I went to law school to become a civil-rights lawyer and found my calling pursuing economic justice. The son of two public school teachers, raised in Zebulon, I came to a conviction early that economic stability is the foundation upon which every other form of justice rests. My career has been an attempt to act on that belief at scale.
That conviction hardened in law school, when I helped organize some of the first groups of students to reach New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to provide pro bono legal services to people who had lost everything. What I took from that experience was a sharper understanding of how systems fail people and what it takes to meaningfully show up when they do.
Professional portrait
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In my first year of law school, I helped organize some of the first groups of students to reach New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina — providing pro bono legal services to families who had lost everything. I didn't wait to be asked. I saw what needed doing and organized people to do it.
That experience taught me something I've carried through every case since: showing up matters. Not in theory. Actually showing up — prepared, persistent, and on the side of the people who needed someone in their corner.
It started in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, representing state attorneys general in the mortgage fraud and predatory lending litigation that followed. The scale of what had happened to American families made clear that individual cases, however well-litigated, weren't sufficient. You had to change the systems.
At the North Carolina Department of Justice, I led the multistate Navient investigation, closed Charlotte School of Law, and fought for-profit college chains that had defrauded thousands of students — producing $142 million in debt cancellation for more than 12,000 North Carolinians. Federal work at the CFPB added another dimension: building supervision strategy, designing rapid-response systems, and understanding how enforcement decisions ripple across entire markets.
Eva Jane Frady Liles served two terms as a Zebulon town commissioner and as mayor pro tem, ran the Chamber of Commerce for a decade, threw out the first pitch at the Carolina Mudcats' inaugural game, and knew everyone in town. Going out to eat with her in Zebulon was like going out with the Queen.
She showed me from an early age that public service is not abstract — it's showing up, knowing your neighbors, fighting for your community, and staying in it for the long haul. North Carolina is not just where I'm from. It's why I do what I do.
I'm a 13th-generation North Carolinian, an Eagle Scout, and a UNC graduate — BA in Economics and Political Science, JD from Carolina Law. I live in Raleigh with my wife, Nan, and our two boys, Emmett and Wells. The work I do is shaped, in no small part, by the state I want them to inherit.
I'm building an independent practice at the intersection of law, policy, and strategy — focused on complex economic accountability matters where those disciplines have to work together to produce results. My clients are organizations, coalitions, state and local governments, and real people who need a seasoned advocate who understands the full system and isn't limited to one corner of it.
If you're working on something where the stakes are real and you haven't found the right approach yet — I'd like to hear about it.