer admitted in May 2024, a graduate of Fordham, sharing the family name and a generational suffix.
They are two different people, and the record cannot be used to check the biography. We did not publish either. This is the second time a supplied pairing has come apart on inspection, and both times the tell was the same: the admission date and the law school did not survive being read against the prose.
What we haven’t checked
Not established. Confirmation of good standing or discipline with the Appellate Division, which New York states is required — now the largest single gap across twenty-one listings rather than one. Any admission outside New York; the register has no field for it, and at least eight of these lawyers say on their own sites that they hold one. Practice areas, fee terms and languages, none of which New York publishes. Business addresses for the one record that carries none. Court records for case outcomes. We print no settlement or verdict figures, and nearly all of these firms publish them. A bar check is a floor, not a ranking.
Coverage grows market by market. If you handle rideshare cases elsewhere in New York, tell us you exist — it costs nothing and buys nothing, but it gets you looked at. All states · How we work