New York Publishes a Lawyer's Home Address If Someone Reports the Lawyer Cannot Be Found There

The exception decides whether a listed address is doing its job

Section 118.2(b)(1) states that the home address of an attorney shall be made available to the public only in the following circumstances. The first is where no office is listed, in which case the home address will be made public. The second is where an office address is listed, but a request for information alleges that the attorney cannot be located at that address, and the Chief Administrator determines, by independent inquiry, that the attorney cannot be located at the listed office address.

Those two clauses do different work. The first is the reason a lawyer looks for an office address in the first place. The second is a condition on the first. Filing an address moves the home address out of public view, and it keeps it there for as long as the filed address survives an inquiry.

That framing is useful because it turns a question about categories into a question about facts. The rule does not ask what kind of address it is. It asks whether the attorney can be located there. Two of the rules below come back to that same question. Judiciary Law 470 asks what has to exist at the place, and New Jersey asks what the designated locations have to be able to do. The advertising rules ask a different question, which is what the address announces to a reader.

Living outside New York changes the question from address to office

Judiciary Law 470 is one sentence. A person, regularly admitted to practice as an attorney and counsellor, in the courts of record of this state, whose office for the transaction of law business is within the state, may practice as such attorney or counsellor, although he resides in an adjoining state. The section is on the books as of September 2026, and it applies to attorneys who live outside New York rather than to all attorneys.

The meaning of the word office in that sentence was certified to the New York Court of Appeals, which held in 2015 that Section 470 requires nonresident attorneys to maintain a physical office in New York. The Second Circuit quoted the reasoning when the case came back: the term office could not be construed to mean only an address or agent sufficient for the receipt of service, and the plain meaning of office, particularly when joined with the additional phrase for the transaction of law business, requires nonresident attorneys to maintain a physical office in New York.

The constitutional challenge that followed did not remove the requirement. In Schoenefeld v. Schneiderman, decided April 22, 2016, the Second Circuit concluded that Section 470 does not violate the Privileges and Immunities Clause, reversed the district court judgment that had invalidated the section, and remanded with instructions to enter judgment for the defendants.

One sentence in that opinion is worth keeping in view because it describes an asymmetry between resident and nonresident attorneys. The opinion records as undisputed between the parties that Section 470 imposes a physical office requirement on nonresident attorneys that does not apply to resident attorneys, who may use their homes as their offices. A lawyer who lives in New York and wants to keep a home address off a public list is solving a privacy problem. A lawyer who lives in New Jersey and practices in New York is solving a jurisdictional one, and the second problem has a court holding attached to it.

The ethics committee attached a condition to its answer and then declined to resolve it

The New York City Bar Association issued Formal Opinion 2019-2 on March 15, 2019, replacing an earlier opinion from 2014. Its digest reads in two parts, a permission and a condition. A New York lawyer may use the street address of a virtual law office located in New York as the lawyer's principal law office address for the purposes of Rule 7.1(h), provided the virtual law office qualifies as an office for the transaction of law business under New York's Judiciary Law. The same digest adds that a lawyer may use such an address on business cards, letterhead, and a firm website.

The condition carries the weight, and the committee said so directly. It wrote that it expresses no opinion on whether the virtual law office described in the opinion meets the minimum standards for a law office in New York, and that the question is one of law beyond the committee's jurisdiction, to be interpreted in accordance with the growing body of case law on the topic. The committee then noted that the arrangement it had described includes a physical facility at which a lawyer may meet with clients and receive service of process.

That sentence is the part worth reading slowly, because it describes the thing the opinion was written about. The opinion defines a virtual law office as a facility that offers business services and meeting and work spaces to lawyers on an as needed basis, typically with private or semi private work spaces, conference rooms, telephones, printers, and mail drop services for a monthly fee. A footnote draws a boundary around that definition and says a virtual law office should be distinguished from a virtual law practice, which typically has no physical address and operates primarily over the internet, and that the opinion does not address the ethical issues associated with operating a virtual law practice.

A second condition sits further down. A lawyer using such a facility should provide for personal delivery and acceptance of service, either by identifying an agent for that purpose or by arranging for the facility to accept service of process on the attorney's behalf. Where the facility is authorized to accept service, the attorney must make sure the facility reports what it receives with sufficient promptness. Confidentiality gets its own paragraph, including training and educating staff at the facility about the lawyer's obligations under Rule 1.6.

