The Bar prints the warning itself: this information is self-reported by Texas attorneys, and current licence or admittance status can only be certified by the appropriate court or licensing entity.
Why that isn’t a technicality
Sixteen of the twenty-two profiles here carry the line “Other States Licensed: None Reported By Attorney”. It reads like a finding. It isn’t — it’s a sentence the lawyer typed, and nothing prompts anyone to revisit it.
Mullen’s listing proves it. His Texas profile reports no other states. His own website lists the State Bar of Missouri, 2015. Two self-reports by the same person, eleven years apart, that don’t agree. Almost certainly nothing more than a stale field — but it means one of his two state registers is unopened, and the Texas page would never tell you that.
Ammons is the same pattern, in the other direction. His register lists four other states — Arizona, Florida, New Mexico, New York. His firm’s site adds a fifth, Oklahoma, admitted 2022. One of those two pages is out of date and neither will tell you which.
Baumgartner’s dates disagree by a year. His firm’s site gives his Texas admission as 1983; the register gives 11 May 1984. We print the register date, because that is the one the Bar wrote.
Payne manages both faults at once. His firm bio dates his Texas admission to 2004; his register says 6 November 2002. The same bio lists a North Carolina admission in 2020 that his register does not report. Two contradictions on one lawyer, neither of them resolvable from either page.
Amaro reports five state licences — Texas, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico and Wisconsin. We’ve checked one. The other four are his statement, not a record.
Regis Mullen’s firm publishes the wrong bar number for him entirely. His bio at Mullen & Mullen gives “Bar Card Number: 24037152”. That number belongs to Shane Mullen, his colleague at the same firm. Regis’s own number is 14642300. Nobody is hiding anything — it is a copy-paste on a family firm’s website — but it is the clearest illustration on this page of why we read the register rather than the bio.
The same firm also appears under two names in the Bar’s own records. Shane’s entry registers it as Law Office of Regis Mullen Inc; Regis’s entry registers it as Mullen & Mullen, Inc. Both cards above print what that lawyer’s own record says, which is why they do not match. Neither is wrong, and the register will not reconcile them for you.
So the honest reading of these listings: checked in Texas, unchecked everywhere else. That’s what the badge means here, and it means something different in Georgia, where the register’s window covers a lawyer’s entire career.
What the register won’t tell you about rideshare
Nothing on a Texas bar record mentions rideshare. Practice areas are self-reported and coarse — Shariff’s register entry reports no practice areas at all, and Paul Schiffer’s reports one: Criminal. So the rideshare tag on each card above comes from reading the firm’s own site, not the Bar. Eighteen of the twenty-two publish rideshare pages. Four publish nothing on it, and their cards say so in dashed grey rather than implying otherwise — all four are Houston firms.
Two of the eighteen need a further line. Nguyen publishes on Uber only, so his tag reads Uber rather than Uber & Lyft. And Majors’ rideshare page is published by McGilberry & Shirer, LLP — a firm his register does not record him at. His register records one practice area, Alternative Dispute Resolution, and his occupation as Mediator. His card says so in full.
Austin: nine were held, and holding them was right
Fourteen Austin lawyers were sent to us for this page. Nine of them arrived without a regulator’s record and we refused to publish them. The State Bar of Texas records have since been supplied, all nine are now above, and the comparison is the most useful thing on this page.
Those nine first reached us as entries from austinbar.org — the Austin Bar Association’s find-a-lawyer. That is a voluntary membership directory: a bar number, a licence date, self-declared practice areas, and a line reading I Am Currently Accepting Cases. It carries no disciplinary field of any kind. The State Bar does, every Houston and Dallas card above says so, and publishing nine Austin cards with a blank where twenty-two cards carried a disciplinary line would have been a double standard visible at a glance on one page.
So they waited. Here is what the wait bought, and none of it was predictable:
All nine read No Public Disciplinary History. The hold cost nine clean lawyers a fortnight on this page. That is the honest accounting, and it is also the point: we did not know that in advance, which is precisely why we could not print it.
Three of the nine licence dates in the association directory were wrong. It gave Jack Zinda as 8 May 2006; the State Bar says 4 May 2006. It gave Jim Rodman as 1 November 1986; the State Bar says 7 November 1986. It gave Alex Matthews as 15 November 2021; the State Bar says 12 November 2021. Small errors, but a directory that gets a third of its dates wrong is not a source you build a bar check on.
And four addresses disagreed — with the regulator matching the lawyer’s own website on three of them. The worst was Ethan Shaw, whom the directory placed at 1609 Shoal Creek. That is Hayden Briggle’s building. Shaw Cowart’s own site and the State Bar both give an address on West 25th Street.
Two of the original five — Andrew Traub and Laura Ramos James — have State Bar records that stop before the disciplinary block. We have now read a record for each of them twice, and neither read carries that block or the courts-of-admittance block, while the other twelve Austin records carry both. Their status lines read Eligible to Practice in Texas, which is a licence check and not a discipline check. Both keep a dash.
This was the third batch running where what we were sent was not the regulator: two San Diego candidates arrived with a trade-association listing and were refused, and the whole Denver batch arrived with a directory and was rebuilt from Colorado’s regulator. Austin is the first time the wait itself produced the evidence for the rule.
What the full fourteen show
Four of the fourteen are board certified by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization — Rodman, Gibbs, and Shaw and Alden with two certifications each. That is the credential Gibbs’s biography tells readers to go and check.
