The RightCounsel.BetterOutcomes.

My career has never followed a single track. Before law school, I worked at sea as an able seaman and junior officer. The work took me to places and situations few people experience: delivering grain and sugar to ports in Angola during its civil war, paper to Bahrain and Dammam in the Persian Gulf, scrap metal through the Strait of Magellan from Argentina to Chile. I worked alongside crews from Central and South America, lived for months at a time with people whose languages, cultures, and views of the world were very different from my own, and learned to solve problems within systems that didn't work the way I expected. Customs officials looking for problems had to be assuaged, aging infrastructure worked around rather than waited on, and local officials with competing interests negotiated with. I learned early on that the people in front of you matter more than the task, the plan, or the situation. That lesson has shaped my approach ever since. I also saw, up close, what poverty and instability actually look like. Not as an abstraction, but in the people loading the ship, waiting on the docks, and living in these countries. That experience shaped my commitment to service long before I became a lawyer, and it eventually led me to pro bono representation, charitable work, and the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. I believe access to good counsel should not depend solely on someone's resources. Professional success has given me opportunities I am deeply grateful for, and with them, a responsibility to give back. How we treat those with the least often says the most about who we are. That lesson followed me into the practice of law. My career has spanned big law, corporate leadership, business operations, technology, finance, and media, and now private practice, fields where legal issues never exist in isolation. I have worked for large corporations, individual founders, small businesses, and nonprofits, and the throughline is the one I learned at sea: focus on the people and what they need, not just the law or the issue in front of you. The law can be researched. People cannot. That breadth is not incidental to my work. It is my work. Most problems that land on my desk are not purely legal. They're usually some combination of personal, operational, financial, and strategic. The value I bring is understanding that solving the legal issue is not always the same as solving the problem.