My life’s background really helped prepare me to be a family law lawyer.
What I mean by that is I uh faced my fair share of challenges in life. I was born in a rural part of upstate New
York. Um my dad died unexpectedly when I was 9 years old. And as a result of that, when I was 12 years old, my mom
made the decision to move our entire family to Southern California to be closer to u her sister and her parents.
So that was um a lot of adversity that I faced during that three or four year stretch of my life. I started at junior
high school. I didn’t know anyone at my school, but I persevered with the help of my family. And in my first year in
California, I met who would become my best friend. When we graduated high school, he went to UCLA. I went to
community college. I started visiting him at UCLA and right away I learned that that was a great place and that’s
where I wanted to finish my undergraduate studies. So, I worked as hard as I could in community college and
I decided that I was going to get straight A’s and apply to UCLA. And I knew one way or another I was going to
get into UCLA and I did and I transferred there and I finished my last two years uh of undergraduate at UCLA.
My experience at UCLA, if you can’t tell, has become an important part of me and who I am and um who I’ve become as a
lawyer, even though I end up going to USC law school, which people always find interesting. And it was a great
education and I made some really good friends there. But I uh always tell people once a Bruin, always a Bruin. And
whenever UCLA and USC are facing each other in athletics, I’m always rooting for UCLA. While I was at USC Law School,
I took a class called family law, and it was taught by someone who is now a well-known mediator and retired judge.
At the time, he was a family law judge.
Um, and that was my first experience into family law. And what I really came
to understand about family law through that class was that family law was an area where I could help people and
individuals rather than entities and corporations. And that was where I started thinking about pursuing family
law as a career after I completed law school.
Uh, what I really like about Family Law is that our clients are real people.
They’re not entities. They’re not organizations. They’re not corporations.
We represent real people. And they’re going through a difficult time in life.
And I think that the adversity that I experienced in life helps me to relate to our clients. And look, being a family
law lawyer can be stressful and it’s not always fun and it’s certainly not always easy, but it’s very rewarding um to help
people through a difficult time. And very often our clients are very grateful for the services that we provide and for the help that we give them getting
through the difficult parts in their life. And I’m often uh happy to share with clients the experiences that I’ve
had to let them know that I’ve been through difficult times too and I’m going to help them get through their difficult times and they can still find happiness and a good life ahead.