History

I started as a public defender — Stanislaus, Solano, and Fresno counties — in offices that ran on budget cuts and caseloads nobody would design on purpose. When the misdemeanor department that used to take three attorneys came down to one, the one was me, and it ran. I handled more than three thousand cases in those years. I stopped counting when I went private, which is its own kind of number.

Then came years of work in my family’s firm — the trials, the family law, and the appointments the courts kept trusting me with: minors counsel since 2018, murder defense in 2020, the dependency panel in 2021. In August 2024, I put my own name on the door. Rusca Law opened as a general practice and is becoming a narrow one on purpose: scaling down, deliberately, to the handful of matters a year that deserve everything a small office can aim at a single problem. The appointment work continues, narrowed like everything else here: at present, the office accepts new court appointments only as minors counsel in family law matters, and only in Fresno County. Most firms’ history pages count wins. This one counts weight carried — and what it has chosen, finally, to set down.