A plain-English description of every editorial, technical, and ethical rule that governs the Find an Attorney directory at /find-attorney.html. If you spot a violation of any rule on this page, please email joel@thecompdesk.com.
Inclusion of an attorney in this directory is not a recommendation, certification, vetting, ranking, rating, or endorsement of that attorney by The Comp Desk or its operators. The directory is informational only. Choosing an attorney is your decision; we encourage you to interview more than one.
You select a region (e.g. NYC, Long Island, Hudson Valley). The directory then:
(a) Filters the full attorney list down to attorneys whose listed region matches your selection. (b) Randomizes that filtered list using a Fisher-Yates shuffle reseeded on every page load and every region change. The randomization seed comes only from the browser's Math.random() at page-load time — there is no input from your identity, IP, prior visits, or any server-side ranking.
That means: every visitor sees a different order, the same visitor sees a different order on reload, and there is no "first slot" that any firm can earn, buy, or be assigned. There is no secondary sort. There is no tiebreaker that could be gamed. The sort logic is documented in code in find-attorney.html and is the only sort logic the page contains.
No attorney pays to be listed. No attorney pays to appear higher. The Comp Desk does not accept referral fees, revenue shares, lead-purchase agreements, or any other compensation tied to whether or which attorney a visitor contacts. Outbound links to attorney websites contain no utm_* parameters, no ref= parameters, and no other tracking identifiers — we link to the bare URL the firm provides.
The Comp Desk does not record which attorney card a visitor clicked, does not associate visitors with firms, and does not report click-through data to listed firms. Outbound links use rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" so that the destination site does not receive a Referer header identifying The Comp Desk as the source.
The owner's firm (Shulman and Hill PLLC, including the variant "Shulman & Hill") and the owner personally (Joel Mays / Joel Mays Esq) are excluded from this directory by policy and by code. The data file (data/attorneys.json) is checked on every commit by an automated test (tests/directory-exclusion.test.js) that fails the build if any forbidden string is present anywhere in the file. The forbidden-string list is intentionally over-broad to catch typos and variants.
To request inclusion, correction, or removal, email joel@thecompdesk.com. Removal requests from a listed attorney are honored within one business day, no questions asked. There is no application fee, no review fee, and no charge of any kind.
The directory data file lives in this site's public source repository at data/attorneys.json and the rendering logic lives in find-attorney.html. Both are auditable. The CI exclusion test lives at tests/directory-exclusion.test.js and runs on every push.