“I love representing my clients because almost inevitably my cases are “David vs. Goliath”-type conflicts — and I love slaying Goliath every chance I get.
My family is composed of lawyers, and I’ve been a ham since the day I was born. As a result, I grew to really love the art of litigation. In the mid-90s, I got really interested in the subject of wrongful foreclosure, and by 2007 it was pretty clear to me that the foreclosure crisis was imminent — and that American homeowners were going to need lawyers with expertise in borrower representation. I joined NACA soon after and have worked on behalf of consumers ever since.
Since I started practicing, I’ve always kept NCLC’s manuals on my bookshelf. Without them, I would have been wholly incapable of identifying issues and figuring out how to leverage federal protections in favor of the few consumer clients I had. The subject area just doesn’t lend itself to self-education, and law schools, at least back then, didn’t really teach consumer law. So NCLC’s publications and conferences were, and remain, absolutely indispensable for every consumer lawyer.
I’m optimistic about consumer law as a “movement” and as an area of practice. The foreclosure crisis demonstrated how abuses of consumers at the micro level can propagate and result in devastating consequences for entire economies at the macro level. Federal legislation has somewhat stiffened protections under RESPA and TILA, and while these protections aren’t perfect, the more we can master these laws, the more we can leverage and expand on them as we educate our colleagues and the judges hearing our cases.”