How TruthMark verifies attorneys

The Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations (Principle 1: Do No Harm; Principle 6: Ethical Evidence Use) is load-bearing for this module. The legal profession is unusually sensitive to false-positive identification:

• Name collisions are common. “John Smith” admitted to the New York bar in 1998 is not the same person as “John Smith” admitted in 2014. A list that conflates the two damages both.
• Discipline disclosure rules differ by state. Florida publishes a 10-year history; California shows full public discipline; some states show only current status. Aggregating into one schema flattens those differences and creates a record no regulator endorses.
• Records change. Reinstatements, status changes, address updates, and corrections happen constantly. The official source has the freshest data; anything we cache is stale by definition.

A separate aggregated index would create a fresh attack surface for misuse — bulk download, defamatory broadcast, scraping after attorneys are reinstated. We don't build that.

The Lawyers module is a curated directory of pointers:

• One canonical link per jurisdiction to the regulator's official lookup tool.
• For every state where the regulator differs from a voluntary trade association — Illinois (ARDC), New York (OCA), Pennsylvania (Disciplinary Board), Massachusetts (Board of Bar Overseers), etc. — we point at the regulator, not the trade group.
• For 4 states with stable public lookups and clear disclosure policies — California, New York, Texas, Florida — we add a richer integration card explaining what each regulator publishes (which fields, which discipline categories) and the limits of that disclosure.
• For a few jurisdictions with no public lookup tool (Delaware, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands), we link to the regulator's homepage and note that verification requires a phone or email to the court clerk.

We do not cache, scrape, or redistribute records. No API tokens are required because no data is being fetched server-side. Every search executes against the regulator's authoritative source.

What you can verify online varies dramatically by jurisdiction. We've grouped this roughly into three buckets:

• Full discipline disclosure. Florida (10-year discipline history on the lookup page), California (full public discipline on the licensee profile), Texas (discipline summary with administrative-vs-disciplinary distinction). These get TruthMark's richer integration card.
• Status visible, discipline elsewhere. New York (registration status from OCA, but discipline orders live with the four Appellate Division departments), Michigan (membership at michbar.org, discipline at adbmich.org), Wisconsin (directory at wisbar.org, discipline at wicourts.gov). We point at the membership lookup and note the cross-reference in the directory.
• No public lookup. Delaware, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands. Verification requires a direct request to the court clerk.

A few quirks worth flagging: Vermont publishes attorneys-in-good- standing as periodic PDFs rather than a live search. Virginia's public NGS tool surfaces attorneys with discipline; an attorney NOT showing up there typically means good-standing, but confirmation requires VSB Membership directly. North Carolina has two distinct entities — the regulator (ncbar.gov) and the voluntary trade association (ncbar.org) — that are easy to confuse.

State bar lookups answer “is this person licensed to practice law in this state and have they been disciplined?” — but federal court practice is a separate admission. An attorney admitted in California isn't automatically admitted in the Northern District of California; each of the 94 federal district courts maintains its own attorney roll, with independent admission rules. The Lawyers homepage surfaces four federal cross-reference resources:

• CourtListener (RECAP) — Free Law Project's archive of federal-court filings via PACER. Find an attorney's actual federal-court appearances across millions of dockets. When you enter a name in the search form, the CourtListener deep-link prefills your query.
• Federal Court Finder — directory of every federal court. Each court's site has its own attorney admission rules and (often) admitted-attorney lookup.
• SCOTUS Bar Admission — information on attorneys admitted to the Supreme Court bar. SCOTUS does not publish a searchable membership database; verification is by written request to the Clerk's Office.
• PACER — Find a Case — per-court electronic dockets including counsel-of-record listings. Account-based access; modest per-page fees. CourtListener mirrors a substantial RECAP-uploaded subset for free.

We don't pre-fetch results from any of these — that would be aggregation through the back door. Each link just hands you a query URL.

A few things bar lookups (and therefore TruthMark) cannot answer:

• Quality of representation. Bar status confirms a license, not competence. There's no substitute for references and consultations.
• Pending complaints. Most states keep open ethics investigations confidential until they result in formal discipline.
• Out-of-jurisdiction practice. An attorney may be licensed in multiple states. A clean record in one jurisdiction does not preclude discipline in another; check each state where you have reason to believe they practice.
• Federal-court only practice. Some attorneys practice exclusively in federal courts (admitted through bar admission to a specific federal district court). CourtListener may surface them when state bar lookups don't.