I spent twenty years on the inside

I started my legal career late by conventional measures. Before the bar exam, I spent two decades at the center of how commercial email actually works, including 11 years at ExactTarget — which Salesforce acquired in 2013. I led the team responsible for enforcement: abuse complaints, policy violations, blocklist relationships, and the day-to-day work of keeping a platform responsible for sending billions of messages per year from becoming a liability to the people who depended on it. At peak, my team handled more than 135,000 cases a year.

During that time, I co-chaired a committee at M³AAWG — the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group — alongside ISPs, mailbox providers, and security researchers working on the policy questions that shape how email actually gets delivered. What made those rooms interesting was what you saw there: every group had real interests at stake, no single viewpoint could carry the day, and the tradeoffs were always visible. You learned a lot about how competing incentives produce standards.

What I wasn’t doing in those rooms was practicing law. That gap bothered me for a long time. Technical expertise without a bar membership means you can identify a problem and describe it precisely, but you can’t resolve it. So, I went to law school at the University of Houston Law Center to close that gap.

I passed the Bar Exam in 2024. I hold CIPP/US and CIPM certifications from the IAPP. They confirm what more than two decades of enforcement work already established: I understand privacy law as something that operates inside real systems, not as an abstraction.

The combination of years of down-in-the-trenches enforcement experience and legal credentials is unusual. For clients dealing with email compliance, privacy law, or data breach questions, it’s usually that combination that matters most.