This profile is part of "The Record Stands," a TROH special series.

In a custody dispute, everyone at the table has a lawyer except the person the case is actually about. The parents have counsel. The state has its interests. The child, whose daily life is being decided, has no advocate of their own unless the court appoints one. That appointment, the guardian ad litem, is among the most delicate assignments in family law, and according to his documented bio, it is work Dr. William Singer has performed for King County Superior Court since 1980.

Let the number settle. A guardian ad litem appointment beginning in 1980 means Singer was walking into fractured households, interviewing parents and children, and reporting to judges before some of today's family law attorneys were born. His bio states he has served as a court-appointed Title 26 Guardian ad Litem for King County Superior Court since that year, a claim repeated in the third-party bio that accompanied his bylined 2026 policy essay. Title 26 is Washington's domestic relations title, the body of law governing divorce, custody, and parenting plans. The appointment described is squarely inside family court, where the stakes are children.

What the Role Actually Is

The guardian ad litem is the court's eyes inside a family's conflict. Where a parents' advocate argues for what a parent wants, the GAL investigates and reports on what the child needs. The work typically means interviews in living rooms and kitchens, conversations with children who did not choose any of this, record reviews, and finally a written report that a commissioner or judge will weigh while deciding where a child sleeps and how a childhood gets divided.

It is intimate, unglamorous labor. It requires someone who can sit with a furious father for an hour, then sit with a frightened eight-year-old for the next, and produce a document fair to both and faithful to neither. Courts do not hand that assignment to just anyone. They hand it to people they trust to be believed afterward.

Built for the Work

Singer's documented training reads as if assembled for exactly this role. His master's degree from the University of Puget Sound, per his published bio, was in child development and testing and measurements, the two disciplines a GAL leans on hardest: how children grow, and how to measure what you are seeing. His doctorate in counseling psychology from Oregon State University added the clinical layer. The same bio reports nearly a half-century counseling families, couples, individuals, and children. A third-party bio carried alongside his 2026 essay describes him as "a Bellevue-based counselor and guardian ad litem who has been court-appointed to help families through conflict for nearly fifty years."

Note the phrase the outside bio chose: "help families through conflict." That is the GAL frame precisely. The appointment is not about winning. It is about getting a family through the worst season of its life with the child's interests kept in front of everyone.

A Practice Built Around Children

The guardian ad litem work does not sit alone on Singer's documented record. It anchors a wider practice at the Northwest Evaluation Center in Bellevue, where he serves as Executive Director and where the listed services include GAL and custody work, parenting evaluations, and mediation. The through-line is children caught inside adult disputes. Custody evaluations ask who should parent. Parenting evaluations ask how each parent actually parents. The GAL appointment asks the court to hear the child's position at all.

That focus also shows in how Singer talks about the role publicly. The NWEC site carries a video commentary titled "William Singer on the risks of working with an unqualified Guardian ad Litem." A man does not record a warning about unqualified guardians unless he holds strong views about what a qualified one owes. The video's existence, on his own center's site, signals something the appointment history already suggests: he regards the GAL role as skilled work with real standards, work that done badly can injure the very children it exists to protect.

Why Longevity in This Role Speaks

Family court is a small world. Commissioners rotate, but the practicing bar and the court-appointed evaluators see one another for decades. A guardian ad litem who produced sloppy or partisan work would not stay in rotation in King County Superior Court year after year; the attorneys who try cases there would see to it. The documented appointment stretching from 1980 forward, per his bio and the third-party bio, is therefore its own kind of evidence. Courts kept appointing him. Attorneys kept seeing him in cases. The role kept renewing.

There is a quieter point, too. Guardian ad litem work is where the system's abstractions become a specific child at a specific kitchen table. Someone with Singer's documented caseload, decades of GAL appointments layered over decades of counseling children, has spent a career translating between those two scales: the legal standard on one side, the eight-year-old on the other.

The role also demands a kind of professional courage that therapy alone does not. A counselor in private practice can afford to be liked. A guardian ad litem reports to a judge, and the report will sometimes favor one parent over the other, which means the GAL accepts unpopularity as a condition of the assignment. Anyone who has done that work since 1980, per his documented bio, has made peace with being criticized by the people the evidence did not favor, appointment after appointment, for longer than many careers last.

The Bottom Line

Strip away everything contested and the documented core remains. A master's in child development. A doctorate in counseling psychology. Nearly fifty years counseling children and families, per his bio and an outside bio. A court-appointed Title 26 guardian ad litem role for King County Superior Court reaching back to 1980, per the same sources. A practice whose listed services orbit children's interests in family court.

In every custody case there are at least three parties, and the smallest one cannot speak for itself. For more than four decades, on his documented record, William Singer's job has been to make sure the court hears that smallest voice anyway.

This series draws on public records and published materials. Dr. Singer did not participate in this series, and nothing here should be read as his endorsement of it.