LA City Lobbying Disclosures - Firms, Clients, Payments

Every lobbying disclosure filed with the City of Los Angeles Ethics Commission, in four linked datasets - 508,882 records:

corpus	Records	Grain
activities	269,146	one client-quarter-project, with the city agencies lobbied
payments	198,238	one client-quarter payment to a firm
clients	30,696	one client registration at a firm
lobbyists	10,802	one registered lobbyist at a firm, per year

Counts measured 2026-10-21. Payments reported for 2024 total $75.8 million across 22,104 rows.

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Search

{
  "corpus": "payments",
  "year": "2024",
  "quarter": "4",
  "firm": "Englander",
  "minAmount": 10000,
  "maxResults": 500
}

Filters: year, quarter (payments and activities), firm, client, lobbyist (lobbyists), city and state (lobbyists and clients), agency, project and referenceNumber (activities), dateFrom / dateTo (registration dates), minAmount / maxAmount (payments). Name filters are case-insensitive substrings. A filter the dataset does not carry is rejected, never silently dropped.

{
  "corpus": "activities",
  "year": "2025",
  "agency": "Planning",
  "maxResults": 200
}

Aggregate

{
  "corpus": "payments",
  "year": "2024",
  "mode": "aggregate",
  "groupBy": "firm"
}

One row per group with groupCount and totalMatched. Dimensions: year, quarter, firm, client, lobbyist, city, state and agency.

agency splits the pipe-delimited agency list, so agency counts add up to more than the row count (one activity can lobby several agencies). A rollup above 5,000 groups fails loudly. Client and lobbyist rollups are counted in process, so keep a year (or firm) filter on the 198k-row payments table: a single year stays well under the limit, while all years together for client currently exceed it.

Joining the tables

There is no shared identifier. The tables join on firm name plus client name. Search rows carry firmKey and clientKey - lowercased, punctuation and ampersands folded, whitespace collapsed - so the four datasets can be joined without re-cleaning names. Aggregate rows fill the key when the group is a firm or a client. Firm-name coverage measured 2026-10-21: 99.8-99.9% of payments, activities and client rows match a firm in the lobbyist register.

Data notes

• City-level disclosure, not federal LDA. Current tools cover federal lobbying; this is Los Angeles City Hall - the mayor, city council, and every city department.
• client_last_name often holds a company's full name when no individual first name was filed; clientName assembles whichever parts the filer supplied.
• Payment amounts are as reported; a large share of payment rows have no amount filed and are delivered with amount empty rather than zero.
• Each record carries a link to the filed registration form or quarterly report at ethics.lacity.org.