Why I Took On the State of California

In 2016, I was lying in bed on a Sunday morning with my fiancée. We had been together for years. We were engaged. I had just bailed out her son — a young man I was about to call my stepson — who was fighting a heroin addiction and had been arrested.

She looked at me and asked the question every family asks in that moment: "Honey, what are we going to do about Jason's case? Who are we going to hire?"

I have been in this industry since 2008. I know every attorney in Southern California. I know who fights hard for their clients and who just collects a fee. I know who the dump trucks are. I know who the exceptional ones are. And I was about to tell her — as her fiancé, as a man who loved her son, as someone who genuinely wanted to help.

Then I stopped cold. Because I realized that if I answered her, I could lose my license. Under California regulation 10 CCR §2071, a licensed bail agent cannot — directly or indirectly — recommend an attorney to anyone they have bonded. No exceptions. Not for family. Not for a fiancée's son. Not for anyone.

I thought: this is insane. This rule was supposed to protect people from corrupt referral kickbacks. Instead it was about to make me a criminal for trying to help the person I loved most.

I filed Chad Conley v. Dave Jones, Case No. BC630383, in Los Angeles Superior Court on August 11, 2016. I made two arguments: the Insurance Commissioner didn't have the authority to make this rule, and the rule violated bail agents' First Amendment rights.

The trial was November 30, 2017. The judge ruled for the Commissioner on February 9, 2018. The court found that when a bail agent refers an arrestee to a lawyer, it is "inherently misleading" because it can create conflicts of interest and undue influence.

I lost. I respect the ruling and I follow it. I still believe families deserve better guidance from people who know the system — and I will keep speaking up for them.

What the ruling did clarify: a social media post that an arrestee happens to see does not violate the rule. Referring someone to the State Bar's lawyer search or the Public Defender's office is also allowed. Those are the paths I point people to today.

Before I ever sold a bail bond, I spent years doing bail skips — tracking down and returning defendants who had failed to appear, so the bail agent who wrote the bond would not have to pay the forfeiture. I did that work for thirteen different bail bond companies across Southern California.

When you recover a $100,000 or $150,000 bond for someone, you become their best friend fast. I watched how those companies operated from the inside. I saw how they talked to clients, how they priced bonds, and what they told people about what they were legally required to charge.

Here is what I saw: agents would write a bond at the full 10% on paper, then quietly tell the client to pay less — and later write off the balance as uncollectible. They were giving rebates. They just were not telling clients that rebates were legal, that clients had a right to ask for them, or that the law required the best available price to be offered. The discount was a favor. It should have been a right.

The moment I started selling bonds myself, those same companies were no longer my friends. But what I had learned — about pricing, about the law, about what clients were actually owed — I was not going to forget.

When I first started selling bail bonds, I worked for a company in Orange County. I was going to bar association meetings — suited up, ready to network, sponsor events, build relationships with criminal defense attorneys. I wanted to compete on price. I wanted to walk into those rooms and tell attorneys I could offer their clients 6%, 7%, 8% — not the standard 10%. The company I was working for did not want that. We parted ways.

I went to work for Don's Bail Bonds. Don was the oldest bail agent I had ever met — in his mid-to-upper 80s, had been in this industry his entire life. His wife did it. His sons did it. He had been writing bonds since before the Yellow Pages. He was a dinosaur, and I mean that with complete respect. He had seen everything.

Don's guys were rough. There was no way they were going to bar association meetings. That was not their world. But Don knew I was the suited-up guy who could walk into those rooms, drink with attorneys, listen, learn, sponsor, and build. He wanted to empower me to go do that — and, honestly, to help save a company that had been built on Yellow Pages and was watching the world change around it.

I sat down with Don and told him my idea. I wanted to advertise rebates. I wanted to write it on the wall at bar association meetings. I wanted to scream it. Don had been in the industry long enough to remember that years before, there had been some litigation — something about rebates, something about Prop 103. He could not remember the details exactly. But he remembered it existed. He said: I know John Rohrbaugh. Let's run this by him.