Robert Alden’s record carries two fields nothing else on this site has: the United States Supreme Court under courts of admittance, and a Recognition line reading Texas Bar College. Jim Rodman answers all five fee options Yes — contingency, flat, hourly, payment plans and sliding scale — which nobody else across two hundred and twenty-eight listings does. Meredythe Heaton Wilkinson is admitted to all four Texas federal districts, and her register lists Insurance as a practice area, matching a biography that says she spent a decade defending insurers.
And one finding is worth a reader’s attention before they compare any two firms. Three Austin firms publish the same statutory coverage figures and label the tiers three different ways. Aguirre’s Period 1 is app-on-with-no-ride-accepted. Matthews’s Period 1 is the app being off — his Period 2 is Aguirre’s Period 1. Zinda skips numbers entirely and says driving mode and matched mode. All three give $50,000/$100,000/$25,000 for the middle tier and $1 million for the top one. We fetched all three pages on 27 August 2026. The dollar amounts are statutory; the period numbers are not.
What Austin adds: the register that prints the silence
Texas asks more of its lawyers than any of the twelve registers on this site — practice areas, law school, fee options, language assistance, other states, courts of admittance, firm size, services provided. And where a lawyer supplies nothing, it prints the refusal in words: None Reported By Attorney.
Alonzo Campos’s record says that, or “None Specified”, five times — firm size, services, fee options, courts of admittance, other states. That is the emptiest State Bar record on this site, and it is more informative than a blank would be: you can tell a question nobody asked from a question nobody answered. Pennsylvania does not ask about discipline at all. Massachusetts publishes nine fields and stops. Texas asks, and then tells you who declined.
The same field set produces the batch’s best moment. Drew Gibbs’s biography states that a lawyer advertising personal-injury specialization without board certification is advertising in violation of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, and tells the reader where the certified list lives. His own State Bar record reads: Board Certified, Personal Injury Trial Law. We loaded the biography and read the register. He states a test anyone can run, and passes it — which across two hundred and twenty-eight listings almost nobody does. Three of the fourteen Austin lawyers who followed him onto this page hold the same certification, and two of them hold two.
Three smaller things the register caught. Scott Crivelli’s law school field reads Unknown and his primary practice location is Killeen, sixty-five miles north of the Austin address of record. Laura Ramos James’s record lists Portuguese under language assistance — a language her own biography never mentions, and among the most practically useful facts a caller could have. And Andrew Traub’s record answers the fee question outright: Contingency Fees: Yes. Eleven other registers do not ask, which is why every non-Texas card on this site reads “fee terms — not on the register”.
Two of the five publish rideshare content we could not fully stand behind. Traub’s page gives a three-way breakdown of who gets hurt in rideshare crashes — 21%, 21%, 58% — attributed to nobody; we fetched the page, confirmed the figures are live, and reprint none of them. Campos’s firm site does not resolve for us at all, so nothing on it is checked and his listing carries no Verified tag on anything but the register.
And a note on the two partners at Gibbs & Crivelli: both biographies and the firm’s rideshare page are served from oldslingshot.triplestarter.com, a staging host. It returns 200. The firm’s apparent own domain returns 403 to us and a second candidate domain does not resolve. We report what we could load and do not speculate about why the live content sits on a host whose name begins “old”.
One coincidence worth a line
Amaro, Shane Mullen, Payne and now Aaron Herbert were all licensed on the same day — 6 November 2002. All four graduated that May, from Wisconsin, South Texas College of Law, the University of Houston and the University of Oklahoma respectively. Four of our twenty-two share an admission date. At four, the interesting part is no longer the coincidence — it is the likelihood that Texas admits in batches on fixed dates rather than continuously, which would make a cluster the expected result rather than a fluke. We have not confirmed that with the Bar, so we are not going to assert it. What we can say is that we found it charming at two and instructive at four.
The twenty-two span half a century of admissions — Paul Schiffer in October 1975, his co-founder Jacob Schiffer in October 2019, forty-four years apart at the same firm and the same desk address. Dallas adds a second family pairing: Regis Mullen, admitted 1981, practises at Mullen & Mullen alongside Shane.
What we haven’t checked
Not established. Sixteen other-state licences across these twenty-two lawyers — twelve reported on the register (Amaro’s Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico and Wisconsin; Ammons’s Arizona, Florida, New Mexico and New York; Davis’s New York; Baumgartner’s Colorado; Payne’s New York; Regis Mullen’s Oklahoma) and four that appear only on a firm’s own site (Shane Mullen’s Missouri, Ammons’s Oklahoma, Payne’s North Carolina, Bollinger’s New Mexico). Not one of those registers has been opened. Marchand’s eligibility to practise — the record supplied to us did not carry the line, so his listing shows a dash rather than a green status. What Nguyen’s 2016 suspension was for — the Bar publishes the sanction, not the conduct. Which of Payne’s two published Texas admission dates is the stale one, and which of his two published Houston telephone numbers reaches him. Whether Strong, whose register puts him in Plano, and Bollinger, whose register names Dallas but gives a McKinney address, run Dallas files from Dallas. Nearly everything about Gonzalez beyond his admission date — his register reports no practice areas, no fees, no languages and a PO Box. Whether Majors takes rideshare cases at all — his register records him as a solo mediator practising Alternative Dispute Resolution, and the rideshare page linked from his listing belongs to a firm the Bar does not record him at. Court records for any settlement figure, including the cause number Shane Mullen publishes. What the Mullen firm’s 29% fee covers. Whether the four Houston firms with no rideshare content take rideshare work at all. No firm’s other lawyers. A bar check is a floor, not a ranking.
Coverage grows market by market. If you handle rideshare cases elsewhere in Texas, tell us you exist — it costs nothing and buys nothing, but it gets you looked at. All states · How we work