What the California register tells you
The State Bar of California publishes more history than most: a bar number, a dated status timeline, and administrative as well as disciplinary actions. All twenty-two lawyers listed here show none of either.
But California removes things, and it is the only register we use that says so on the record itself. The notice sits directly above the status table on every profile, in these words: “Administrative suspensions that meet the criteria in the State Bar’s policy on removal of administrative actions would not be displayed below.”
Administrative suspensions are not discipline — they follow from unpaid fees or missed continuing education, not misconduct. But the sentence still means what it says. A clean timeline is a clean displayed timeline, and we will not write “never suspended” when the register reserves the right to have taken the entry down.
That is a defensible policy. It also means an absence on a California profile is a different fact from an absence on an Illinois one, where the ARDC prints “None” and leaves it there permanently.
And when there is discipline, it prints a docket
For twenty-two listings that removal notice was the whole story, because every timeline read clean. The San Diego batch supplied the case that shows what the register does when it has something, and it is the fullest disciplinary record any register on this site has produced.
Steve Guilin’s status history gives two case numbers, the dates charges were filed as well as the dates discipline landed, two separate actual suspensions in 2013 and 2014, and his restoration to Active in April 2023. Beneath it the Bar lists five State Bar Court documents — a Decision, a Stipulation, a Modification Order, an Order re Extension of Time and an Order — each with an effective date, each linked. We loaded the page and read every line of it ourselves.
That corrects something we published a week ago. Our Massachusetts page called the Board of Bar Overseers the only register on this site that links a disciplinary decision rather than merely naming one. Massachusetts links one document. California links five, and has all along — we had simply never had a Californian listing with discipline to display. The Massachusetts page now says so.
It also sharpens the removal notice rather than undercutting it. The Bar’s policy covers administrative suspensions, which it defines as non-disciplinary — unpaid fees, missed education. Disciplinary matters are not in scope, and Guilin’s record proves the field is live twenty-three years into a career. A clean California timeline therefore means more than a clean Washington one, where the register never writes “none” at all. It still does not mean the Bar has told us everything.
And it does not check what the lawyer tells it
Where a California record carries practice areas, the Bar prints a warning beside them: it does not verify the accuracy of this content and makes no warranties regarding experience or competence in practice areas. Eleven of our twelve San Francisco listings left that block empty altogether — only William Smith filled it in. For the other eleven the register holds a name, a number, an address and a status, and nothing whatever about what they do.
What the San Francisco batch turned up
Two firms make the same first. Altair Law and Jones Clifford each say they handled the first wrongful death case against Lyft in California, and each page is written as though the claim is theirs alone. Co-counsel is the obvious explanation; neither page says so. We report that both say it and have checked neither.
Two lawyers share a suite. Wesley Wakeford and John J. Roach are registered at the same address down to the floor — 1388 Sutter Street, Suite 810 — as two separate solo practices with separate bar numbers, sites and phone numbers. Neither site mentions the other.
Two pairs were admitted on the same day. Timothy Hamilton and Scott Righthand on 29 November 1979; Omar Habbas and Steven Bell on 11 December 1986.
One firm argues that the numbers cannot be trusted. Carter Zinn’s rideshare page is titled San Francisco Rideshare Accident Statistics and its central finding is that no publicly available count of Uber and Lyft crashes specific to San Francisco exists. It works through the CPUC reports, SFMTA and DataSF, and SWITRS, and explains why each fails to isolate rideshare involvement. That is this site’s own argument, published by a firm with every commercial reason to make the opposite one.
And three pages state figures they do not source. Scott Nakama’s firm opens with an unattributed NHTSA crash-rate multiplier and a table of causes with percentages; Wakeford’s gives a daily pickup figure for the city. We reprint neither. Two more pages state rideshare insurance limits that John Roach’s page says were changed by statute in January 2026 — which is why we print no limits from any of them.
What the San Diego batch turned up
Three of the sixteen names we were sent are not on this page, because none of them arrived with a bar record. Two came with a listing from the Consumer Attorneys of California — a voluntary trade association. A CAOC entry tells you a lawyer paid dues. It says nothing about licence status, and nothing whatever about discipline. The third came with no register reference at all.
We published a Boston listing last week for exactly this error: a firm page telling readers to check disciplinary records at a bar association rather than the regulator. It would be a poor sort of directory that named that mistake in someone else’s copy and then made it in its own. A bar check is the precondition for a listing here, and three candidates did not have one.
Two listings on this page share one address of record. Brian Mason trades as The Mason Firm from 770 First Avenue, but the State Bar still holds him at Gomez Trial Attorneys, 755 Front Street — the same address it holds for John Gomez, also on this page. That is not a duplicate in our data. It is what the register says, and the register is what governs service. Both cards say so.
Four listings give a different phone number on the register than on their own website, and one gives three numbers across his own pages. Josh Bonnici’s bar record, biography and office block carry three separate numbers, two of them differing by a single digit. None of this is misconduct. It is a reminder that the register is a filing, not a marketing asset, and the two drift apart.
The batch cannot agree on a coverage figure. For the phase where a driver is logged in but has not accepted a ride, some of these pages put property damage at $25,000 and others at $30,000 — and one page gives both, in two different sections, about the same phase. That page also prints the label per individual against both the $50,000 and the $100,000 bracket, where the second is a per-accident limit. We report the disagreement and do not resolve it. We have no source that settles it, and choosing the figure that sounds right is the exact habit this site exists to break.
Two pages here are worth reading for the opposite reason. Barbara Savaglio’s is the only rideshare page across all one hundred and eighty-five listings to name an autonomous-vehicle operator — every other page in fourteen cities is built on a model that assumes a human driver with a personal policy. And Brian Mason’s is the only one that disclaims its own results, stating beside its settlement figures that past results do not guarantee future outcomes. We print no figures either way, but a firm that qualifies its own numbers is doing something almost nobody here does.
At the other end, one firm publishes a “99.7% success rate” in three places. A figure quoted to a tenth of a percent implies a denominator, and no register, court or auditor publishes one. Another names a source for every statistic it gives — genuinely rare here — and then applies a national rider count to California alone. Attribution is not the same as accuracy, and a reader trusting the citation would not catch it.
What we haven’t checked
Not established. The five State Bar Court documents behind Steve Guilin’s two suspensions — the register links them and we did not open them, so nothing here describes the conduct. That is the largest gap on any listing on this site, and unusually it is one a reader can close in a click. The State Bar Court’s own case search, which we have not run for anyone. Which property-damage figure is right. Anything California’s own policy removes from display — the register tells you it does this and does not tell you when. Self-reported practice areas, which the Bar says it does not verify, and which eleven of our twelve San Francisco listings left blank. The Court of Appeal decision Altair Law describes on rideshare offloading duty — the most checkable claim in the batch, and one we have not found. The text of SB 371. Court records for case outcomes. Any recovery figure — no regulator collects or audits them, which is precisely why we publish none. A bar check is a floor, not a ranking.
Coverage grows market by market. If you handle rideshare cases elsewhere in California, tell us you exist — it costs nothing and buys nothing, but it gets you looked at. All states · How we work