Professional Training

Mr. Gutierrez began his professional architectural training at a modest two-year but highly noted collegiate architecture program which featured architectural production phase and construction phase services, along with other professional practice.

Undergraduate education continued with comprehensive training for professional practice in urban planning at Cal Poly Pomona. The training was focused on immediate planning practice in the public sector. UCLA graduate planning complemented this undergraduate training, and focused on public policy, planning and economic development.

Planning education of Mr. Gutierrez, combining undergraduate and graduate, has thus been at an equivalent level to formal training of practicing planners, allowing him to understand and counsel planning and development clients on the legal aspects of their practices.

Throughout extensive training in urban planning, and because of his Los Angeles inner-city roots, Ezequiel focused on advocacy planning, that branch of planning geared toward the representation of urban communities within overall policy, planning and development.

Law school soon became a direct and compelling step toward professional development for Mr. Gutierrez. UCLA Law included environmental law, urban government law, land use law, and planning and development control law.

After extensive law practice and urban design practice, which included representation of diverse urban communities, along with public agencies, regarding land use planning and policy, and after representation of design professionals, namely architects and engineers, who were being charged with professional negligence within the context of large, complex, multiparty and multi-million-dollar construction litigation, Mr. Gutierrez returned to UCLA for graduate architecture, earning the professional degree of master of architecture.

The graduate design-oriented UCLA architecture program complimented undergraduate architecture which had been geared toward architectural production. UCLA also offered a studio concentration in urban design where Mr. Gutierrez applied law and urban planning perspectives.

As a result of this combined planning and architectural training, Mr. Gutierrez offers a full range of legal counseling for design professionals from project conception and planning, to construction and delivery of the project. The context for counsel has ranged from project design within a building footprint to site analysis and design, and project development.

Design Professional Representation

Construction litigation has regularly taken the form of cross-actions by developer/builders, who otherwise had complete command of the entire project, naming design professionals in the lawsuit, as well as almost every other project professional who performed any work on the claimed defective project, now in dispute, for some alleged malfeasance on the part of the design professionals as well as on the part of other project professionals.

The extensive law practice experience of Mr. Gutierrez has been applied in the defense of design professionals. Strategic legal defense, timely raised during litigation, has resulted in expert witness testimony against the design professional reduced or eliminated altogether.