The one register that never says “none”
Every other state we use answers the discipline question out loud. Illinois, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia print “None”. Texas prints “No Public Disciplinary History”. Florida prints “None” for its decade. California prints “None on record”. New York prints “No record of discipline”. Massachusetts prints “None” — and links the decision when it is not none. Ten of our twelve registers give you a sentence. This is one of the two that do not — and it is the more honest of the pair, because Pennsylvania’s attorney record does not carry the field at all.
Washington prints nothing. The Disciplinary History section on twenty-three of these twenty-four records contains no entries and no statement — only a note that in some cases, discipline search results will not reveal all disciplinary action relating to a Washington licensed legal professional, and may not display links to the official decision documents.
So what we can report is narrow: no disciplinary entries are displayed, and WSBA warns its search may not display everything. That is not the sentence “this lawyer has no discipline”, and we will not write the second one when the register only supports the first. WSBA keeps a separate Discipline Notice Directory; we have not searched it. Those twenty-three listings read amber rather than green for that reason.
And then one of them printed something
For two batches this page carried an argument on trust. We said a dash was not a clean record, only a missing sentence — and a reader was entitled to wonder whether we were being pedantic about a register that simply had nothing to report.
Josh Brumley’s record displays a Reprimand, effective 25 April 2023. It is the first disciplinary entry the Washington register has shown for anyone on this site. When WSBA has something, it shows it. The dash was never hiding a green tick, and now we can say that as an observation rather than a caution.
What it shows is thin: an action and a date. No case number, no decision document, no account of the conduct — where Nevada gives us a case number and Florida gives us a decade of coverage. It sits on his card face, in full, in the register’s own words, and we have added nothing to it. A reprimand is the least severe form of public discipline in most systems and it has not touched his licence: he is Active and eligible to practise.
His record is unusual twice over. Asked whether he has ever served as a judge, WSBA answers Yes — the only affirmative on that field anywhere on this site — and names a Washington municipal court from 1 January 2022, with no end date. Every other record that carries the field answers Unknown — and most of our ten registers, Massachusetts among them, do not ask at all.
Washington is also the bluntest state on self-reported fields. Above the practice information it states that the information is provided voluntarily and might be incomplete, inaccurate, and/or out of date. Texas says “self-reported”. Washington says it might be wrong. And asked whether a lawyer has ever served as a judge, it answers Unknown — a register willing to print its own ignorance.
What that warning looks like in practice
It is easy to treat a disclaimer as boilerplate. This batch is what it protects you from.
Gregory McBroom’s record selects forty-three practice areas — we counted them — including Antitrust, Maritime, Securities, Lobbying and Oil, Gas & Energy, for a practice the same record describes as having two to five members. Richard Adler’s record selects none at all, and carries no email either. Justin Elsner declined the office-size question outright, and the register prints the refusal: No Response. McBroom’s entry also carries a fax number of (000) 000-0000.
None of that is misconduct. It is one optional field, filled in four different ways, published unchecked — exactly as WSBA warns. Registers that print a fact and registers that print an answer are not the same thing, and Washington is honest about which it is doing.
The cleanest demonstration arrived with this batch, because it removes every other variable. Matthew J. Smith and Gregory McBroom are partners at Smith McBroom — same firm, same address, same suite. McBroom’s record selects forty-three practice areas. Smith’s selects twelve. Same practice, same question, a four-fold difference in the answer. Nothing about either lawyer explains it; the field does.
Matthew Russell makes the same point single-handed. His WSBA record lists Criminal, Disability and Personal Injury. His own biography states his practice is 100% personal injury. Both are his. Neither is checked. And Boris Davidovskiy, whose record carries no email, no website and no firm name at all, still lists eight practice areas and four languages — Bulgarian, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian, the fullest languages entry on this site. The optional block is not fuller because the record is fuller.
The sharpest case is Lauren Mariko Wegener. WSBA holds her at Bradley Johnson Lawyers with a single practice area — Criminal. Her own biography is published by a different firm, which calls her its owner and managing attorney, and leads with DUI and violent crime, with personal injury under other practice areas. Both can be true; the self-reported block goes stale. We print the disagreement rather than pick a side.
