California Attorney Discipline Scraper

Scrapes attorney disciplinary actions from The State Bar of California. Returns one row per disciplinary action — disbarments, suspensions, probations, and reprovals — with sanction type, effective date, violation categories, and a link to the attorney's official bar profile.

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California Attorney Discipline Scraper Features

• Pulls directly from the official State Bar of California "Recent Disciplinary Actions" publication.
• Extracts 19 fields per record including attorney name, bar number, sanction type, effective date, county, and a plain-English complaint summary.
• Classifies each action into a canonical type — Disbarment, Suspension, Probation, Public Reproval, Resignation, or Other — so you can filter without parsing prose.
• Auto-extracts violation categories (misappropriation, trust violations, moral turpitude, criminal conviction, etc.) from the summary text.
• Optional full-history enrichment — fetches each attorney's profile and returns every historical sanction and administrative action on file.
• Filter by sanction type at runtime; no post-processing required.
• No proxies, no browser, no authentication — just clean HTML extraction.

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Who Uses Attorney Discipline Data?

• Compliance teams — Screen outside counsel before engagement and monitor panel attorneys for new sanctions.
• Insurance underwriters — Price legal malpractice policies using sanction history rather than hope.
• Law firm hiring — Run lateral candidates through a sanction check that takes seconds instead of a subscription to a vendor database.
• Litigation funders — Flag opposing counsel with prior misconduct before committing capital.
• Legal-tech products — Power attorney-vetting and due-diligence features with structured sanction data.
• Researchers and journalists — Track disciplinary patterns across California's 260,000+ attorneys.

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How It Works

1. Pick a sanction type filter (or leave it blank for all types) and set maxItems.
2. The scraper walks the State Bar of California's paginated Recent Disciplinary Actions listing — 20 records per page, roughly 80 pages deep.
3. Each action is parsed into a structured record with sanction type, duration, violation categories, and effective date. The attorney profile URL comes along for the ride.
4. If includeFullHistory is on, the scraper fetches each attorney's profile page and appends their full License Status and Disciplinary History table. Otherwise it returns just the listing row, which is plenty for most workflows.

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Input

{
  "maxItems": 20,
  "states": ["CA"],
  "sanctionType": "",
  "includeFullHistory": false
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	20	Maximum number of disciplinary-action records to return (1–5000).
states	array	["CA"]	State codes to scrape. California is the only supported state in v1.
sanctionType	string	""	Filter to one sanction category: disbarred, suspended, probation, resigned, reproval. Empty returns all types.
includeFullHistory	boolean	false	When true, fetch each attorney's profile page and attach full historical sanction data. Adds one request per record.

Examples

Recent disbarments only:

{
  "maxItems": 50,
  "sanctionType": "disbarred"
}

Full historical discipline for the last 10 sanctioned attorneys:

{
  "maxItems": 10,
  "includeFullHistory": true
}

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California Attorney Discipline Scraper Output Fields

{
  "attorney_name": "Ronen Zargarof",
  "bar_number": "295853",
  "state": "CA",
  "sanction_type": "Disbarment",
  "sanction_raw": "disbarred for misappropriation of client funds, intentionally making false statements, failing to maintain client funds in trust, and other violations",
  "effective_date": "2026-04-10",
  "sanction_date": "2026-04-10",
  "duration": "indefinite",
  "violation_type": "misappropriation, trust violations, misrepresentation",
  "complaint_summary": "disbarred for misappropriation of client funds, intentionally making false statements, failing to maintain client funds in trust, and other violations",
  "case_number": "",
  "city": "Beverly Hills",
  "county": "Los Angeles",
  "current_status": "",
  "is_disbarred": true,
  "is_suspension": false,
  "historical_actions": [],
  "source_url": "https://www.calbar.ca.gov/public/concerns-about-attorney/recent-disciplinary-actions",
  "profile_url": "https://apps.calbar.ca.gov/attorney/Licensee/Detail/295853",
  "scraped_at": "2026-04-18T01:39:51.420Z"
}

Field	Type	Description
attorney_name	string	Attorney's full name as published in the action.
bar_number	string	California State Bar registration number.
state	string	Two-letter state code. Always "CA" in v1.
sanction_type	string	Canonical sanction class: Disbarment, Suspension, Probation, Public Reproval, Resignation, or Other.
sanction_raw	string	Raw sanction description as published, cleaned of leading whitespace and trailing punctuation.
effective_date	string	Date the sanction took effect, ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD).
sanction_date	string	Date the sanction was ordered. Usually matches effective_date.
duration	string	Human-readable duration (e.g. "2 years probation, 60 days suspension"). "indefinite" for disbarments. Empty when not specified.
violation_type	string	Comma-separated violation categories extracted from the summary (misappropriation, trust violations, moral turpitude, etc.).
complaint_summary	string	Full narrative of what the attorney did — or didn't do.
case_number	string	State Bar Court case number (e.g. "02-O-10216") when present in the record.
city	string	Attorney's city of record as published.
county	string	California county, or "Out-of-state" for attorneys practicing outside California.
current_status	string	Present license status from the attorney's profile page. Populated only when includeFullHistory is true.
is_disbarred	boolean	true when sanction_type is Disbarment.
is_suspension	boolean	true when the sanction includes any suspension component.
historical_actions	array	Full prior-sanction history from the attorney's profile, formatted as `"YYYY-MM-DD
source_url	string	The listing page this action was scraped from.
profile_url	string	Deep link to the attorney's California State Bar profile.
scraped_at	string	ISO 8601 timestamp when the record was captured.

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FAQ

How do I scrape California attorney discipline data?

California Attorney Discipline Scraper runs directly against the State Bar of California's public Recent Disciplinary Actions publication. Set maxItems, pick a sanction filter if you want one, and run it. No login, no API key, no proxies.

How much does this actor cost to run?

California Attorney Discipline Scraper uses the standard pay-per-event model — $0.10 to start the run, plus $0.01 per record returned. Scraping 50 recent disbarments runs you about $0.60.

What sanction types does California Attorney Discipline Scraper classify?

The actor normalizes every California State Bar action into one of six canonical types: Disbarment, Suspension, Probation, Public Reproval, Resignation (with charges pending), or Other. It also sets is_disbarred and is_suspension boolean flags so you can filter downstream without parsing strings.

Can I get the full sanction history for an attorney, not just the recent one?

Yes. Set includeFullHistory to true and the scraper will pull each attorney's full California State Bar profile, including every prior disciplinary and administrative action on file. Useful for compliance screens where the question isn't "did they get sanctioned" but "how many times."

Does California Attorney Discipline Scraper need proxies?

No. The State Bar of California publishes disciplinary actions on a public, unauthenticated page with no bot detection worth mentioning. The actor runs on Apify's shared compute with no proxy configuration required.

What other states are supported?

California is the only state in v1. The State Bar of California publishes structured, scrapable discipline data. Most other state bars either lock their equivalents behind Cloudflare challenges or publish everything as scanned PDFs, which is a different problem. Additional states will ship as standalone actors when their sources become practical to parse.

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Need More Features?

Need custom filters, historical backfill, or additional states? File an issue or get in touch.

Why Use California Attorney Discipline Scraper?

• Affordable — ~$0.01 per record, no subscription.
• Structured, not scraped prose — Every action gets a canonical sanction type, parsed duration, and extracted violation categories, so you can filter and aggregate without running an LLM over the summary text.
• Official source — Data comes straight from The State Bar of California's own Recent Disciplinary Actions publication, which is as authoritative as it gets.