Mark Venardi
Five years in the United States Coast Guard before law — search and rescue and marine law enforcement aboard the cutter later made famous by The Perfect Storm. His register website field points at a different domain from his email: vefirm.com against vzlawfirm.com. He spent his first decade defending corporations before switching sides in 2004.
The bar record
We read Mark Venardi in the State Bar of California’s licensee search. California publishes more history than most registers: a bar number, a dated status timeline, and administrative as well as disciplinary actions.
California is the one register that tells you it removes its own history. Above the status table, every record carries this: some administrative suspensions are subject to automatic removal from the attorney profile page pursuant to the State Bar’s policy on removal of administrative actions ... administrative suspensions that meet the criteria in that policy would not be displayed below.
Administrative suspensions are not discipline — they follow from things like unpaid fees or missed continuing education. But the sentence still means what it says. A timeline showing nothing is a timeline showing nothing that the State Bar currently displays, and we are not going to write “never suspended” when the register reserves the right to have taken an entry down. No other register on this site says this about itself.
And it does not check what the lawyer tells it. Where a record carries practice areas, the State Bar prints a warning next to them: it does not verify the accuracy of this content and makes no warranties regarding experience or competence in practice areas. Eleven of the twelve lawyers on our San Francisco page left that block empty altogether, so for most of them the register holds a name, a number, an address and a status — and nothing about what they actually do.
What the record shows
The register gives his email at vzlawfirm.com and his website as vefirm.com. The firm publishes vzlawfirm.com. The website field appears to be stale; both are printed here as the register holds them.Verified
He is the only lawyer on this site whose published record includes military sea service: he says he served in the Coast Guard from 1980 to 1985, on search and rescue and marine law enforcement, aboard the cutter Tamaroa, which later performed the rescue depicted in The Perfect Storm.Verified
He says he made partner at Holland & Knight and then left in 2004 to represent people rather than corporations. That is the same crossing-over that Carter Zinn and several Chicago listings describe, and it is worth knowing which direction a lawyer came from.Verified
His firm’s rideshare page is written for San Francisco while his address of record is Walnut Creek, about twenty-five miles east; the page’s own contact block gives an Oakland address.Verified
What the firm says
He says he was born in 1962 in Seattle, raised in Peoria, Illinois, and received an honorable discharge from the Coast Guard as an E-5 in 1985.Reported
He says he earned a B.A. in Political Science at UC Berkeley in 1991 and a J.D. at UC Hastings in 1994, was co-chair of the Moot Court Competition Committee and a judicial extern to Judge Charles Legge of the Northern District of California.Reported
He says he was an associate at Cox Wootton, Griffin & Hansen, joined Haight, Gardner, Holland & Knight in 1998, and made partner in his sixth year of practice.Reported
Rideshare
What we haven’t checked
No attorney pays to be listed here, and this profile is not an endorsement or a recommendation. We report the public record so you can weigh it yourself. If anything here is inaccurate or out of date, tell us and we’ll correct it. How we work