Cuttone & Associates

Focus and practice areas

Cuttone & Associates works on real estate and business law from an office in Fresno, California, and takes clients across the San Joaquin Valley. The firm describes itself as a small boutique practice. It handles both courtroom disputes and the paperwork side of the same subjects.

The real estate side covers failure to disclose, fraud in transactions, title problems, property line and easement disputes, transfers of title, purchase and sale agreements, security instruments, and leases. That list mixes litigation with deal work. A client fighting over an easement and a client closing a sale can both find their matter here.

Business clients come for entity formation, corporate documents, general advising, ownership and shareholder disputes, contract disputes, and regulatory compliance. The firm also does estate planning. In my opinion, the pairing makes sense: property owners in the Valley are often business owners too, and the two problems tend to arrive together.

Landlord, tenant, and real estate professionals

The firm represents both landlords and tenants, including unlawful detainer and eviction claims. Taking both sides of that line is a choice worth noting, because many Fresno offices pick one.

California unlawful detainer is a summary procedure. The timelines are compressed compared with ordinary civil actions, and a tenant's response window is measured in days, not weeks. The paperwork sequence starts with a notice, and a defect in that notice can end the case before the merits are reached. Anyone entering one of these matters benefits from knowing the calendar before the filing goes in.

A separate practice area serves real estate professionals: agents and brokers facing commission disputes and matters before the California Department of Real Estate. DRE proceedings are administrative rather than judicial. A licensee's ability to keep working can turn on them, which puts them in a different category from a contract fight.

Who does the work

The site names one attorney, Brian K. Cuttone. He is a civil trial lawyer with trial and appellate experience in state and federal court, working in real estate, business, and bankruptcy litigation.

His education is local. He earned a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology from CSU Fresno, then graduated from San Joaquin College of Law in 1999. He was admitted to the California Bar the same year. That puts him more than twenty-five years into practice as of 2026.

Two credentials sit outside the usual attorney profile. Cuttone obtained a California real estate salesperson license in 1994, five years before he became a lawyer, and a broker's license in 2007. As a reviewer, I find this the most useful detail on the site. It means he learned the transaction side of property before he learned to litigate over it.

Judge pro tem service

Cuttone has served as a judge pro tem for the Fresno County Superior Court in real estate disputes. A judge pro tem is a volunteer attorney who hears assigned matters as a temporary judicial officer. Courts appoint them from the local bar, generally in the subject areas where they practice.

The value of the role is angle. An attorney who has sat on the other side of the bench has watched how a real estate dispute lands on a judge who has limited time and a full calendar. That informs how a case gets presented.

Rebecca Stasio is the office manager and legal assistant. She is not an attorney. The site is clear about this, which matters more than it might sound, because directory users sometimes assume every named person on a firm site holds a bar card.

What the firm's structure tells a client

This is a small office. One attorney and one support staffer, by the site's own account. The practical effect is that a client's calls and filings go through a short chain of people.

Small offices carry a different rhythm from larger ones. The attorney who takes the initial call is the attorney at the hearing. Scheduling depends on one person's calendar, so a client with an urgent filing deadline should raise the timing early.

The firm's geography is stated plainly: Fresno, serving the San Joaquin Valley. Real estate litigation is inherently local. Property sits in a county, disputes get filed where the property sits, and local recording practices and court customs shape how a case moves. A Fresno-based real estate lawyer handling Valley property is working in familiar territory.

How these matters generally proceed

Some context helps for readers weighing whether their problem fits this kind of firm. What follows describes California practice generally and is not a description of results at this office.

Failure-to-disclose claims usually begin with the seller's Transfer Disclosure Statement. The dispute turns on what the seller knew and when. Buyers often discover the problem months after closing, and California's limitation periods for these claims run on their own clocks, so early advice is worth more than late advice.

Easement and boundary disputes move slowly. They frequently need a surveyor, a title search back through prior conveyances, and sometimes a quiet title action to settle ownership on the record. Cases like these often resolve through negotiated agreements recorded against both parcels.

Shareholder and ownership disputes inside a closely held company follow a different track. The governing documents come first: the operating agreement, bylaws, or buy-sell provisions. Where those documents are silent, California corporate statutes fill the gap, and the outcome can hinge on drafting choices made years earlier.

Transactional work

Entity formation and corporate documents are preventive work. A properly drafted operating agreement anticipates the shareholder dispute described above. Firms that do both sides, forming entities and litigating over them, see how the drafting holds up under pressure.

The same logic applies across the property practice. An attorney who writes leases and also tries unlawful detainer cases knows which lease clauses get argued about.

Reading this listing

The website is direct about scope. It names its practice areas, names its people, and describes the region it covers. Several things a directory reader might look for are absent from the site: a founding year, an entity suffix, and social media accounts.

What is present is verifiable and specific. Bar admission year, law school, license dates for two real estate credentials, and a judicial service role are all checkable claims rather than adjectives. In my opinion, a site that leads with dated credentials gives a prospective client more to work with than one that leads with adjectives.

Brian K. Cuttone was admitted to the California Bar in 1999 and holds a California real estate broker's license obtained in 2007.