About
I'm an attorney licensed in Oregon and Michigan. I spent most of the past decade not in a law firm, but running a company.
From 2015 to 2024, I co-founded and led PSI Labs, one of the first state-licensed cannabis testing laboratories in Michigan, while serving both as its in-house legal and regulatory lead. I helped our company carefully navigate and interpret statutes and rules that hadn't been tested, and were sometimes rolled out haphazardly. I negotiated contracts when there were no templates. I managed regulatory investigations in a nascent industry, where operators and regulators alike were "flying the plane while building it." I engaged directly with legislators and agency directors, and drafted proposed standards that were ultimately adopted into rule. I ran operations, raised capital, and built a team at the same time.
I sat in both seats at once - founder and lawyer, operator and de facto lobbyist - for nearly a decade.
That experience left me with something genuinely hard to replicate: a detailed, firsthand understanding of how regulated systems actually work versus how they're supposed to work. A business thrives or dies not only based on its governing rules and regulations, but on their enforcement - or in some cases, their lack thereof. Where the true exposure lives. Which rules get enforced and which ones don't. What regulators actually care about regardless of statutory law. When outside counsel is the right tool and when it simply adds overhead without adding clarity.
That's the foundation of my current practice.
I work with a small number of clients at a time, by design. Advisory services are non-legal in nature, clearly scoped, and priced to reflect the value of good judgment rather than the overhead of a firm. When legal services are the right tool, I provide them directly: billed separately and always clearly distinguished from advisory work.