Appellate Practice Attorney serving New York, NY
As a general rule, you can use any name you want as long as you don't use it as a means of defrauding people. There is generally no need to endure any formal procedure. Thus, for example, you can't fill out a loan application using the name Joseph in order to conceal the fact that Jose has defaulted on 3 loans. But that doesn't mean that you can't use the name "Tony" instead of "Anthony", or "Joseph" instead of "Jose".
Answered on Nov 10th, 2016 at 12:28 PM