Disbarred: How a San Francisco Attorney Turned a Trust Fund Into His Own Contracting Company

What Happened

On July 3, 2025, the California Supreme Court ordered attorney Drexel Andrew Bradshaw disbarred — the most severe punishment the State Bar can hand out — for defrauding an elderly, incapacitated client and lying to a probate court about it, repeatedly, under oath.

The case, In re Bradshaw, is a cautionary tale about what happens when an attorney is trusted to manage someone else's money and life savings, and instead quietly funnels it toward himself.

The Backstory

Ora Gosey was 78 years old when she first hired Bradshaw for a landlord dispute in 2006. She had no spouse or children. She asked his law firm to set up an estate plan — a trust holding her only major asset, her San Francisco home, which had a rental unit attached. The trust had one central purpose: take care of Ora Gosey for the rest of her life, ideally letting her stay in her own home.

Fast forward to 2013. Gosey fell in her home, was hospitalized, and was diagnosed with dementia. She could no longer manage her own affairs. The people originally lined up to step in as trustee — a former partner and a longtime friend — both declined. That left Bradshaw's law firm as the backup choice. He was appointed her conservator and trustee, taking full control of her home, her trust, and her finances.

How the Scheme Worked

Around the same time Bradshaw took over, he hired a handyman named Juan Gonzalez — who had no contractor's license — to do repair work at Gosey's home. Over the following months, Bradshaw:

• Paid for Gonzalez's licensing classes out of pocket.

• Personally filed the paperwork to incorporate a new company, Bay Construction, Inc. — listing himself as the sole signer and using his own law office as the company's address.

• Set up the company's bank account using his own Social Security number, and put himself as the only person authorized to sign checks — meaning Gonzalez, the supposed "owner," couldn't even access the company's money.

• Directed the company's day-to-day decisions — which jobs to take, how much to charge, who got hired — while Gonzalez sat largely silent in negotiations.

• Arranged for a contractor who lived in Idaho and had never even met Gonzalez or seen the job site to be listed as the "supervisor" required for the company to get its state license — a arrangement state investigators later confirmed never actually involved real supervision.

Then came the money. Using his authority as trustee, Bradshaw:

• Took out a $346,000 reverse mortgage on Gosey's home, then a second one for nearly $890,000 — converting her only major asset into cash he had full access to.

• Steered over $150,000 in repair work on Gosey's home to his own company — a new staircase, foundation repairs, flood damage — without ever getting competitive bids from other contractors.

• Left Gosey's actual caregiving agency — the people feeding and bathing her — $45,000 behind on payments, while paying his own construction company promptly and in full.

• Took seven months to fix a rotting, "dangerous" staircase that was Gosey's only fire escape — then handed the job straight to his own company with no other bids the moment its contractor's license came through.

The Cover-Up

When the probate court started asking questions — after Bradshaw came back a second time asking to pull nearly $900,000 out of Gosey's home — he told the court, under oath, that he had "no relationship or affiliation" with anyone he'd hired to work on the property, and that he had no financial interest in Bay Construction.

Both statements were false. And investigators found he'd made a similar false statement years earlier just to get himself appointed as Gosey's conservator in the first place.

A court-appointed investigator eventually pieced together what was really going on. When the judge asked Bradshaw directly whether he was using his position to steer business to a company he had ties to, he accused the court of trying to "demonize" him.

What the Courts Found

This case moved through two separate tracks that eventually collided:

1. Probate court: A judge formally removed Bradshaw as trustee, finding he'd engaged in blatant self-dealing — hiring his own company for uncompetitive, unsupervised work — and had actively concealed and misrepresented the truth to the court. The Court of Appeal upheld that finding.

2. State Bar discipline: Bradshaw was formally charged with professional misconduct. A hearing judge who watched the witnesses testify found him not credible and recommended disbarment. But an internal appeals body — the Review Department — initially disagreed and wanted to let him off with just a six-month suspension, largely because it found the contracting work itself had technically been "done well" and wasn't obviously overpriced.

The Supreme Court didn't buy that reasoning. It stepped in to independently review the entire record — and sided decisively with the original hearing judge.

Why the Supreme Court Ordered Disbarment

The Court's reasoning boiled down to a few key points:

• It doesn't matter if the work was done competently. The Court was clear: a trustee who hands over $150,000+ of someone else's money to a company he secretly owns and controls — without getting other bids — has breached his duty regardless of whether the finished product happens to be fine. The betrayal is in the decision-making, not the outcome.

• Repeated lying under oath is disqualifying on its own. Bradshaw didn't misstate one fact one time. He made the same false denial of financial interest in Bay Construction across multiple sworn court filings, over multiple years, to multiple courts.

• Gosey was about as vulnerable as a client can be. Elderly, alone, suffering from dementia, entirely dependent on the very person who was exploiting her. The Court treated this as a serious aggravating factor — not a minor detail.

• He'd done something similar before. Years earlier, Bradshaw had been quietly reprimanded for mishandling a different client's settlement money without telling her the full amount she was owed. The Court saw this as part of a pattern, not an isolated lapse.

• He never showed remorse. Throughout the entire process — probate court, the State Bar investigation, even his own witnesses' testimony — Bradshaw never acknowledged wrongdoing. Some of his own character witnesses admitted their opinion of him would drop if the allegations were true, which the Court took as telling.

The Bottom Line

In re Bradshaw is a stark reminder of what a fiduciary duty actually requires: complete transparency, and zero self-dealing, when you're trusted with someone else's money — especially someone who can't watch over it themselves.

An attorney serving as trustee, conservator, or any other fiduciary role isn't just held to "did the job get done." They're held to a much higher standard: did they put their client's interests ahead of their own, and did they tell the truth about it? Bradshaw failed both, repeatedly, over the better part of a decade — and the California Supreme Court decided that record left no room for anything short of permanent disbarment.

This post summarizes In re Bradshaw, 17 Cal.5th 1095 (Cal. July 3, 2025), for general informational purposes. It is not legal advice.