Steve Wolf Turns Complex Cases Into
Irrefutably Clear Evidence

It is virtually impossible to hurt someone with a gun without breaking at least one of the four cardinal rules of gun safety. The rules exist precisely to protect people from being unintentionally shot even when equipment malfunctions. Don't break the rules, then blame the hardware.

The Four Rules

1. All guns are always loaded.
   Not "treat them as if." "As if" implies we are playing make-believe. Make-believe is not an acceptable framework when death is on the line: a gun is loaded until you personally clear it. It remains clear only while it stays in your hands under your direct control. Loaded is a status, just as clear is a status. The moment you look away, set it down, or hand it to anyone, it is a loaded gun. A gun must be cleared every time it is picked up and every time it changes hands.
2. Never allow a gun to point at anything you don't want to see destroyed.
   "Never allow," not "never point." The traditional version covers only what you do with the gun. This version includes the actions of others. If someone is pointing a gun at you, they are breaking your rule. Do not permit this rule to be broken for even an instant, intentionally or carelessly. That's all it takes for someone to be killed. Not even "just for the shot." Consult a qualified armorer for safe work-arounds.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target.
   When holding a gun, your finger should be indexed along the frame, outside the trigger guard. Placing your finger on or near the trigger is not permissible, even if you're certain you're not pressing the trigger. People sneeze. People trip. People get startled. Your finger does not go to the trigger until you're perfecting your sight picture on a target you've decided to shoot.
4. Be sure of your target and what is beyond it.
   You are responsible for every round until it stops. What's behind the target matters as much as the target itself.

Case postures Steve handles:

• Plaintiff, negligent handling. A rule was broken and someone was hurt. Steve identifies the rule, reconstructs how the violation caused the harm, and establishes that no equipment failure is needed to explain the outcome.
• Plaintiff, unlawful use of force. The firearm was used in a way that wasn't legally justified. Steve analyzes applicable training standards and protocols and whether the use conformed to the rules governing lawful deployment.
• Plaintiff, known manufacturing defect. Where a defect was documented, known to the manufacturer, and left uncorrected, and that defect contributed to the harm, Steve can support the plaintiff's case.
• Defense, manufacturer or dealer. Almost every alleged unintentional discharge is a human-factors case. The gun didn't fail; someone broke a rule. The narrow exception is a firearm that catastrophically fails and injures a person holding it correctly: the gun blows up in your hand. Short of that, the framework is rule violation, not equipment failure.

While this website describes expert witness services, not firearms safety instruction, you can never read, write, state, or share these rules too often.

A wildfire loss is almost never one failure. It is a chain, and the chain is usually documented long before the fire. The question is not whether the fire was foreseeable. It is which of the parties who could have broken the chain chose not to, and what it would have cost them to do it.

The five links Steve examines

1. Ignition.
   What released enough energy, in the right place, into a receptive fuel bed. Arcing conductors, slapped or downed lines, failed splices and dead-end fittings, idle and de-energized circuits still capable of induction, equipment strikes, hot work, vehicle exhaust and dragging chain, fireworks and pyrotechnic devices, and incendiary acts. Origin and cause work is documented against NFPA 921 and the federal NWCG wildland guide, and the hypothesis has to survive the elimination of alternatives, not just fit the first candidate found.
2. Fuel and vegetation management.
   What was allowed to accumulate under, around, and inside the strike zone. Clearance intervals, inspection records, deferred work orders, hazard-tree tagging, and the gap between the vegetation program on paper and the vegetation on the ground. This is where the discovery record usually decides the case.
3. Weather, terrain, and rate of spread.
   Wind speed and direction, slope and aspect, fuel moisture, and time of day, reconstructed against the actual progression. Whether a public safety power shutoff, a patrol, or a re-energization decision was defensible on the forecast that existed at the time, not the forecast in hindsight.
4. Defensible space and structure hardening.
   Ember intrusion through vents, soffits, and decking; combustible material inside the five-foot zone; roof and siding assemblies; water supply and pressure at the moment it was needed; and compliance with wildland-urban interface codes and fire hazard severity zone requirements. Structures a hundred feet apart burn differently for reasons that are entirely knowable after the fact.
5. Warning, evacuation, and loss.
   Notification timing, egress capacity, and what was recoverable and when. On the damages side: destroyed and damaged structures, contents, smoke and particulate contamination in structures that never burned, business interruption, and diminution in land and real estate value that persists long after the debris is hauled away.

Case postures Steve handles:

• Plaintiff, utility and infrastructure ignition. Where equipment condition, maintenance deferral, circuit protection design, or vegetation clearance created the ignition. Steve reconstructs the failure and shows what the defendant knew, when, and what the fix would have cost against the loss it prevented.
• Insurance subrogation. Carrier-side recovery is a large share of what actually gets paid in wildfire litigation and it is a far less crowded expert market than the individual-plaintiff side. Steve supports origin, cause, spread, and mitigation-failure opinions across consolidated and multi-carrier recovery actions, and he is comfortable being the expert whose report has to hold up across hundreds of aggregated claims.
• Plaintiff or defense, defensible space and mitigation adequacy. Whether the clearance, hardening, HOA or municipal requirement, or contracted mitigation work was performed to standard, and whether performing it would have changed the outcome for that structure.
• Defense. Not every fire near a power line was started by the power line, and not every total loss was preventable. Steve will say so. He has excluded proposed causes as often as he has established them, and a defense expert who has actually built ignition sources is hard to move on cross.
• Property loss and diminution. The Boulder County matter on his case list was a real-estate value case, not an ignition case. Land that burns carries the loss forward into the market for years, and that loss is provable.

Wildfire and explosion matters are billed on Steve’s specialty rate schedule. Select the case type on the CV request form in the resources section and the correct fee schedule is included with the download.

Steve is the founder of Team Wildfire and Executive Director of Wildfire Labs. He does not testify about wildfire mitigation from a textbook. He has designed, prototyped, and filed patents on it, which is the difference between an expert who can describe a standard of care and one who can explain to a jury exactly what the defendant could have done instead.

• Wildfire Command AI — U.S. Application 18/630,213. Fire detection, prediction, and resource-direction system.
• PyroSphere Shelter — deployable structure protection and personnel survival enclosure.
• ThermaFlow TankGuard — thermal protection for fuel and water storage under radiant and ember load.
• Humidi-Fire — humidification-based fuel-moisture and ember suppression.
• SkyPhoon and Hurricane — high-volume aerial and jet-driven suppression delivery.
• BioSafe FireGuard — non-toxic retardant chemistry.
• Cyclone Express, Sand Storm, WolfPack, and the CoreTechs Helmet — suppression delivery, containment, and responder protection systems.

Supporting credentials relevant to fire matters: BATFE Class 20 Explosives Manufacturing License, 33 professional certifications including 17 from FEMA, forty years of controlled ignition and combustion work on 77 Hollywood productions, and a B.A. from Columbia University.