The most important attorney discipline office you've never heard of sits on the 24th floor of Renaissance Plaza in downtown Brooklyn, at 335 Adams Street. From that address, the Grievance Committee for the Second and Eleventh Judicial Districts oversees attorney discipline for Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island — the three most populous of New York City's five boroughs, and together home to well over four million residents. The person running that office, responsible for investigating complaints against the attorneys who serve all of them, is David William Chandler. He was admitted to the New York bar in 2014. He has been a licensed attorney for 12 years.
That number — 12 years — would be unremarkable in most legal contexts. Partners make partner after eight. Accomplished litigators try their first jury trial in year four. Twelve years is, by most measures, a solid professional foundation. But as the chief counsel of a major grievance committee, 12 years of bar admission is not a foundation. It is, by a wide margin, the shortest tenure of any comparable official in the state of New York.
The Ethics Reporter has reviewed the bar admission records of chief counsels across New York's attorney discipline system, using publicly available Office of Court Administration registration data and the NY Lawyers' Fund for Client Protection's directory of grievance committees. The comparison is not flattering to the Second Department, which oversees attorney discipline across the state's most populated downstate region outside Manhattan.
The Full Comparison: A Stark Disparity
New York's attorney discipline system is organized by Appellate Division department. The First Department covers Manhattan and the Bronx. The Second Department covers Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Long Island, and a swath of the Hudson Valley and Westchester — the most populous division in the state. Each department, and each judicial district within it, has a grievance committee with a chief counsel who runs investigations, manages staff, and drives the disciplinary process. Those chief counsels are appointed by the Appellate Division court itself.
Here is how the current chief counsels compare in years of bar admission:
- Jorge Dopico, First Department (Manhattan and Bronx) — admitted 1980, approximately 45 years at the bar. Chief Counsel of the Attorney Grievance Committee for the First Department, the office that handles discipline for attorneys in the country's most prominent legal market. Georgetown University Law Center graduate. The standard-bearer.
- Monica Duffy, Third Department (Albany, upstate New York) — admitted 1988, approximately 38 years at the bar. Her office covers an enormous geographic area including much of upstate New York from the Capital Region to the North Country.
- Catherine Sheridan, Tenth District (Nassau and Suffolk Counties, Long Island) — admitted 1994, approximately 32 years at the bar. Long Island's attorney discipline office handles one of the highest-volume suburban caseloads in the state.
- Cydney Kelly, Fourth Department (Buffalo, Rochester, Western New York) — admitted 1995, approximately 31 years at the bar. The Fourth Department spans the state from Buffalo to the Southern Tier.
- Courtny Osterling, Ninth District (Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Putnam, Dutchess) — admitted 2011, approximately 15 years at the bar. The Ethics Reporter reported on Osterling's appointment in May 2026, noting that at the time he was the most junior chief counsel in New York State. He oversees attorney discipline for the suburban counties that feed directly into the Second Department's appellate review.
- David Chandler, Second and Eleventh Districts (Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island) — admitted 2014, approximately 12 years at the bar. The newest entrant into the bar among all chief counsels in New York. His office is responsible for attorney discipline in the second-most-populated urban area in the United States outside of Manhattan.
The pattern is not subtle. First, Third, and Fourth Departments — offices covering Manhattan, upstate New York, and Buffalo — are led by chief counsels with 31 to 45 years of bar experience. The two junior outliers, Osterling and Chandler, both serve within the Second Department. Both cover high-population downstate districts. And Chandler, at 12 years of bar admission, is more junior than Osterling by three full years.
Why the Second Department?
The question that emerges from this data is not whether Chandler or Osterling are competent — bar admission year says nothing about individual ability. The question is structural: why does the Second Department, which handles attorney discipline for the single most densely populated region of New York outside Manhattan, consistently appoint chief counsels with significantly less experience than departments covering smaller, less complex districts?
The answer, at least in part, lies in the appointment mechanism. Chief counsels of New York's grievance committees are not elected. They are not confirmed by a legislative body. They are appointed by the Appellate Division court itself — the same court that hears appeals of disciplinary decisions and sets the legal standards that the grievance committees are supposed to enforce. The Appellate Division, Second Department, seated in Brooklyn, is responsible for both the appointment of its grievance committee chief counsels and the oversight of their work.
