Lynn C Tuttle

Run don't walk from this women. After being assigned, and after six months and roughly $5,000 spent, it appears that she did little more than reviewing some emails and having a couple of conversations with Mom and Dad. She refused to accept documents electronically, requiring me to print and provide ...reams of paper. Then CPS removes the children from Mom's home. At the hearing, she declines to provide any meaningful input, stating that she needs additional funds before proceeding. She later puts in writing that she will not do any further work until she receives more money. I promptly paid my half of the additional retainer. Mom did not. Ultimately, I was awarded full custody of the children. What is particularly frustrating is that after months of stating she would do no work until she received additional funds, she suddenly took my portion of the retainer and applied it toward work she now claims she performed during that same period when she had expressly stated she was doing nothing. When I filed a small claims action to recover the money, she argued that the matter was outside the jurisdiction of small claims court and belonged in superior court. The judge agreed. The entire experience has left me feeling that the system is fundamentally broken. I paid nearly $8,000 and received little to no benefit from the GAL's involvement. Beyond that, I never saw evidence of the kind of thorough investigation or meaningful work that I believed I was paying for.

I was a respondent in a King County committed intimate relationship (CIR) dissolution case where this GAL was court-appointed. Having reviewed her report in detail with counsel, I have serious concerns across multiple dimensions of her professionalism and methodology. Delayed start and missed dead...lines. After signing the engagement contract and representing she had availability to take the case, she did not begin substantive work for several months. The investigation ultimately took nearly 12 months to complete. For family law matters involving children's welfare and residential schedules, this kind of delay causes real harm to families and court timelines. Unannounced work stoppages tied to retainer balance. Throughout the investigation, she would cease work entirely when her trust account balance was depleted — without any advance notice to the parties or their counsel. There was no warning that funds were running low and no opportunity to replenish the account proactively. Parties only discovered work had stopped when told that additional payment was required to continue. This pattern is unprofessional and inconsistent with the obligations of a court-appointed investigator in matters affecting children. Material errors she declined to correct. The report contained material factual errors. When these were raised directly, her stated position was that she does not correct her report. For a court-appointed investigator producing a document that will influence judicial decisions about children's lives, this is an indefensible response. A concrete example of careless work. Among the recommendations in her report was a provision allocating "Mother's Day" to the mother. This was a same-sex male relationship. There was no mother in the case. This is not a minor clerical slip — it reflects a fundamental failure to engage carefully with the basic facts of the case she was investigating. Failure to pursue key witnesses. I submitted multiple references. Two did not respond to initial contact — including a live-in caregiver who resided in our household for two years with extensive daily observation of my parenting. Neither was followed up on with additional contact attempts. The other party's references were all contacted and fully incorporated into the report. This asymmetry is not explained and is not acceptable. Conclusions shaped by inference rather than evidence. A GAL's role is objective fact-finding. In this report, conclusions are frequently drawn by selecting facts that support a predetermined narrative rather than allowing the full evidentiary picture to drive the analysis. Allegations originating from one party — including recordings and logs created unilaterally by that party — are treated as reliable findings without adequate scrutiny of their source or motivation. Flawed analytical framework. The reasoning in key sections of the report follows a pattern of: if X exists and Y is present, then Z must be true — without adequately considering alternative explanations or contradictory evidence. This approach produces findings that are stated with more certainty than the underlying facts support. A Guardian ad Litem exercises significant power over families, children, and legal outcomes. That power demands accuracy, methodological rigor, genuine evidentiary balance, and basic professional reliability. I would strongly encourage any party in a King County proceeding to ask detailed questions about this GAL's process, her approach to factual errors, her timeline commitments, and her billing and retainer practices before agreeing to her appointment.

My ex and I did not consult these reviews, and hired Lynn in a high-conflict divorce. Lynn produced a sloppy report that included outdated information. She wrote a very one-sided report favoring the mother and recommending sole custody. She charged over $10K, plus more to appear at trial (and she mad...e a billing mistake, overcharging me!). We went to trial, where the judge disregarded almost everything she said and ordered 50-50 custody. I dodged a bullet there, but pay attention to the above reviews and avoid Lynn Tuttle at all costs!

Lynn Tuttle lied all over our final report. She mixed up who said what, lied to make their favored parent look more involved in the children's lives than even they said they were, reported false evidence as fact without verifying, lead the children with yes or no to answer questions to contradict the...ir original answers, and totally disregarded pivotal family testimony of the children living in a hostile home environment, which was the direction the children's answers were revealing, and Lynn's own transcript clearly steered the interview a different direction.

I have seen some very unethical law professionals, but Lynn Tuttle is the worst. She unethically engaged with one party, who immediately convinced her that the other party was the worst parent ever. The bias was felt by me from the very first email from Lynn. He is very haughty, privileged, and treat...ed me like I was an immigrant trash. She rescheduled appointments repeatedly, including on the day of the appointment, while the children's activities had to be canceled to accommodate her shifting schedules. She ignored the witnesses from my side, and kept regurgitating the other party's witness lies, provided by that family's worst representatives. Many of them refused to participate in the mud slinging, including my mother-in-law. Lynn interviewed the kids, and anything they said about the other party, she blamed on me - I was not even there when the kids experienced all of this!!! She completely ignored the kids' wishes - and she is supposedly there to protect their interests?! She sure was not! She made the kids so uncomfortable with her interrogation, that they dreaded the very name. One of them eventually just shut her off during her multi-hour questioning, because she kept asking the questions to trip him, to get him to say what she wanted to hear - that is a direct quote from the child. She was there to support the lies the other party fed her. She made up her mind on the case before she even met me or the kids. She is the worst and DANGEROUS! PLEASE SAVE YOUR KIDS A LOT OF ANXIETY, AND KEEP THEM AWAY FROM THIS HORRIBLE INDIVIDUAL, WHO SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO TOUCH HUMANS, FORGET DEALING WITH CHILDREN!!!