Where these lawyers actually are
Fifteen of the twenty-four have an address of record outside Seattle: Tacoma, Kent, Issaquah, Brier, Bellevue, Tukwila, Normandy Park, Kirkland, Lakewood, Everett, Tukwila, SeaTac, Bonney Lake, Kent and Mountlake Terrace. All sit inside the Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue metro — the furthest, Lakewood and Bonney Lake, are about forty and thirty-five miles, comparable to the distance we accepted in the Phoenix metro. Every one of those cards says so on its face.
Steve Dashiak is a further variation: his address of record is a PO box in SeaTac with no street address at all, and his office type reads Solo in shared office or suite, while his site describes offices throughout Washington. He is the second listing on this page held at a PO box, after Gustad.
Two firms give a downtown Seattle address on the website and a suburban one on the register. Elsner’s Seattle office is marked By Appointment Only by his own firm; Colburn’s site gives a 5th Avenue address with map coordinates while WSBA holds him in Issaquah. Neither is hidden, and neither is unusual. It is simply not what the register says.
We also read six lawyers we have not published, whose Washington licences are in order but whose addresses of record are in Kennewick, Lake Oswego, Sandy, Salt Lake City, Houston and Tempe. A Seattle landing page is not a Seattle practice, and the distance rule we applied in Tucson and Augusta applies here too. Four more went the same way in the second batch — Vancouver, Olympia, Moses Lake and Spokane, the last about two hundred and eighty miles east. A fifth was a Washington D.C. bar record with no WSBA entry at all, which is a different thing from a Washington lawyer, and is why this page is titled by the state rather than the city.
One page in this batch states the wrong state’s law
Egan Kilbane is registered at a Seattle street address with a Seattle practice. The rideshare article behind his listing is headed Uber and Lyft Accidents in Ohio, talks about a Guardians game in Cleveland, and gives a two-year limitation period. Washington’s is three years — RCW 4.16.080, cited on two other firms’ pages in this very batch. A reader taking that timing at face value for a Washington claim would be working from the wrong deadline. His listing says so, and his rideshare tag reads Ohio-law page rather than Uber & Lyft.
One more worth naming. Megan Wernli’s firm page opens with a specific King County ride-hailing permit count and attributes it to nobody. We have not reprinted the figure. This site once carried eighteen fabricated statistics of exactly that shape, and the rule that came out of it is the first one we follow.
And Robert Kornfeld’s firm has a Kirkland Uber and Lyft page that loads fine and is written around his partner throughout, naming Neil Lindquist as the lawyer who handles these claims. Kornfeld does not appear on it. The page is his firm’s; the practice it describes is not shown to be his. Matthew Dubin’s rideshare page is headed for Everett while his address of record is on North 85th Street in Seattle. Neither is dishonest. Both are reasons a listing should say which page it is pointing at.
One firm’s website will not let us read it
Joshua Anderson’s site, jdandersonlaw.com, returns 403 Forbidden to us — to curl and to a separate fetch, under two different browser user agents. We could not read a page of it. His bar record is intact and checked, so his listing stands on that and on nothing else: every claim about his practice on his profile carries a Reported tag and none carries a Verified one, and the card says the site is unreadable to us on its face. This is the third such listing on the site, after two in Chicago. It is not an accusation; blocking automated traffic is ordinary. It is a limit on what we are entitled to tell you.
What we haven’t checked
Not established. The WSBA Discipline Notice Directory, a separate search we have not run — a gap across all twenty-four listings, and largest by far on Brumley’s, where the register displays an action and a date and no account of the conduct behind them. Joshua Anderson’s firm website in its entirety, which returns 403 to us. Whether any of them is licensed elsewhere; WSBA has no field for it, and at least seven say on their own sites that they are. Whether the self-reported block — firm, office size, practice areas, languages — is current for any given lawyer, since WSBA states it might not be. Whether Gustad’s or Dashiak’s practice has a street office; both addresses of record are PO boxes. Court records for case outcomes. We print no settlement or verdict figures, and most of these firms publish them. A bar check is a floor, not a ranking.
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