I learned to litigate during the 2008 financial crisis, representing state attorneys general against the largest financial institutions in the country in mortgage fraud and predatory lending cases that reshaped the industry. Multi-party, high-exposure, and unforgiving. Hundreds of thousands of families' financial futures were on the line.
I took that experience into trial courts and appellate courts, multistate investigations, and federal regulatory proceedings across nearly two decades of state and federal enforcement work, against adversaries with deep resources and every incentive to run out the clock. The student loan crisis was its own education: cases sprawling across agencies and jurisdictions, where the complexity itself was a defense strategy.
I have drafted federal court pleadings, argued on appeal, and led investigations that produced landmark settlements. I know how to read a case for its real leverage, build a record that holds, and keep pressure on when the other side is counting on attrition. That skill set doesn't belong to any one subject matter — it travels.
Charlotte School of Law marketed itself as a pathway to the legal profession for students who might not otherwise access it — a second-chance law school, a vehicle for upward mobility. That was the pitch. The reality was something else.
CSL was owned by InfiLaw, a private equity-backed for-profit chain, and operated with one overriding incentive: enrollment. To grow enrollment, the school steadily lowered admissions standards, accepting students who, by the school's own internal metrics, had less than an 18 percent chance of ever becoming a practicing attorney. Those students were still encouraged to borrow up to $200,000 to attend. The school collected tuition. The students collected debt.
This is what predatory access looks like: the language of opportunity deployed to paper over deliberate exploitation. CSL knew its bar passage rates were collapsing — from among the best in the state in 2010 to roughly 19 percent for the class of 2016. It responded by offering students money to delay taking the bar exam so the numbers wouldn't show up in public reporting.
At the NC Department of Justice, I led the state's investigation and enforcement strategy — coordinating with the ABA, the UNC Board of Governors, and the U.S. Department of Education to close the school and protect students. The strategy had three components:
- Civil fraud investigation. We opened a consumer protection investigation into CSL's misrepresentations to prospective and enrolled students — the false promises about accreditation status, bar passage rates, and employment outcomes. That investigation created legal jeopardy for the institution and its owners.
- Licensing coordination. Working with the UNC Board of Governors, we established conditions the school could not meet — requiring both restored federal aid eligibility and ABA approval of a teach-out plan by a hard deadline. When CSL missed that deadline, the license expired automatically.
- Student debt relief. Using a rarely-invoked "exceptional circumstances" provision of the closed school discharge rules, I wrote the letter to Secretary DeVos invoking that provision and argued that students who withdrew while the school was visibly collapsing should not be penalized. The Trump administration ultimately granted the extension.
The for-profit college industry learned early that the language of access and opportunity could be used to insulate predatory practices from scrutiny. Calling a school a second-chance institution doesn't make it one. And the students being exploited were disproportionately first-generation college students, veterans, and people of color — exactly the people the access pitch was designed to attract.
Getting the Trump administration to cancel student debt for defrauded borrowers wasn't a political win. It was a legal argument, made carefully, grounded in statute, and hard to refuse on the merits. That's the kind of leverage I look for.
Navient was the largest student loan servicer in the country — responsible for managing the repayment of more than $300 billion in federal and private student loans for millions of borrowers. It was also, by the evidence the multistate investigation would develop, systematically steering those borrowers away from affordable repayment options and into costly long-term forbearances that were good for Navient's bottom line and bad for everyone who owed money.
When a borrower called struggling to make payments, Navient's representatives were supposed to counsel them on income-driven repayment plans. Instead, Navient pushed borrowers into forbearance — a temporary pause that kept interest accruing. Borrowers who thought they were getting help were quietly falling deeper into debt.
Navient called these individual customer service breakdowns. The investigation would prove they were something else entirely.
I served as North Carolina's lead attorney and representative on the executive committee of the multistate investigation — the group of five or six states that actually ran the investigation, developed the legal claims, coordinated across all participating states, and conducted negotiations directly with Navient. North Carolina sat alongside Pennsylvania, Washington, Illinois, Massachusetts, and California in that core leadership group.
The central legal challenge: Navient had a contract with the federal government and argued that state consumer protection law was preempted by federal regulation. Defeating preemption was not just a legal obstacle — it was a threshold question for whether state attorneys general could ever hold a federal student loan servicer accountable.
Keeping the coalition intact over five years required more than legal strategy. When some states broke away to file independent lawsuits, the executive committee had to hold the remaining states together and resist pressure to take whatever was on the table. At one point, Navient's CEO showed up unannounced to lobby my Attorney General directly. I was in that room. I had spent months gathering sworn declarations from North Carolina borrowers — people who had called Navient for help and been steered into forbearance instead. Those declarations put a human face on what the data showed in aggregate: this was not a customer service problem. It was a business model.
Then January 2017 arrived. The Trump administration came in, negotiations broke down, and Navient felt emboldened. We declined the bad deal. We kept the investigation moving. The case continued after I left for the CFPB, and ultimately resolved in January 2022.
The Navient case is the best example in my career of what it takes to hold a well-resourced, well-connected institutional defendant accountable over a long period of time under adverse conditions. The legal theory had to be developed from scratch. The coalition had to hold through state defections, a hostile administration, and a defendant that thought its federal contract made it untouchable.
Navient was counting on complexity, time, and a changed political environment to make the problem go away. The answer to that strategy is not more cleverness. It is persistence, coalition discipline, and a record built on evidence strong enough — and human enough — that no CEO visit or political headwind can neutralize it.