Washington's Guardian Ad Litem Crisis: What a December 2025 Legislative Hearing Revealed About Zero Oversight in King County

Legislative Updates · By Gale McArthur · 2026-04-14 · 12 min read

Recapping the House Civil Rights & Judiciary Work Session on December 5, 2025 — testimony revealed GALs operating with no standardized qualifications and virtually no oversight in King County.

Recapping the House Civil Rights & Judiciary Work Session, December 5, 2025

Watch the full hearing: TVW — House Civil Rights & Judiciary, December 5, 2025 (GAL discussion begins at approximately 1:09:00)

On December 5, 2025, the Washington State House Civil Rights & Judiciary Committee held a work session that pulled back the curtain on a troubling reality: the people tasked with investigating custody disputes involving domestic violence, child abuse, and substance use — guardians ad litem, or GALs — are operating with shockingly little training, no standardized qualifications, and in some counties, virtually no oversight at all.

The hearing, chaired by Rep. Jamila Taylor (D-Federal Way), featured testimony from attorneys, law school deans, and family law practitioners. While the first portion of the session addressed the legal profession's pipeline crisis in rural Washington, the segment beginning around the one-hour-and-nine-minute mark is what every parent, advocate, and family law practitioner in this state needs to hear.

What Are GALs, and Why Should You Care?

As Chair Taylor clarified for the audience, GALs are typically appointed in family law cases where there are allegations that could trigger restrictions on a parent's time with their children — domestic violence, substance abuse, mental health issues, and other concerns under RCW 26.09.191. They are not appointed in every family law case. But when they are, their reports carry enormous weight with judges, often shaping the outcome of custody decisions for years.

Here's the problem: GALs are not required to hold a professional license. They are not required to be attorneys. They are not regulated by the Washington State Bar Association the way lawyers are. And in many counties, the training and oversight they receive ranges from inadequate to nonexistent.

The Testimony the Legislature Needed to Hear

Jeffrey Keddie, a managing attorney at the Northwest Justice Project and a key figure in developing Washington's updated GAL training curriculum, delivered testimony that should alarm anyone involved in the family law system. Keddie outlined how, in 2016, his organization identified widespread problems with GAL investigations: limited training, recommendations inconsistent with the law, significant investigator bias, GALs diagnosing parties without qualifications to do so, and fees being imposed on clients who could not afford them.

In response, the Administrative Office of the Courts partnered with the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges to develop an updated three-and-a-half-day training curriculum, first piloted in 2018. The training emphasized reducing bias, prioritizing investigation over recommendations, and properly defining the GAL's role.

But then Keddie said something that should be a wake-up call:

> "Many judges have not been trained on how to use guardians ad litem. Guardians ad litem trained prior to 2018 may not have had strong training on domestic violence or culture issues or bias in family law cases. Some counties don't require any additional training after somebody's been put onto the list."

Let that sink in. Some counties do not require GALs to complete the updated 2018 curriculum. A GAL could be making life-altering recommendations about your children based on training that predates meaningful instruction on domestic violence dynamics, cultural competency, or investigator bias.

King County: The State's Biggest County, With the Least Oversight

If you assumed that King County — home to Seattle, the state's largest population, and one of the highest volumes of GAL appointments — would have the most robust oversight system, you would be wrong.

Dawn Sydney, a family law attorney and former GAL in King County, testified about systemic failures she has witnessed firsthand. She described a case where a GAL with no domestic violence training whatsoever issued a report recommending against her client, a domestic violence survivor. After a grueling ten-day trial, the judge completely rejected the GAL's findings and made DV findings against the other parent instead. But Sydney's client had to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get to that point — money that most people do not have.

Sydney also recounted a case where a GAL printed confidential medical, financial, and mental health records at a public library, left before they finished printing, and didn't retrieve them for two days. When Sydney filed a motion demonstrating the GAL's bias — the GAL had selectively relied on some documents while ignoring others — the GAL faced no meaningful consequences. As Sydney put it, there is no accountability system comparable to the Washington State Bar Association's disciplinary process for attorneys.

Recent investigative reporting by InvestigateWest has confirmed just how bare the oversight cupboard is in King County. While most large counties have a review committee of judges or court officials to handle complaints against GALs, King County relies on a single judge to review grievances. When InvestigateWest requested grievance records from King County covering the prior two years, the court's administration initially could not locate any complaints at all — and only found two after a reporter pressed them to look again.

This is not oversight. This is the absence of oversight.

One parent who tried to file a complaint in King County was told she could not pursue it because the person assigned to her case was technically classified as a "parenting evaluator" rather than a GAL — even though the court's own appointment order used the term "Guardian ad Litem" and the investigator's filing was labeled a "GAL report." When the system's own terminology creates a loophole that prevents accountability, the system is broken.

