My legal career started and grew as a natural progression of occurrences rather than a planned event. I never really aspired to be an attorney until my senior year at the University of Illinois when I began to wonder what I would do after school with my Political Science degree. My good friend Colin Bruce, who is now the lead federal prosecutor for the Central Illinois (Urbana) United State’s Attorneys Office, comes from a family of well-connected lawyers and he, understanding my dilemma, suggested that I should take the LSAT with him, so I did. Afterward, I submitted my grades and was accepted to DePaul University College of Law, among others. That sealed it. From 1986 to ’89, I rarely lifted my head from a book. In hindsight, I’d say my first year of law school was more grueling than Marine Corps boot camp.

Criminal/Traffic defense was not my original intended legal path either. It was a natural gravitation as well. I recall thinking in law school, “I’ll never do that.” Well, never say “never.” As a senior in law school I held an internship at the Lake County State’s Attorneys Office under Fred Foreman (who is now a most-respected full circuit judge in Lake County). There I cut my teeth in traffic court prosecuting DUI’s and moving violations. Then, after passing the Illinois Bar Exam in 1989 I joined The Law Offices of Howard M. Lang, a general practice firm as their junior associate. I was assigned many different types of legal tasks that included DUI defense and traffic court. Success sowed the way to more and more of it.

On February 14, 1991 I opened offices with my close law school friend, Neal Levin. Our offices were in the near-west side of Chicago. We had a variety of clients including matters in business, real estate, entertainment, civil litigation and criminal defense. Again for me, there was a natural progression toward criminal defense and happy clients always seem to send happy clients. I joined the Chicago Bar Association and the Illinois State Bar Association Traffic Section Council. Being on a parent committee for over ten years allowed me to gain leadership skills, teach classes to attorneys and chair meetings for other leaders in my field – not to mention that it afforded me a great wealth of knowledge of criminal and traffic law that has a practical application in my professional life every single day.

In June of 1993 I left Chicago and opened my first office in Waukegan to be closer to home. To get business I did what came naturally which led to more defense work. Traffic work was, and still is, bread and butter to me. Helping good people out of a pinch has always been gratifying. Traffic law is great, however when you are young and eager, felony work is the promise land. Gradually, over time I climbed the ranks and gained a lot of very valuable felony jury trial and bench trial experience. Ultimately, I was part of the defense team on two different complicated and tragic Illinois death penalty cases. One ended in a life sentence plea negotiation, the other went to jury trial and ended in a guilty finding, conviction on murder, and the imposition of a life sentence without the possibility of parole - justice served with no death sentence imposed in either case. Those and other court experiences like them steeled my nerve and gave me professional poise to begin what was to come next in my career.

In December of 1999 I got a phone call from my brother Adam in LA saying that his band mates in TOOL had a need for a legal watchdog to watch over their legal and business affairs and they’d like me to come on board. They had by that time seen a great deal of the world via their concert tours, they had sold multi-platinum records, they were nominated for and had won Grammy Awards as well as MTV Music Awards, but in their artist’s perspective, they found the business of the music industry to be distasteful. They needed someone that they could trust implicitly. Despite having very little entertainment experience and operating from my little office in Waukegan, Tool put immense amounts of trust in me to do the job. I was inspired to work hard for them and I still am. I listened to anyone that would explain any aspect of the business to me, I read everything that I could get my hands on, and overtime, I learned to be highly effective. Management of an operation on their scale is all about organization, planning, choosing excellent people for the right job and, above all, integrity. TOOL has immense artistic strength and impeccable integrity and to top it off, they are insightful businessmen. They have surrounded themselves with excellent people and they move slowly and cautiously through their business world. Hence, it makes my job that much more rewarding.

Gradually, as TOOL increased my profile in their business I welcomed every minute of it, so I compensated my time constraints by decreasing the amount of complicated felony work that I accepted. The transition came quite naturally. Philosophically, it was an easy change for me to make to move from representing destructive felons to representing creative and influential individuals, artists and their businesses. That is not to say that everyone I’ve represented in the criminal court system has been dishonest and destructive. To the contrary, I’m privileged to say that there have been truly innocent people on my client list, and there have been many genuinely good people that were guilty, but also deserving of my best efforts and a second chance from society. I still take one or two felony cases at a time for good people that are willing to work hard to obtain a well-deserved break. That is also why I still enjoy DUI/Traffic work – if a good person is going to get into trouble, they’re not going to rob a bank, they’re going to get into a scrape on the road. There will always be a need for a guy like me to help good people through a legal entanglement.

So, I seem to have come full circle in my career. I began my career handling DUI and Traffic matters before climbing the felony defense ladder. Once there, I found greener pastures in business and entertainment law and learned the ins and outs of something I had not expected, but have genuinely come to love. And better yet, DUI and traffic matters still fit perfectly into my practice as many years of experience in the field help me get excellent results and I still get that satisfaction of helping good people out of a legal pinch. Hence, like the two different but consistent energies of yin and yang, my mornings are filled with court and my afternoons are filled with entertainment/business matters and I couldn’t be more pleased to spend my working days as a self-employed attorney.