One footnote in the opinion is easy to miss and hard to forget once seen. It notes that the New York City Bar Association offers its members a virtual law office service meeting this general description, which means the organization that wrote the opinion also offers the arrangement the opinion describes. That does not change what the opinion says, and it is a reason to read the condition in the digest as carefully as the permission.

Advertising the address is tested separately

North Carolina reached the advertising question directly in 2012 Formal Ethics Opinion 6, which is still posted among the state bar's adopted opinions. The opinion says, in its own words, that it would be misleading for a law firm to use a leased time shared office address on letterhead or in advertising to infer that the law firm has an office or a lawyer located in a community when the law firm's only connection with the community is the lease arrangement that allows a lawyer to use meeting rooms in that community on an as needed basis.

The same opinion describes two ways the arrangement stops being misleading. A lawyer who does not wish to meet clients at home, or to list a home address, does not mislead the public by using a leased time shared office address when the lawyer actually lives in the community associated with the leased address and uses the leased office to meet with clients on a regular basis. Alternatively, the communication is acceptable so long as it contains an explanation that accurately reflects the law firm's presence at the address, and the opinion gives by appointment only as the example.

The same opinion treats a post office address as usable for the address requirement in the advertising rule, provided the post office address is on file as the lawyer's current mailing address in the lawyer's membership record with the North Carolina State Bar. The registration record and the advertisement are expected to agree with each other.

The advertising rule that opinion was written under has since changed. The American Bar Association amended Model Rule 7.2 at its August 2018 annual meeting, replacing office address with contact information, so the current model text reads that any communication made under this rule must include the name and contact information of at least one lawyer or law firm responsible for its content. A comment explains that contact information includes a website address, a telephone number, an email address or a physical office location. North Carolina adopted that language in 2021 and Pennsylvania has it in 204 Pa. Code 7.2(k).

Two cautions belong with that paragraph. The Model Rules bind no one by themselves, so the text that matters is the version a state has adopted. And the shift away from a required office address is not uniform even within an adopting state. Pennsylvania keeps two office address duties alongside the new wording. Rule 7.2(h) requires every advertisement and written communication to disclose the geographic location, by city or town, of the office in which the lawyers who will actually perform the advertised services principally practice law, and to name the county if that office is outside the city or town. Rule 7.2(i) requires an advertisement paid for by a lawyer outside the firm to disclose the name and principal office address of each lawyer or law firm paying for it. The first of those reaches ordinary advertisements and written communications alike, and it asks where the work is actually done rather than where mail arrives.

New Jersey removed its definition and named the functions instead

New Jersey changed Rule 1:21-1 in 2013. What it had before is described in the New York City Bar's 2019 opinion, which recounts that a New Jersey court rule then required an attorney to maintain a bona fide office for the practice of law, and that New Jersey Ethics Opinion 718 read that requirement as a fixed, specific, full-time physical location where clients are met, files are kept, the telephone is answered, mail is received, and the attorney or a responsible person acting on the attorney's behalf can be reached in person and by telephone during normal business hours. The 2013 amendment took the bona fide office requirement out of the rule, and the reading quoted here describes what that requirement had meant.

The same New York City Bar opinion records why New Jersey Ethics Opinion 718 concluded that what it called a virtual office was not a bona fide office under that older standard. Among the reasons it gives are that the attorney generally is not present during normal business hours but will only be present when he or she has reserved the space, and that the receptionist at such a facility does not qualify as a responsible person acting on the attorney's behalf who can answer questions posed by the courts, clients or adversaries. That reasoning is about the old definition rather than the current rule. The same opinion records that New Jersey studied whether to permit virtual law offices and changed its rules in 2013 to allow them, and the current rule asks only for an arrangement that makes prompt response demonstrably likely. What the older reasoning still does is name two things an address alone does not supply.

What stands in its place is a list of functions, quoted here as the Second Circuit set the rule out in 2016. It opens by saying an attorney need not maintain a fixed physical location for the practice of law. The same sentence continues with a proviso that an attorney must designate one or more fixed physical locations where client files and the attorney's business and financial records may be inspected on short notice by duly authorized regulatory authorities, where mail or hand deliveries may be made and promptly received, and where process may be served on the attorney for all actions, including disciplinary actions, that may arise out of the practice of law.