The Training Gap Is a Statewide Problem

The 2018 curriculum was a meaningful improvement. But as Keddie's testimony made clear, the training infrastructure has not kept up. As of 2022 — four years after the new curriculum was approved — only two trainings had been held statewide, each with a long waitlist.

The Administrative Office of the Courts asked the legislature for approximately $480,000 annually to facilitate the mandatory training across the state multiple times per year, fund continuing education, help courts develop local rules requiring ongoing training, and keep the curriculum updated after each legislative session. That request was not funded. Christopher Stanley, the AOC's chief financial and management officer, testified at the hearing that the agency actually prepared a budget request for a statewide Title 26 GAL training program but pulled it due to budget concerns. He indicated they would be open to further conversation about it.

Meanwhile, smaller and rural counties lack the resources to organize their own trainings. Would-be GALs in those areas must travel elsewhere when training events happen to be scheduled — if they happen at all. The result is a patchwork system where the quality of the person investigating your custody case depends heavily on which county you live in.

The Cost to Families

The financial burden of the GAL system falls disproportionately on the families it is supposed to help. Testimony at the hearing and subsequent reporting have documented cases where GAL investigations run bills upward of $30,000 to $40,000. As Sydney noted, the cost itself creates a selection effect: cases with GALs tend to be cases where at least one party can afford to pay for them, leaving lower-income families in a different and often worse position.

When a GAL produces a biased or poorly trained report, the parent on the wrong end of it faces a terrible choice: spend tens of thousands of dollars fighting the report at trial, or accept a custody arrangement that may not reflect the truth. For domestic violence survivors already dealing with financial abuse and limited resources, this is not a real choice at all.

What Other States Are Doing — And What Washington Isn't

Keddie's testimony referenced the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges' model code, which recommends that custody evaluations in cases involving domestic violence be conducted by licensed mental health professionals with extensive knowledge of domestic and child abuse. While no state has yet adopted the updated model code in full, several states have taken steps Washington has not.

• Utah and Virginia require GALs to be attorneys.
• Oregon has experimented with loan repayment assistance programs tied to public service.
• Thurston County, within Washington itself, has adopted a model where GALs serve as fact-finders only — they do not make parenting plan recommendations, shifting that responsibility back to judges where it belongs. Thurston County also has monthly meetings for GALs, mentorship programs for new investigators, and a more structured grievance process.

King County, by contrast, has a single judge reviewing complaints, no mandatory continuing education requirement documented in testimony, and a grievance tracking system so underdeveloped that the court could not locate its own records when asked.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Chair Taylor signaled during the hearing that she sees this as the beginning of a longer conversation. She has since stated publicly that she sees significant opportunities for legislative updates to GAL training requirements and oversight structures. The committee heard from multiple witnesses that a commission or formal review of the GAL statute may be needed.

Based on the testimony and the investigative reporting that has followed, several reforms deserve serious consideration:

1. Mandatory completion of the 2018 (or updated) training curriculum for all active GALs statewide — not just new applicants, but anyone currently on a county's registry. If you are making recommendations that could separate a parent from their child, you should be trained on domestic violence, cultural competency, and investigator bias. Period.

2. Statewide minimum qualifications that go beyond what individual counties choose to require. The current system, where Cowlitz County requires only bar membership in good standing while Snohomish County requires five years of family law experience, creates unacceptable inconsistency.

3. A real oversight and grievance mechanism in King County and every other county. A single judge reviewing complaints — when that judge may have professional relationships with the GALs being complained about — is not a functional accountability system.

4. Funded, recurring statewide training administered by the Administrative Office of the Courts, with continuing education requirements tied to registry renewal.

5. Narrower investigation scopes in court appointment orders, as Keddie recommended, to reduce the likelihood of overreach and contain costs.

6. Serious consideration of the Thurston County model — limiting GALs to fact-finding rather than recommendations — as a potential statewide standard.

The Bottom Line

The December 5, 2025 hearing made one thing unmistakably clear: Washington's guardian ad litem system is an unregulated patchwork that varies wildly by county, lacks meaningful oversight in its most populous jurisdiction, and imposes enormous financial and emotional costs on families — particularly domestic violence survivors. The people investigating the most sensitive custody disputes in our courts may have received less training than a newly licensed cosmetologist.

King County has no review committee. It has no documented system for tracking grievances that actually works. It relies on one judge. And some of its GALs may never have completed the updated curriculum that was designed specifically to address the biases and training gaps identified almost a decade ago.

This is not a partisan issue. This is a due process issue. This is a child safety issue. And it is long past time for the legislature to act.

The full hearing is available at TVW. The GAL discussion begins at approximately 1:09:00. For ongoing investigative coverage of GAL issues in Washington, see InvestigateWest's reporting series "Guarded by Predators".