I’ve spent more than 30 years resolving complicated and consequential legal disputes. For more than a dozen of those years, I was an Associate General Counsel at Amazon, where I managed Amazon’s global portfolio of intellectual property litigation, a position from which I retired in January 2025.

            I continue to be engaged in legal matters, but on a more limited scale.

            Writing Workshops. For many years I presented a legal writing lecture to law firms and businesses with which I was affiliated. I still hear from some of my former colleagues (many of whom are now long into successful legal careers) about how they continue to invoke some of the techniques and insights that we discussed decades ago. I have taken that show on the road and today offer my writing course more widely to law firms, companies, government agencies, and other associations where good writing is a non-negotiable requirement for professional success.

            Mediation Services. As one can imagine, I have negotiated the resolution of more disputes than I can remember. Sometimes, I was the lawyer. Other times, I was the client. Most times, however, I felt more like the mediator, publicly questioning my own clients or lawyers (depending on my role) while teaching my adversaries how deeply I understood their positions, which would earn their trust—all with a view towards reducing a sprawling and cacophonous dispute into one or two manageable questions on which everything else depended. Many lawyers and mediators have told me that one day I should become a professional mediator. I have taken their advice.

            Legal Representation. I don’t keep a docket of cases. But I am still interested in helping people with matters of social, legal, or political significance. We live in complicated times, and there are many questions of great consequence for our republic that have yet to mature into settled precedent.

            Background. I am a 1992 alumnus of Harvard Law School, and a 1989 alumnus of the University of Chicago, where I studied political philosophy with Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, and where I served as a Junior Fellow in the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy. I was in private practice in Chicago between 1992 and 2012 before moving to Seattle to serve as an Associate General Counsel at Amazon.