About Us

Thank you for visiting our site and welcome. My name is Rick Gustafson. I founded Gustafson Legal, PC in order to provide legal and consulting services to consumers and fellow lawyers. My goal is to make people happy. I’m not looking to bill out hours for an “unwinnable” case or take on lucrative matters if I don’t think I can make you happy in the end. I provide honest and practical advice to help clients make good decisions in a complicated world. I understand that an attorney-client relationship is a business relationship, but I my hope is to create transcendent relationships with my clients that go beyond business. Let’s face it, we do what we do to earn money and that is important, but life is about the people we encounter and the relationships we form.

A little about me. I was born in Hinsdale, Illinois and I grew up in north Texas with my brother and parents. After graduating high school, I attended college at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. I graduated in 1990 with a double major in Economics and Political Science. Immediately after college, I moved to Chicago and attended DePaul University College of Law where I graduated in May 1993. Currently, I am a proud father of two wonderful kids (1 boy and 1 girl) and a husband to my wonderful wife of 21 years. Our family has lived in Evanston, Illinois since 2004. My family attends church at Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church in Chicago. My wife and I sing in the choir and I have served in various leadership roles in the church.

After graduating from law school, I went to work for a very large consumer bankruptcy firm here in Chicago. I handled all aspects of bankruptcy cases representing individuals and married couples in Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy cases. After steadily being trusted with more responsibilities , within 5 years I was the fourth most senior attorney at the firm. I then went on to join the management team of another high volume consumer bankruptcy firm based in Chicago. At that firm, I was instrumental in helping the firm expand from representing debtors in 4 states to representing debtors coast-to-coast in 20 states. My responsibilities rapidly expanded to include a wide range of responsibilities. Among them, financial reporting and management, ethics compliance, business compliance, hiring and training staff, human resource policies, employee benefits administration, contract review and negotiation, and ethics compliance.

I value the relationships I formed with both clients and colleagues. Experience taught me that it was these relationships that provided job satisfaction for me. I made a positive difference in people’s lives and that’s what was the most important thing to me. Whether it be giving relief and hope to someone who needed to file a bankruptcy to provide a better financial future for his family, or mentoring a young lawyer, it was the relationships and the happiness that arose from those relationships that I have come to realize is the most important thing. I realized over time that despite my efforts, I couldn’t maximize the happiness factor in the high volume practice model. My goal at Gustafson Legal & Consulting is to maximize the happiness factor for my clients and create a relationship that transcends money.