I grew up inside the practice of law. My mother worked as a legal secretary in Lufkin. After school I spent the hours in the office of Joe Lee Register, then a generalist who handled every kind of matter that came through a small East Texas firm—criminal, civil, family, probate. He is now Judge of the Angelina County Court at Law. My father was a banker who wrote software for banks. In those rooms I saw the ordinary mechanics of cases, and I began writing programs of my own. The work was never abstract to me.

I entered Texas Christian University in 1997 and studied philosophy and economics until 1999. I then transferred to the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. The training was rigorous and the decision to leave it was deliberate. In 2005 I entered what is now Texas A&M University School of Law in Fort Worth. I was admitted to the State Bar of Texas in 2008.

One of my first major matters was the long-running suit affecting the parent-child relationship in Rebecca Lynn Staton v. Lanny Wayne Staton, II, Case No. 00-07-04181 (Montgomery County). The case involved allegations of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. I deposed several of the world’s leading neurologists and prepared the defense that secured the result for our client.

My first chair trial was the Hague Convention petition brought by the Government of Norway for the return of a child. The child was a Norwegian citizen who had lived continuously in Norway for more than two years at the time of removal. Through fact-intensive cross-examination I established that Norway was not the child’s habitual residence. In re S.J.O.B.G., 292 S.W.3d 764 (Tex. App.—Beaumont 2009).

That result opened years of work in international and interstate child-custody jurisdiction. In Berezowsky v. Ojeda, 765 F.3d 456 (5th Cir. 2014), and related proceedings, I served as trial counsel for Mr. Rendon and obtained sole conservatorship of a two-year-old he had never met—an uncommon appearance for a family-law dispute in the Fifth Circuit.

For a period I worked with my college roommate, Christopher Scott Hamilton, of Hamilton Wingo in Dallas.

I also joined the early Bloomberg Law project, working with Bloomberg Terminals to read and reduce to single precise sentences every reported New York decision from the state’s founding to the present. It was exacting work inside one of the finest businesses in the country, and it sharpened both writing and an understanding of how technology could order the law.

In 2012 I joined Roerig, Oliveira & Fisher in the Valley for the extensive hailstorm litigation opposite Steve Mostyn. I was the newest lawyer and, within weeks, senior associate. I worked for every partner and for every national insurance carrier the firm represented.

The volume was large and the pace was high. I managed hundreds of cases, conducted hundreds of mediations—sometimes dozens in a single week—and brought numerous qui tam actions involving Medicare fraud. The work was intense. We did well. I will always be glad of the time spent there.

The civil-defense matters included representation of the City of Brownsville on sovereign-immunity claims, representation of Charles E. Butt of H-E-B in apex-deposition disputes, and coverage analysis for the national carriers in complex decisions.

Among the appeals was Long Island Village Owners Association, Inc. v. Berry, No. 13-14-00363-CV (Tex. App.—Corpus Christi–Edinburg 2016). I was trial and appellate counsel, prepared the briefing, and delivered the opening and closing arguments. A jury-trial judgment involving canal maintenance obligations in a Port Isabel condominium development was affirmed.

I later moved to Houston as senior associate in a rapidly growing practice. During and after the pandemic I returned to my own work.

In all this time I tried Lee v. Wei, Cause No. 201246488, in the 245th Judicial District Court of Harris County, preventing a child’s abduction to China; tried Enloe v. Enloe, Cause No. 201143312, in the 309th Judicial District Court of Harris County, effecting service on a disappeared parent on Easter Island; obtained a complete division of a substantial marital estate in favor of my client; and advanced novel arguments concerning bank financing in the Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. v. Smuck matters (including No. 14-12-00574-CV, Tex. App.—Houston [14th Dist.] 2013, pet. denied). My client had lost a billion dollars attempting to rebuild houses after Hurricane Katrina. In the end he wanted to defeat one bank. We did.

I now practice in Galveston in a smaller boutique while building AI legal software. The work remains the same: take the burden early, choose the destination with care, and leave intact what can be guided rather than broken.