That structure creates a feedback loop that is, at minimum, worth scrutinizing. The same court that benefits from a disciplinary system that processes complaints smoothly, without creating adversarial friction, is the court that decides who runs that system. There is no independent body reviewing whether the chief counsels it selects meet any minimum experience standard.
There is no formal minimum bar admission requirement to serve as a New York grievance committee chief counsel. The OCA's regulations specify that chief counsels must be licensed New York attorneys, but set no floor on experience. The comparison to other departments — where decades of experience appear to be the informal norm — suggests that the Second Department's appointments represent a departure from the evident standard applied elsewhere.
The Stakes: Volume and Complexity
Attorney discipline in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island is not a low-stakes enterprise. The Second and Eleventh Districts encompass some of the most diverse, high-volume legal practice in the state. Immigration attorneys, criminal defense lawyers, personal injury practitioners, real estate closings, family court, landlord-tenant — the range of practice areas from which complaints arise is broader here than in almost any other district in New York.
The grievance committee's role is to investigate those complaints, conduct hearings, and recommend discipline to the Appellate Division when warranted. That work requires not just legal knowledge but institutional memory — an understanding of how disciplinary cases develop over time, which fact patterns typically rise to the level of formal proceedings, and how to navigate the complex procedural rules that govern respondent attorneys' rights during investigation.
The NY Lawyers' Fund for Client Protection, which tracks restitution awards to clients harmed by attorney misconduct, annually disbursed millions of dollars to clients victimized by New York attorneys. The grievance committees are the first line of accountability for those cases — and for the thousands of complaints that never result in formal discipline but establish the documented record of attorney conduct in New York.
Running that process with 12 years of bar experience is not, on its face, impossible. But it is a choice — and one that the Appellate Division, Second Department, has now made twice in the downstate suburban and urban districts it controls. Both of its newest chief counsels are substantially more junior than their counterparts in every other New York department.
What the OCA Records Show
According to OCA registration records, David William Chandler (Registration #5226287) was admitted to the New York bar in 2014. His registered employer is the Appellate Division, 2nd Department — Grievance Committee. His business address is 335 Adams Street, Suite 2400, Brooklyn, NY 11201. His phone number, as listed in the NY Lawyers' Fund's directory, is (718) 923-6300.
The OCA registration records do not show prior positions, law school attended, or years of experience in disciplinary practice specifically. They confirm bar admission year and current employer. For context about the office he leads: the grievance committee for the Second and Eleventh Districts is one of the two highest-volume attorney discipline offices in New York State, alongside the First Department's Manhattan-based committee overseen by the 45-year veteran Jorge Dopico.
The contrast between those two offices — in terms of their chief counsels' experience — is as stark as any comparison in the New York attorney discipline system.
Questions the Appellate Division Should Answer
The Ethics Reporter sent a request for comment to the Appellate Division, Second Department, regarding the appointment criteria for grievance committee chief counsels and the experience levels of its current appointees. We asked specifically: What criteria does the Second Department use in selecting grievance committee chief counsels? Is there a minimum bar admission or practice experience requirement? How does the Second Department evaluate the experience of its current chief counsels relative to those in other departments?
We did not receive a response before publication.
The absence of any public standard for chief counsel appointments — and the absence of any independent review of the Appellate Division's choices — means that questions about the Second Department's pattern of junior appointments have no available public answer. The accountability system for New York attorneys operates within structures that face almost no external accountability of their own. The Appellate Division appoints the grievance committee chief counsels. The Appellate Division reviews their work on appeal. The Appellate Division answers to no one about the experience level of the people it puts in those chairs.
For the attorneys who practice before the 2nd and 11th District grievance committees — and for the clients who file complaints with them — that closed loop is worth understanding. The person making the initial call on their complaints was admitted to the bar 12 years ago. Every other comparable office in New York is run by someone with at least 15 years of experience, and most by someone with 30 to 45. That is not an accident. It is a choice. And it is a choice the Second Department has not been asked to explain.
This report is based on publicly available attorney registration data from the New York State Office of Court Administration, the NY Lawyers' Fund for Client Protection's grievance committee directory, and prior Ethics Reporter reporting on Courtny Osterling. OCA registration data is available at iapps.courts.state.ny.us. Corrections and responses are welcomed at theethicsreporter.com/contact.
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