That is how Rohrbaugh got involved. John Rohrbaugh is one of the top bail bond attorneys in California. Don made the introduction. The three of us started digging into the law together.

What Rohrbaugh found — and what I had suspected — was that bail bonds are insurance. Proposition 103, passed by California voters in 1988, brought insurance under competitive rate regulation. It included an exclusion list. Bail bonds were not on it. Which meant bail bonds were included. Which meant the 10% rate was not a legal floor — it was a maximum. And rebates were explicitly permitted as long as they were non-discriminatory.

The 6-7-8% structure was mine. I engineered it. Rohrbaugh built the legal foundation — the argument that bail bonds were not excluded from Prop 103, the non-discrimination requirement, the start-and-stop date structure for rebate categories. But the idea of creating tiered rebate categories, filing them properly, and advertising them openly at bar associations — that was what I came in with. That was what I had been trying to do since before I ever met Don.

Here is what most people in the industry still do not understand: you are allowed to create rebate categories. You define the qualification — private counsel, for example, or a specific time window. You file a start date and a stop date. And during that window, every client who walks in the door gets told what rebate they qualify for. You cannot pick and choose. You cannot give the informed client a discount and charge the uninformed client full rate. That is the non-discrimination requirement. That is the part the industry ignored. That is the part I built my business around.

After I started selling bonds, I wanted a legal, transparent way to compete on price — not the back-room handshake version I had watched for years. So I hired John Rohrbaugh, one of the top bail bond attorneys in California, and we dug into the law.

What we found was Proposition 103. Passed in 1988, it brought bail bonds under California insurance regulation — and insurance law requires that the best available price be offered to every customer. It explicitly allows premium rebates as long as they are not unfairly discriminatory. The 10% rate was not a legal floor. It was a floor the industry had invented and enforced through intimidation.

I was the first bail agent in California to come out publicly and say it — loudly, in writing, on the record. Rebates are legal. Clients have a right to pay less. The industry told me I was wrong, that I was going to lose my license, that I was destroying the market. I kept saying it anyway.

To be precise about who was pushing back: it was other bail bondsmen — the old-school agents who had built their businesses around the fiction that 10% was fixed. Not the surety companies. When an agent rebates, the surety still gets paid the same amount. The rebate comes entirely out of the agent's commission. The agents who came after me were protecting their own margins, not the sureties.

The pushback was not just talk. A complaint was filed against me with the California Department of Insurance. Someone in the industry decided that if they could not win the argument, they would try to take my license. The Department investigated. They took no action. Because what I was doing was legal.

In 2019, a class-action antitrust lawsuit — Crain v. Accredited Surety and Casualty Company — was filed accusing major bail sureties and industry groups of conspiring to fix bail premiums at 10% across California and eliminate the competition Proposition 103 was designed to create. The complaint cited my 2014 post as the only clear public acknowledgment from a California bail agent that rebates were legal and that clients had a right to them. I was not a defendant. I was not a party. I was cited as evidence that the truth was publicly available — and that the industry had suppressed it anyway.

In 2026, several defendants in that case reached proposed settlements totaling $69.4 million. The case continues against remaining defendants. I am not going to comment on the merits or the outcome. What I will say is this: everything I wrote in 2014 was accurate, it was legal, and it was something every family in California deserved to know.

Every bail bond application in California had it baked in: an annual premium renewal clause. Twelve months after a bond was written, bail companies would call the client and say the premium was due again. The client — already stressed, already paying off a bond — would get a bill for another year.

I never did it. Not once. I advertised that I did not do it. It is in the Chad the Bail Guy archive if you want to find it.

That practice ended while I was away from the industry for a period. I am not claiming I ended it alone. But I was saying it was wrong before it stopped — the same way I was saying rebates were legal before the federal complaint proved the industry had been suppressing that fact for years.

More on this story coming. The full account of how annual renewals worked, who was doing it, and what it cost families is something I will document here when I am ready to tell it completely.