The Washington Record,
Twenty Years on the Ground

Washington is not a state this practice visits for a trial date. It is where the work began.

From 2002 to 2022 Professor Gilbertson held a private investigator license in Washington State, and twelve of those years went to criminal defense casework: interviewing civilian and police witnesses, reading case files against the reports written about them, gathering evidence, and testing witness statements for what they could and could not support. Two of those years were served as a Guardian ad Litem. That is two decades of fieldwork inside Washington files, and it started more than a decade before the expert practice did.

The classroom ran alongside the casework: a quarter century teaching criminal justice in Washington, first at Saint Martin's University and then across a long tenure at Centralia College, with concurrent senior-lecturer years alongside. The subject was the standard officers are trained to meet, taught to degree-seeking students. It is also where the habit of explaining police procedure in plain language was built, and it is the same register a jury hears.

The casework followed the same ground. Matters have come out of King, Pierce, Snohomish and Clark counties, out of the superior courts of Washington, and out of the state's federal districts, on both sides of the docket: excessive force and wrongful death claims for plaintiffs, false arrest and search questions, police misconduct, and state-court criminal defense including homicide and self-defense trials. The King County part of that file has a page of its own, Seattle and King County casework. So does the Pierce County part, on the Tacoma and Pierce County page; the Guardian ad Litem years were served for the Pierce County Superior Court in Tacoma. Hunter v. City of Federal Way and Taylor v. City of Seattle were both Western District of Washington matters, and in Hunter the engagement ran from a written report through trial testimony, which the jury credited. The citations as filed, and the published amounts, sit with the rest of the state's published matters in the selection below and on the selected results and case history page.

What that history gives retaining counsel is specific rather than sentimental. What a Washington case file looks like from the inside, and what a Washington courtroom expects of an expert, were learned across two decades of working those files and teaching this subject in this state, not read up on after retention. The measure applied to a Washington matter is still a national one: model policies, peace officer standards and training expectations, and accepted practice in academies and field training programs, read against what the involved agency's own policy and training actually required of the officer. The bench has addressed that background on the record, in the court's ruling in Alvarez v. King County.

Four of the 93 Washington matters in the practice file name Spokane in the citation, and the agencies those citations name are the City of Spokane and Spokane County. Five of the 93 Washington matters in the practice file name Olympia and Thurston County in the citation, and the agencies those citations name are the City of Olympia and the Thurston County Sheriff.

A matter is counted here only when its own citation names the place or an agency of it; nothing is inferred from a court, a docket or a judge. The published results, where there are any, are on the panel above and on the case history page.

Small as these parts of the file are, they read differently. In Spokane the claims run across use of force, wrongful death, police misconduct and police practices, with self-defense alongside them. Most of those matters are in the state courts, Spokane Cty. Super. Ct. among them, and a single matter is in federal court, cited as E.D. Wash.

The Olympia and Thurston County matters tilt the other way, with more of them in federal court than in the state courts. The federal matters are cited as W.D. Wash., and the state courts include Thurston Cty. Super. Ct. The civil claims there are use of force and police misconduct, and on the criminal side the file holds homicide defense and self-defense. In both metros a handful of matters is too few to characterize any agency or court.

What differs between the metros is the forum they are in and the mix of claims, not the reading, which is the one the page describes. How a use-of-force claim from either metro is analyzed is the subject of the use of force practice page.

Testimony has been admitted in the state courts of Washington and in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington. Matters have also arisen in the Eastern District of Washington. Admissibility in any particular matter remains retaining counsel's responsibility. Clark County matters, across the river from Portland, are read together with the Oregon side of that metro on the Portland and Vancouver page.

The Washington work runs along two tracks. On the civil side it is Section 1983 litigation: excessive force claims, and false arrest and search questions, each measured against agency policy and against national standards and practices, with the use of force also weighed under Graham v. Connor on what was known at the time, without hindsight. On the criminal side it is state-court defense work on reports, procedure, search and seizure, and self-defense, through consulting review, written reports, deposition, and trial testimony.

Either track can call for something short of a full testifying retention: a preliminary evaluation of case merit, a consulting-only engagement, a rebuttal report answering an opposing expert's disclosed opinions, review of an opposing expert's work, or, in federal court, Rule 702 and Daubert preparation ahead of disclosure. How early in a matter that decision is best made is taken up in the guide to when counsel should retain a police practices expert.

Retentions come from both sides. Plaintiff's counsel in civil rights matters, the criminal defense bar, and counsel defending officers and agencies get the same standards, the same complete record, and the same analysis; an expert who has appeared for one side alone can be impeached on that fact by itself. Where the evidence shows an officer acted within accepted police practices, the report says so.

Legal conclusions remain counsel's, and the opinions address police practices. Where scientific, medical, technical or human factors evidence is involved, qualified experts in those disciplines are deferred to on the record. Counsel weighing whether a nationwide practice properly reaches a given state will find that question taken up in the guide to the jurisdictions a nationwide expert covers.

A Washington firm retains a Naples-based expert the same way counsel anywhere else does. Every engagement opens with a conflict check, and a conflict is reported immediately rather than discovered late.

A first inquiry carries the case type and posture, the jurisdiction and case number, the deadlines that govern, what the record holds so far, and the parties to run the check against. Nothing privileged travels with a first inquiry, and privileged material is not exchanged by email at any stage. The guide to what a first inquiry should include sets the same list out in more detail.

After retention the record moves on physical media: a computer flash drive or an external hard drive, by mail or by courier. Online sharing services are not used, and there is no upload portal.

What counsel's staff assembles is the relevant record rather than the whole box: investigation and internal affairs reports, witness statements and deposition transcripts, agency policies and procedures, involved-officer training and disciplinary records, and the body-worn, dash and surveillance video. That file is then reviewed in full before anything is drafted, and the engagement produces one written report. Reports require sixty days of advance notice, and retaining counsel approves a bullet-point outline before writing begins.

Distance is a scheduling question rather than a substantive one. Depositions are taken by Zoom or a similar platform. Out-of-town trial testimony runs on the published flight-to-flight clock, timed from before the departure flight to after the return flight lands, so a trial date in Seattle or Spokane is budgeted on the same published terms as any other.

The fee schedule, the travel terms and the retention path are set out on the For Counsel page, and trial travel is covered further in the guide to trial testimony and travel nationwide. The complete published selection, with citations reproduced as filed, is on the selected results page, and the full table of cases goes to retaining counsel on request.