To kick off my new blog, I thought I should probably tell readers a bit about myself. (I’ll explain why I blog in a separate post.) I originally grew up primarily in small farming towns in Illinois and Ohio, with a brief stint during childhood in Chicago. I ended up studying economics at the University of Cincinnati (my Bearcats are going to the Orange Bowl this year) and earned my law degree from Harvard Law School - also with short stops in Washington, DC and Cleveland along the way. So I have a pretty diverse background as far as where I’ve lived, which allows me to help out when someone needs to know anything from where hay really comes from (answer: alfalfa) to which sushi restaurants in Chicago or Phoenix are worthwhile (answers, respectively: changes every month and I’m still looking).
Following law school, I took a job as an associate at Katten Muchin Rosenman in Chicago in their corporate law group – spending much of my time in mergers & acquisitions, private equity, venture capital and private real estate investment fund formation. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial bug and Katten provided a great outlet to work with start-up companies during my time there (as well as some pretty big corporations of course). That same bug led me to leave Katten and form my own real estate investment and development company in 2005 in Phoenix. We managed to successfully raise funds for investment in Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, Mexico and spent a couple of years working on bringing together the plans for vacation condominiums there. It was quite a cross-cultural business experience and provided me great perspective on managing many moving parts as the head of a business organization.
As the real estate market has gone south, I decided to use my business experience and legal background to again counsel companies as an attorney – this time with a greater appreciation of what great outside counsel can provide a growing company and a passion to provide that counsel. I successfully passed the Arizona bar exam, received my license to practice law here in November 2008 and opened my own law practice. And so here I am today, practicing business law in Phoenix. To read more about my law practice, you can click here.
I’ll post a little bit about why I blog later…
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