56 of 81 New York Criminal Defense Firms Publish No Case Results

What we measured

We read the results pages of every criminal defense firm in this directory and recorded four things: how many outcomes the firm lists, whether a figure is printed beside any of them, whether any court or county is named, and whether a prior-results disclaimer sits with them.

All 81 of those firms are in New York, which is what makes the comparison below worth running. The comparison cohort is the 77 personal injury firms in New York: the largest other practice in the same market, so the city, the local search results and the state's advertising rules are all held still while the kind of work changes.

One distinction carries the whole page. A firm that publishes nothing is a finding. A page our crawler could not reach is our failure, and it is counted separately rather than folded in: every one of the 81 results pages answered us, as did 3 on the personal injury side. Those firms keep the sub-factor pending instead of scoring zero.

The track record is mostly not there

25 of the 81 criminal defense firms publish at least one outcome. 46 of the 77 personal injury firms do. Same city, same bar, and the share goes from 31% to 60% when the kind of work changes.

Where they do publish, the two practices publish different things. 14 of the 25 publishing criminal defense firms print no figure beside any outcome. On the personal injury side every one of the 46 prints at least one. A dismissal has no dollar value, so there is nothing to print, and that is a fact about criminal law rather than about the firm.

The same shows in how specific the pages are. A publishing criminal defense firm names 5.5 kinds of matter on average, against 8.1 for a publishing personal injury firm.

The ceiling is worth looking at, because it shows the shape rather than the shortfall. Law Office of Gina M Wicik lists 40 outcomes with 4 court references and not one dollar figure among them. It takes 15 of the 15 points our scale awards for published outcomes, which is all of them, and it does it without naming a sum.

The rest of the checklist

Three of the checks this search is told to run can be counted the same way: find the outcomes, find the courts the firm works in, find the lawyers by name. Here is how far each one gets in each cohort.

Naming the court is the one that matters most and is counted least. We have published before that a named venue is worth more than the figure beside it, because a county and a case type are what let a reader go and look the matter up. 20 of the 81 criminal defense firms name one. Hold the publishing constant and that difference disappears. Among only the firms publishing anything at all it is 20 of 25 criminal defense firms against 33 of 46 personal injury ones, which is 80% against 72%. The cohort-level gap is a gap in how many firms publish at all, not in how carefully they do it.

The disclaimer tells the same story. 14 of the 81 criminal defense firms carry a prior-results line, and 23 of the 46 publishing personal injury firms do. New York's advertising rules effectively require it beside published results, and the firms with nothing published have nothing to disclaim. We counted that line across the whole directory in a separate study, where most of the firms missing it turn out to keep the sentence on another page of the same site.

The roster is the sharpest difference and it has nothing to do with results at all. 33 of the 81 criminal defense firms name no attorney on any page we could read, against 14 of 77. These are smaller practices: the median criminal defense firm here names 1 person and the median personal injury firm names 5. A roster is the input every other check needs, so a one-name firm is not hiding anything; it is simply smaller than the checks assume.

What our own score does with it

This is the part that is about us. Pillar B of the LFL Certification Score is worth 15 points and it reads a case results page. Criminal Defense firms average 3.04 of it and Personal Injury firms average 6.78.

The pillar has three shapes and this practice fits none of them. Where a firm's primary work is a real estate transaction or a divorce, pillar B reads a different block entirely: the price of the transaction, or the hourly rate and the stages of a matrimonial case. Those shapes were written when each practice arrived. Criminal defense arrived without one, so it is scored against a results page, and a criminal matter produces no settlement to list.

Pillar B is not the whole gap, and saying it is would be the easy version of this page. The two cohorts differ by 16.7 raw points on average, and the three sub-factors that read published outcomes account for 22% of that. The rest sits in roster verifiability, review volume, fee transparency and the availability line: every one of them a count of how much a firm publishes.

We have published this class of problem twice before, when a score turned out to mean different things on either side of a state line and when a fee and access sub-factor turned out to be measuring a billing convention. This is the third instance and the largest. The methodology sets out every sub-factor and the evidence behind it.

What the clients said

If the gap were about the firms rather than about what they publish, it ought to show up somewhere a client was asked. It does not.

Median certification score runs 43 against 66. Mean Google rating runs 4.80 against 4.85, a difference of 0.05 of a star across 81 and 77 firms. The complaint-share sub-factor, which reads the low-star reviews in the sample Google returns, averages 3.60 and 3.60 of 4.

What does separate the two cohorts is reach. Median monthly organic search traffic is 145 visits for the 81 criminal defense firms we hold search data for, against 1,189 for the 77 personal injury firms. Median Google review count runs 75 against 345. That is the same finding we reached from the other direction when we sorted the whole directory by search visibility: visibility brings more reviews, not better ones.

One firm makes the point on its own. The Law Office of Anthony Sharnov, PC publishes no case results we could find and holds 2,410 Google reviews at 5.0 stars, more than any other silent criminal defense firm here. It earns 0 of 15 for published outcomes and its certification score is 49.

What is left to check

The advice on this search is not wrong so much as unavailable. Three things on it can still be done, and two of them are not on anybody's list.

How long the lawyers have practised, where a state will say. New York publishes an attorney register we may query, and it is the only state in this directory that does. Across the criminal defense firms we matched 93 of the 299 people they name to a registration, and those lawyers have been admitted 22.1 years on average. The personal injury side matched 501 of 650 at 20.4 years. The sub-factor built on it scores 8.79 of 10 for the 38 criminal defense firms where it runs and 8.69 for the 61 personal injury ones. On the one measure here that is about the lawyers rather than the website, the two cohorts are the same.

Whether the firm is a company the state has a record of. That is a separate check, it is open to anybody, and we have written down exactly what it does and does not prove.

What the firm says about price. Criminal work is not paid out of a recovery, so there is no percentage to publish and most of these firms publish nothing. The page a law firm website reaches for last is the one about fees, in every practice we have counted.

The ranked list for this market is built from the same records, firm by firm: Criminal Defense firms in New York, with the personal injury ranking beside it for the comparison this page draws. The practice hub carries every market we cover.

What this does not measure

Four limits, in the order they would bite.

Nothing here measures how a case went. We count what a firm chose to publish about its own outcomes. A firm that wins constantly and says nothing is indistinguishable here from a firm that does not. No court record in this directory is tied to a firm, and the block that would carry a verified result is empty on every record we hold, which is why no amount any firm publishes is repeated on this page.

One cohort, one city. Every criminal defense firm here is in New York, so this is a study of 81 firms in one market and not a statement about the practice nationally. The cohort was assembled by us, which means our own selection sits inside every figure above.

The admission figures rest on our matching, not on the firms. We matched 31% of the people named at criminal defense firms to the register against 77% on the personal injury side. Those are different denominators, so the comparison of years admitted is the weakest figure on this page and is reported with its coverage attached rather than as a headline.

The reading is dated and the sites are not frozen. These results pages were read between September 10, 2026 and October 20, 2026, one firm at a time. A page added after we looked is a page we do not have.

Practice groupings are each firm's own primary practice as published on its profile. Outcome counts, court references and disclaimers come from the firm's own results page. Review counts and ratings come from Google Business Profile listings verified to the firm. Years since admission come from the New York attorney register. A firm whose page we could not read keeps the sub-factor pending rather than scoring zero.