The attorney had been dead for four months before we caught it.
Not our fault, exactly. His profile had passed our intake check the previous year. Active license, no discipline, a clean record in a mid-sized firm in the Midwest. Then one Tuesday in a routine sweep, the state bar portal returned a status we had learned to read slowly: the record still showed his admission date, his bar number, his practice areas, and one small line near the bottom that had not been there before. Deceased. No fanfare. The bar had updated the record, the firm had not updated its website, and for four months a dead lawyer was still listed as taking new clients on a live directory page.
That is the kind of thing a quarterly recheck exists to find. Not the dramatic disbarment that makes the legal press. The quiet drift. The lapse nobody announced.
Why we do this four times a year instead of once
When we first built our verification process, the instinct was annual. Check a firm’s attorneys once, stamp the profile, move on. That instinct is wrong, and it took us maybe two cycles to understand why.
Bar licenses do not fail on a January-to-January schedule. They fail whenever they fail.
Consider the mechanics. Most states run their attorney registration on an annual dues cycle, but the cycle start date varies by jurisdiction and sometimes by the attorney’s birth month or admission date. California’s active membership fees carry their own deadline. New York registers attorneys biennially, tied to the attorney’s birthday, in a two-year rhythm that does not line up with anyone else’s calendar. Continuing legal education compliance runs on reporting periods that differ state to state, some annual, some biennial, some on rolling group assignments by last name. An attorney can be perfectly current in March and administratively suspended by July for missing a CLE deadline that had nothing to do with their competence and everything to do with paperwork.
Discipline is worse for scheduling, because discipline lands whenever the disciplinary machinery finishes grinding.
A grievance filed in one year can produce a suspension order eighteen months later. Interim suspensions arrive fast when there is a threat to clients, and slowly when the process runs its full course through a hearing panel and a state high court review. There is no season for it. A lawyer who is fine on the day we check in Q1 can be suspended by Q2, reinstated by Q3, and suspended again by Q4, and we have seen sequences nearly that busy.
Annual checking means that for up to eleven months, a profile we call verified may be describing an attorney who cannot lawfully practice. That gap was not acceptable to us. Quarterly closes it to a worst case of roughly ninety days, which is not perfect, but it is honest about the tradeoff between our own labor and the accuracy we promise readers.
We considered monthly. We may still move some high-volume states to a tighter cadence. The reason we have not gone fully monthly across all fifty is the second half of this story, which is that the infrastructure for checking bar standing is, to put it plainly, a mess.
Fifty states, fifty front doors, no shared key
There is no national attorney license database that the public can query in one place. People assume there is. There is not.
The ABA does not license attorneys. States do, through their state bars or their court systems, and each one built its own lookup tool on its own timeline with its own budget and its own idea of what the public should be allowed to see. The result is a spread that runs from genuinely excellent to functionally hostile.
At the good end, you have states with searchable, current, well-structured online portals. You type a name or a bar number, and you get back a status, an admission date, a public discipline history, and often the specific dates and documents attached to any disciplinary action. California’s State Bar attorney search is the reference example most people know, and it exposes a real disciplinary record with links. When a state runs its lookup like this, our sweep is fast and the answer is unambiguous.
In the middle, you have states that publish a members list but treat status and discipline as separate concerns. You can confirm someone is admitted. Confirming they are in good standing, or reading the detail of a suspension, may require a second source, a separate discipline page, or a certificate of good standing request that costs money and takes days.
At the bad end, and it is a real end, you have jurisdictions where the practical answer is a PDF, a phone call, or an email to a staff member who pulls the record by hand.
We have chased status through downloadable roster documents that a bar posts and updates on an irregular schedule, which means the PDF you are reading might reflect last month’s reality or last quarter’s. We have called bar offices and waited on hold to have a human confirm whether a suspension we saw referenced in a court order had actually taken effect. We have parsed disciplinary actions out of board newsletters and high-court opinion feeds because the state’s own attorney lookup did not surface the discipline next to the name.
This unevenness is the single biggest reason bar-standing verification is harder than it sounds. A single national query would make this a five-minute job. Instead it is fifty workflows, and the workflow for a phone-only state cannot be run at the same speed or the same hour as the workflow for a state with a clean API-adjacent portal.
It also means the confidence level of our answer varies by state, and we think honesty requires saying so. A verified status in a jurisdiction with a live, timestamped portal is a stronger claim than a verified status pulled from a PDF roster dated six weeks ago. We treat both as our best available answer. We do not pretend they are identical in reliability.
What the ABA data tells us about the categories
The American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Professional Discipline runs an annual survey of lawyer regulation, and it is one of the few sources that lets you talk about the shape of attorney discipline nationally without inventing numbers. It aggregates what the state disciplinary agencies report: how many complaints came in, how many resulted in formal charges, how many produced sanctions, and what kind of sanctions.
