One lawyer, thirty years of courtrooms, one town.

Admitted in 1995, I went straight into divorce work as a founding partner of an Orange County, California divorce litigation firm that grew to thirty attorneys and staff. The State Bar of California certified me as a Family Law Specialist, and the cases that came to me were the ones in which the balance sheet was the battlefield: professional athletes, entrepreneurs, executives, and public figures whose divorces turned on what a company was worth, how compensation had been structured, and where the money had gone. Seventy-odd bench trials, four hundred depositions, and fourteen hundred motions and hearings later, I know what a judge listens to and what a judge tunes out, and that is worth more at a settlement table than in a closing argument. I am also a veteran of the U.S. Navy.

Then I did something divorce lawyers rarely do: I spent a decade as general counsel of a company in one of California's most heavily regulated industries, closing corporate and real-estate deals and trying the business, partnership and real-estate disputes they produced. I sat where the client sits while outside lawyers explained their invoices. A client does not want a memorandum; a client wants to know what will happen, what it will take, and what to do on Monday. That is the standard I hold my own work to.

The LL.M. in Taxation, earned with distinction at Georgetown, is the credential people ask about most. Nearly every divorce is a tax event dressed as a property dispute: which transfers are taxable, how a buyout should be timed, what a spouse actually keeps of what the decree awards. I run those numbers myself, at the beginning. The criminal and national-park work came with the town: a resort county's DUI, assault and possession cases in the courts in Jackson, and the federal citations visitors carry home from Yellowstone and Grand Teton, which is why the national-parks chapter is written for a reader in another state.