Career Highlights

• Firm Founder & Longevity: Established David Centeno Law, PC in 2009, maintaining and scaling the practice into a widely recognized virtual and physical matrimonial firm across New York for 17 consecutive years.
• Judicial Clerkship & Early Exposure: Served as a formal judicial clerk inside the Supreme Court of the State of New York (2003–2004), gaining extensive internal insight into courtroom mechanics and judicial decision-making frameworks.
• Corporate Financial Tenure: Developed specialized commercial acumen working as an attorney for major global investment firm Bear Stearns, Inc. (2005–2008), providing a rare institutional foundation for evaluating high-asset distributions.
• Massive Case Representation Volume: Successfully navigated, guided, and finalized marital dissolutions or family restructuring for over 4,130 unique New York clients.
• Bar Leadership & Institutional Governance: Maintained active roles within legal regulatory groups, including designated memberships on the New York State Bar Association’s Family Law Section and the Committee on Civil Practice Law and Rules.
• Elite Media & Business Appointments: Hand-selected as an active member of the invitation-only Forbes Business Council and provides expert legal commentary to mainstream outlets including Forbes, Entrepreneur, and The Huffington Post, alongside regular appearances as an on-air television legal analyst.
• Peer Recognition Baseline: Voted onto the New York Super Lawyers list for more than 10 consecutive years by fellow matrimonial and family law attorneys.

Proven Experience

• The Smart Divorce™ Framework: Developed and implemented a proprietary legal process that successfully transitions potentially high-conflict marital separations into predictable, paperless, flat-fee uncontested divorces.
• High-Net-Worth Portfolios & Liquidity Protection: Negotiated high-value property distributions involving complex corporate stock options, multi-state real estate holdings, and corporate business valuations completely outside of public courtroom litigation. This included structuring a fully confidential out-of-court mediation for a corporate founder to insulate a massive corporate liquidity event from public record tracking.
• Cryptocurrency Asset Divisions: Spearheaded a highly specialized niche framework within New York family law to safely trace, evaluate, and divide volatile or hidden cryptocurrency asset portfolios while drafting bulletproof settlement safeguards.
• Statewide Digital Infrastructure: Built a remote legal operational system capable of executing fast-tracked, no-fault divorces with or without children across all 62 counties in New York State, yielding an average resolution time of six weeks.
• Custom Marital Immunization Agreements: Crafted and executed rigorous prenuptial and postnuptial agreements specifically designed to protect high-earning professionals, executive teams, and business owners from future litigation exposures.
• Collaborative Custody Agreements: Formulated comprehensive out-of-court parenting plans and private spousal maintenance structures that completely bypassed traditional trial enforcement mechanisms.
• High-Stakes Private Representations: Handled sensitive, private family law matters for elite New York client pools, including corporate CEOs, investment bankers, law enforcement officials, and prominent creative industry professionals.

A Note About Family-Law Case Privacy

Divorce, custody, support, parentage, and domestic-violence proceedings frequently involve children, financial records, medical information, and other sensitive personal matters. Depending on the court and jurisdiction, records may be confidential, sealed, redacted, or unavailable for remote public review. Consequently, an attorney’s publicly documented results may represent only a portion of their family-law experience.