The value of that survey for our work is not any single figure. It is the taxonomy. It confirms that the categories we watch for in a sweep are the categories the regulators themselves track: private and public reprimands, suspensions of varying length, disbarments, transfers to disability inactive status, and resignations or disbarments on consent while charges are pending. When we design a recheck, we are looking for the same events the ABA survey counts, one attorney at a time, in near real time, instead of in an annual national aggregate.
What a sweep actually surfaces
People imagine verification catching dramatic villains. Mostly it catches administrative housekeeping. Here is the honest breakdown of what comes up, ordered roughly by how often we see it.
The most common finding by a wide margin is the administrative suspension. These are not accusations of misconduct. They are lapses. An attorney did not pay their annual dues or bar assessment on time. An attorney did not complete their required CLE hours by the reporting deadline. An attorney let their registration go inactive because they moved to an in-house or government role and stopped maintaining active status, then the firm never updated the public-facing bio. States often label these clearly: administrative suspension, CLE noncompliance, nonpayment of fees, inactive status.
The important thing about an administrative suspension is that during it, the attorney cannot practice law. The reason is bureaucratic, but the effect on authority to practice is real. A firm listing an administratively suspended attorney as an active practitioner is listing someone who currently cannot take the matter. That is why we flag it, even though nobody did anything wrong in the moral sense. The client does not care whether the suspension came from a fee lapse or a fraud finding. The client cares whether the lawyer can lawfully represent them today.
Second most common is the name change, which sounds trivial and is not.
Attorneys change names. Marriage, divorce, personal reasons. The bar record updates. The firm bio may or may not. More disruptively, an attorney can be admitted under one name, appear in older court records under another, and be findable in the bar portal only under the current legal name. When a directory profile lists a name the bar no longer indexes, an automated lookup returns nothing and a careless verifier concludes the attorney does not exist or is not licensed. The attorney is fine. The record just moved. Catching name changes cleanly is a large fraction of what separates a real verification process from a broken script that throws false alarms.
Third, the deceased-attorney finding. We opened with one. It is not rare in the way people assume. Firms, especially small ones and especially founder-named firms, are slow to update. A named partner passes away and the firm name, the letterhead, and the website roster can carry the name for years as a matter of goodwill and inertia. The bar record, though, gets updated when the bar learns of the death, and the mismatch is exactly the sort of thing a periodic sweep exists to reconcile.
Fourth, disciplinary suspensions. Now we are into actual misconduct findings. A hearing panel or court has determined the attorney violated the rules of professional conduct and imposed a suspension for a defined period, or an indefinite one pending conditions. These carry public opinions and orders in most states, and the good portals link them. The conduct ranges widely: mishandling client funds, missing deadlines that harmed clients, failure to communicate, conflicts, misrepresentation. When we surface one of these, we are not the finder of the misconduct. The state already found it. We are the party noticing that the finding exists and the public profile has not caught up.
Fifth, and least common, disbarment. Permanent, or in some states subject to a long reinstatement bar, this is the top of the sanction ladder and the regulators use it sparingly relative to the volume of complaints they process. When it shows up, it is unambiguous and consequential, and it triggers the piece of this that firms most often overlook.
The auto-suspension trap when a firm’s attorney is disbarred
Here is the part that firms do not think about until it hurts them.
When an attorney at a firm is disbarred or suspended, the direct consequence is obvious: that attorney cannot practice. The indirect consequence is where firms get caught. Under the rules of professional conduct that virtually every state has adopted in some form, based on ABA Model Rule 5.5 and Model Rule 5.4, a disbarred or suspended lawyer cannot practice law, cannot share legal fees, and cannot hold themselves out as authorized to practice. The firm’s remaining lawyers have affirmative obligations tied to that person’s status.
A firm that continues to list a disbarred attorney as a practicing member of the firm has a live problem. So does a firm that lets a suspended lawyer keep doing work that constitutes the practice of law under a different title, or keeps splitting fees with them, or leaves their name on pleadings and websites in a way that implies they can still take the matter. The unauthorized practice of law rules reach the person who is suspended, and the assisting-a-nonlawyer rules reach the colleagues who let it continue.
There is also the mechanical suspension question that trips people up in specific jurisdictions and forums. Federal courts and many state courts have reciprocal discipline rules: discipline in the licensing jurisdiction can trigger a matching or parallel action in every court where the attorney is admitted. The Supreme Court’s decision in Selling v. Radford, 243 U.S. 46 (1917), set the long-standing frame for how one jurisdiction gives effect to another’s disbarment, allowing the second forum to impose reciprocal discipline unless there was a want of due process, insufficient proof, or a grave injustice in the original proceeding. A lawyer disbarred by their home state does not simply keep practicing in the federal district court next door. The reciprocal machinery follows them, and it follows them into every bar they hold.