The rest of the rule fills in what that arrangement has to do. An attorney without a fixed physical location in New Jersey must designate the Clerk of the New Jersey Supreme Court as agent for service of process. The rule asks for a telephone and messaging arrangement that makes prompt response demonstrably likely. An attorney shall be reasonably available for in person consultations requested by clients at mutually convenient times and places. And a closing sentence keeps the old term alive for out of state attorneys, who may practice in New Jersey in accordance with New Jersey's Rules of Professional Conduct 5.5(b) and (c) as long as they maintain a bona fide office.

Read together, New Jersey did not decide that location stopped mattering. It decided that the location does not have to be where the lawyer sits during business hours, and then listed what the location still has to do. The proviso names three functions, and an address that does only one of them does not answer the rule, which is worth noticing before treating any one of them as solved on its own.

An address in a state where you are not licensed is a different problem

A separate line of ethics opinions deals with lawyers who work remotely from a state where they are not admitted. The California committee that issued Formal Opinion 2023-208 collected them in a footnote, and the collected opinions point the same direction.

District of Columbia Opinion 24-20, issued in 2020 and framed around a pandemic era reading of the incidental and temporary practice exception, listed four conditions. Two of them were that the lawyer maintains a law office in a jurisdiction where the lawyer is admitted to practice, and avoids using a District of Columbia address in any business document or otherwise holding out as authorized to practice law in the District. Delaware Opinion 2021-1 states that lawyers may not hold themselves out as being licensed to practice in the other jurisdiction and may not advertise or otherwise hold themselves out as having an office in the other jurisdiction.

ABA Formal Opinion 495 takes the same shape, and its conditions are worth reading whole. In substance, the opinion says that absent a local jurisdiction's finding that the activity constitutes the unauthorized practice of law, a lawyer may practice the law authorized by the lawyer's licensing jurisdiction, for clients of that jurisdiction, while physically located in a jurisdiction where the lawyer is not licensed, so long as the lawyer neither holds out a presence or availability to perform legal services in the local jurisdiction nor actually provides legal services for matters subject to that local jurisdiction, unless otherwise authorized.

What those opinions name is the holding out. Two of them name it concretely. The District of Columbia opinion names using a District address in a business document, and Delaware names advertising an office in a jurisdiction where the lawyer is not licensed. ABA Formal Opinion 495 states the same idea more broadly, as holding out a presence or availability there. A lawyer admitted in that state, using an address in a market where that lawyer actually practices, is in a different position from a lawyer using an address to suggest a presence that does not exist.

An address service settles part of this and leaves the rest to you

save office provides commercial classified street addresses with mail handling, and the locations pages list the cities and what comes with each one. That gives a lawyer a street address to put in the office field instead of a home address. Whether a filed address keeps a home address out of the public release is a separate question, and 22 NYCRR 118.2(b)(1) answers it by asking whether the attorney can be located at that address.

The rest of what the rules above ask about is not settled by an address either, and the honest version of this article says so plainly. The 2019 New York City Bar opinion was written about facilities with meeting rooms and work space that accept service of process, and it declined to say whether any particular facility qualifies as an office under the Judiciary Law. The New York Court of Appeals reading of Section 470 rules out an arrangement that amounts only to an address or an agent for receiving service. North Carolina asks whether the firm's connection to the community goes beyond the arrangement itself. New Jersey asks for designated locations that cover three functions, and mail handling is one of the three. Pennsylvania asks every advertisement and written communication to name the city or town where the lawyers who will actually do the advertised work principally practice, which is a question about where the work happens, and an address alone does not answer it.

So the questions to bring to any address provider, including us, are specific. Does the location accept service of process on your behalf? How quickly does it tell you? Is there meeting space you can use with clients? What does the provider say you may state about your presence there? Do the answers hold in the city you are considering, rather than in the provider's general marketing? Those answers vary by city and by arrangement, and a lawyer's registration record is a poor place to discover that the answers did not hold.

None of the above is legal advice about a particular practice. The rules cited here are the ones we could verify in September 2026, from the sources listed below, in New York, New Jersey, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The ethics opinions named from the District of Columbia, Delaware and California, and the American Bar Association's model text and Formal Opinion 495, bind no one by themselves. New Jersey's earlier rule is described here from the New York City Bar's account of it, and the current rule text is quoted from the Second Circuit's 2016 opinion, rather than from the state's current rule page. A lawyer's own state rules, and the current text of them, decide the question.