John-Paul Gustad

John-Paul Gustad has been licensed in Washington since June 2001 and leads Gustad Law Group, which lists offices in Seattle, Tacoma and Spokane. The Washington State Bar Association lists his licence as active and eligible to practise, and records that he carries professional liability insurance.

His listing completes our first pass: nine states checked, and Washington turns out to be the only one of the nine that never uses the word "none".

The bar record

WSBA splits its profile into two parts and labels them, which we've reproduced rather than flattened.

What Washington doesn't say

Every other register we've used answers the discipline question out loud. Illinois, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia print "None". Texas prints "No Public Disciplinary History". Florida prints "None" for its ten-year window. New York prints "No record of discipline".

Washington prints nothing. The Disciplinary History section on Gustad's profile contains no entries and no statement — only this:

So what we can report is precise and narrow: no disciplinary entries are displayed on his profile, and WSBA warns that its search may not display everything. That is not the same sentence as "this lawyer has no discipline", and we're not going to write the second one when the register only supports the first.

WSBA also maintains a separate Discipline Notice Directory, listed alongside the Legal Directory in its own navigation. The existence of a second directory is itself informative — it means the profile page isn't where discipline necessarily lives. We haven't searched it. That's the honest state of this check, and it's why the tile above reads with a dash rather than a green "None".

The self-report warning, in WSBA's words

Washington is also the bluntest state on the reliability of lawyer-supplied fields. Above the practice information block, in capitals, it states that the information is provided voluntarily by the licensed legal professional and might be incomplete, inaccurate, and/or out of date.

Texas says "self-reported". Washington says it might be wrong. Both are being honest; only one is being emphatic. The firm name, office size, practice areas and languages above sit under that warning, so they're tagged accordingly.

Nine states, nine different answers

This completes the first pass, and the result is the most useful thing this project has produced:

Nine registers, nine different lines drawn around the same question. Every one of them points you somewhere else for the complete answer. None of them is being evasive — they're each being careful about a different thing, and no two states are careful about the same thing.

That is why every profile here names its register, dates the check, and prints the caveat in the state's own words. A badge that means nine different things is worth exactly as much as the sentence next to it.

Practice

His self-reported practice areas are Social Security Disability, veterans’ claims and personal injury — in that order — operating in Spanish.Reported Rideshare is not among them — that's seven of the ten firms we've bar-checked. The disability and military focus is distinctive and suggests a practice that a rideshare claim would arrive at rather than one built for it.

One practical note: his WSBA address of record is a PO box rather than a street address — the only listing here where the register alone will not confirm a physical office. His firm plainly has them: Seattle, Tacoma and Spokane, per its own site and business listings. The register is simply not where that is written down.

What we haven't checked

No attorney pays to be listed here, and this profile is not an endorsement or a recommendation. We report the public record so you can weigh it yourself. If anything here is inaccurate or out of date, tell us and we'll correct it. How we work