For a firm, this means one attorney’s disbarment can cascade. If that attorney was admitted in three states and several federal courts, the fallout is not one status change. It is a set of status changes rolling across jurisdictions on their own timelines, each of which our sweep has to catch separately because, again, there is no single national record that reconciles them.
We have watched this cascade in the public record. An attorney is disbarred in their primary state. Weeks or months later, a reciprocal order appears in a federal district. Later still, a second state where they were admitted acts. If you checked only the primary state, or only once a year, you would see the beginning of the story and miss the rest. Quarterly checking across every jurisdiction an attorney holds is the only way to keep a firm profile honest through that cascade.
Reinstatement, and why standing is not a one-way door
The other thing an annual model gets wrong is that discipline reverses.
Suspensions end. Administrative suspensions clear the moment the attorney pays the fee or completes the CLE and the bar processes it. Disciplinary suspensions for a fixed term expire and, depending on the state, either lapse back to active automatically or require a formal reinstatement showing. Even some disbarments are not permanent; a number of states allow a disbarred attorney to petition for reinstatement after a set number of years, on a heavy burden of proof about rehabilitation and fitness.
This matters for verification because a stale flag is its own kind of error. If we caught a suspension in Q1 and never rechecked, we would keep a scarlet letter on an attorney who paid their dues in February and has been in perfectly good standing since. That is unfair to the attorney and inaccurate to the reader. Reinstatement handling is not a courtesy. It is the same accuracy obligation running in the other direction.
So a sweep has two jobs, not one. It looks for standing that dropped, and it looks for standing that was restored. An attorney we flagged last quarter gets rechecked this quarter with equal care, and if the status is now active, the flag comes down and the profile reflects current reality. We keep the history internally, because the fact that a suspension happened is real and does not vanish, but the current-status line describes the present, because that is what a client is relying on when they read it.
The states differ here too, of course. Some show a clean current status with a separate, still-visible public discipline history, which is exactly the right design: current authority to practice and past record, both visible, not conflated. Others flip the record back to active and bury the history, which makes the past discipline harder to find and forces us to preserve it from the original order. Reinstatement is one more place where the fifty-front-doors problem shapes how hard the work is.
The honest frequency, in words rather than invented numbers
We will not hand you a statistic we cannot source. What we can do is characterize what a large recheck cycle feels like, because the distribution is stable enough across quarters that we trust the shape of it.
The overwhelming majority of attorneys we recheck are exactly where they were last quarter. Active, clean, unchanged. Most firms have nothing move at all in a given cycle. This is the boring truth that no one puts in a headline: verification mostly confirms that things are fine.
Of the changes we do find, administrative status changes are far and away the most common. Fee lapses, CLE noncompliance, moves to inactive or retired status. These are frequent enough that any sweep of a decent volume of attorneys will turn up several, and most of them resolve within a quarter or two as the attorney cures the lapse.
Name changes and record corrections come up regularly, less often than administrative status but often enough that we built specific handling for them rather than treating each as an anomaly.
Deceased-attorney findings are uncommon per sweep but consistent over time. Across enough firms and enough quarters, you will always find some. The correlation with founder-named small firms is strong enough that we watch those profiles a little harder.
Disciplinary suspensions are meaningfully rarer than administrative ones. They show up, they are serious when they do, and they carry documentation. Disbarments are rarer still, the least frequent category we track, which matches what the ABA survey data reflects about the sanction distribution nationally: the severe outcomes are a small slice of the total.
The point of stating it this way is to resist two opposite distortions. One distortion says verification is theater because most lawyers are fine. The other says the profession is riddled with fraud that a sweep is constantly uncovering. Neither is true. The reality is that a small but persistent stream of real, consequential status changes flows through the profession every quarter, invisibly, and a directory that does not recheck will slowly fill with claims that were true when made and are false now.
What we actually think about all this
We think the burden should not be on us, or on any private verifier, to reconcile fifty incompatible systems just to answer a simple question: can this lawyer lawfully practice today, and where.
The information exists. Every state knows the current status of every attorney it licenses. The states that built clean, current, searchable, public portals with linked discipline records have proven it can be done well and cheaply. The states still running on irregular PDFs and phone-only confirmation are not protecting anyone. They are just making the public work harder to learn something the public has every right to know instantly.
We will keep doing the quarterly sweep because the alternative is a directory that lies by omission, slowly, as the world moves and the pages do not. But we would trade our entire multi-workflow apparatus tomorrow for a single national, current, public register of attorney standing and discipline. That does not exist, and there is no sign it is coming.
Until it does, the recheck cadence is a compromise with reality. Ninety days is the longest we are willing to let a profile drift, because the dead attorney sat live for four months once, and we decided that was three months too long. If you take one thing from how we work, take that: bar standing is not a fact you establish. It is a fact that expires, quietly, on a schedule nobody publishes, and the only defense is to keep asking the question.