The register that does not ask
Ten registers in, we thought we had seen the range of answers to one question: what will a bar register stand behind on discipline? Texas prints a sentence. Florida prints a decade. Georgia opens in 1991. Illinois enumerates exactly what its answer covers. Washington refuses to write “none”. New York answers and then tells you to confirm it elsewhere. California prints a docket with the court file attached. Massachusetts links the decision.
Pennsylvania’s attorney detail does not have the field. Not “None”, not a blank with a caveat, not a redirection. Attorney ID, status, admission date, employer, address, telephone, fax, county, district, insurance — and then it ends. We read fifteen records and the question is on none of them.
So all fifteen listings on this page carry a dash. That is a third distinct reason for a dash on this site, and it is the only one that is about the shape of the form rather than the content of an answer. Our Washington dashes mean the register would not say. Our New York dashes mean the register said and then disclaimed it. These mean the register was never asked.
The Board does publish discipline — through separate resources we have not searched. That is now the largest single gap on this site, spanning fifteen listings at once, and every card and profile here says so. It would be easy, and wrong, to let an absent question read as a clean answer.
And the one thing it does better than any of them
Where Washington records professional liability insurance as Yes with an update date, and Massachusetts as a bare Yes, Pennsylvania prints a sentence in the first person:
“I maintain, either individually or through my firm, professional liability insurance of at least $100,000 per occurrence and $300,000 in the aggregate per year as set forth in Rule of Professional Conduct 1.4(c).”
It is still a self-report; the Board is not auditing anyone’s policy. But of twelve registers this is the only one that quotes the lawyer speaking instead of flattening them into a checkbox — with a figure, a rule number and an attestation attached to a name. It also assigns each lawyer a county and a disciplinary district. All fifteen here read Philadelphia, District 1. No other register on this site publishes its own administrative geography.
Eleven of fifteen publish a phone number that is not on their record
We checked every listing’s bar-record telephone against the number its firm publishes. Two match — Michael-John Goodnow and Farhan Ali. Two firms publish no direct number. The other eleven give a different one, and three of those publish three numbers across their own pages.
None of that is misconduct and none of it is unusual. A bar record is a filing made once and updated rarely; a marketing page is rewritten whenever a campaign changes. But a directory that printed the address without the number would be hiding the easiest check a reader can run, so we print both and label which is which. Thomas Oakes’s bar record carries a New Jersey area code against a Philadelphia address.
Three listings go further: the register names a different firm from the one whose website carries the biography. Samuel Anyan is Wapner Newman on the record and The Cochran Firm on the page — same building, same suite. Ramon Arreola is Messa & Associates on the record and Wieand on the page, at two different addresses. Ashley Oakey is Levin & Zeiger on the record and The Levin Firm on the page.
Eleven of the fifteen pages do not survive reading
We read every rideshare page behind every listing. Fourteen of fifteen load; one returns 403 and carries no Verified tag on anything from it as a result. Of the fourteen we could read, eleven have something wrong with them.
The worst is the one this site was built to catch. Stephen Ernst’s firm publishes five precise Philadelphia crash statistics for 2023 — 842 rideshare crashes, 325 taxi rear-end accidents, 152 limo crashes, 202 passenger-door injuries, 2.7% of for-hire crashes at airport pickups — and attributes not one of them to anybody. We fetched the page and confirmed all five are live. This is the exact shape of the eighteen invented statistics our own homepage once carried, above our own articles proving such figures are not published. We reprint none of them. We are not saying they were fabricated; we are saying that a number nobody sourced is not evidence, however specific it looks.
The most consequential is a career. Jason Fine’s firm page credits him with over 25 years fighting in the courtrooms of Pennsylvania. The Board says he was admitted on 18 October 2010 — fifteen years. A decade, contradicted by the one document in the file that nobody writes for marketing. It is the single clearest demonstration on this site of why a bar check is worth running. The biography we were sent under his name also turned out to belong to a different lawyer at the same firm; we fetched the page and confirmed it, and nothing on his listing is sourced to it.
Two pages disagree with the rest of the batch on money. Ryan Zavodnick’s gives waiting-period bodily injury limits of $25,000 and $50,000 where eleven others give $50,000 and $100,000. Ashley Oakey’s puts passenger-carrying coverage at $500,000 where the rest say $1 million — on the page that otherwise sets out Pennsylvania’s 2016 statute in more detail than anything else here, down to vehicle age caps and background-check intervals. We report both divergences and resolve neither. We have no source that settles them, and printing whichever figure the majority happens to give is not verification.
Then the ordinary decay. Goodnow’s page begins a list of who the $1 million covers and stops after one bullet. Kwass’s promises our results speak for themselves: and prints nothing after the colon. Ali’s firm duplicates an entire self-driving-car section verbatim and still says Lyft plans full autonomy by 2023. Reiff’s cites a version of Uber’s terms last updated in April 2015 and ends a list of former partnerships with a name simply missing. Anyan’s credits the work to a “Mr. Miller” who is never introduced. Oakes’s wedges search phrases into the middle of its own sentences until one stops being a sentence.
Four that are worth reading
Jason Manus’s firm page is the only one of fifteen we could not find a defect in: every figure sourced or omitted, every list finished, every lawyer named introduced, and a claimed start of practice that matches his admission date exactly.
Brian Chacker’s is the only page here to name Pennsylvania’s choice no-fault election — the decision a driver makes when buying a policy, which can matter more to a Philadelphia claim than which rideshare period was running. Fourteen pages explain the tiers in detail and skip it.
Gregory Heller’s names a university and a year for its central statistic, and says plainly that a settlement it describes was confidential rather than implying a figure. Ramon Arreola’s biography carries a footnote stating that Super Lawyers and Best Lawyers accolades have not been approved by the Supreme Court and mean only that he appeared on a list. Across one hundred and ninety-nine listings, no other lawyer disclaims his own awards. It is a Pennsylvania advertising convention rather than a personal scruple — and it is still the closest any lawyer here has come to printing our own Reported tag unprompted.
One more worth naming: Ernst’s page, which has the worst sourcing in the batch, is also only the second on this entire site to name an autonomous-vehicle operator, after Barbara Savaglio in San Diego. Those are not in tension. They are what an unedited page looks like: nobody checked the numbers, and nobody stopped the one good instinct either.
What we haven’t checked
Not established. The Disciplinary Board’s separate discipline resources, which we have not searched for any of these fifteen — the largest single gap on this site, because the attorney detail does not carry the field and we have not gone looking elsewhere. What any of these lawyers actually practises: the register records no practice areas, no law school, no languages and no admissions in other states, and eight of the fifteen say on their own sites that they are licensed elsewhere. Which waiting-period and passenger-carrying coverage figures are correct. Every award, ranking and recovery figure on every one of these sites. Court records for case outcomes. We print no settlement or verdict figures, and most of these firms publish them. A bar check is a floor, not a ranking.
Coverage grows market by market. If you handle rideshare cases elsewhere in Pennsylvania, tell us you exist — it costs nothing and buys nothing, but it gets you looked at. All states · How we work