John is a corporate and commercial transactions lawyer who advises companies, founders, investors, and executives at all stages, from initial structuring to exit.

His clients are usually the smaller party at the table, though smaller is relative. They range from executives negotiating their own compensation, to startups and closely held companies, to a platform valued at over $1 billion. What they have in common is a counterparty with more leverage, more lawyers, and its own paper. John has run his own practice for the smaller party since 2015, and he knows how big businesses and private equity negotiate because he spent the first eleven years of his career practicing at a large law firm, doing that work. He knows which terms actually move, which are worth pressing, and which to concede. His approach is pragmatic and business-focused. The goal is not to win every point. It is to close the deal cleanly, on reasonable business terms that meet the client’s business needs.

For many clients, John is the legal department they do not yet have, working directly with owners and management, often for years, on everything from MSAs, vendor and customer agreements, and privacy terms to employee onboarding, governance, and the rest of the day-to-day legal work of running a company. For others, he is an extension of an existing in-house team, taking the commercial agreements, acquisitions and asset deals, data privacy and AI terms, or executive compensation work that the team does not have the bandwidth or the specialist depth to absorb.

John’s practice is AI-forward. He uses AI daily for drafting, review, and legal research, and that fluency carries into his advice: when he negotiates AI addenda and data terms, he is working with technology he actually uses, not technology he has only read about. It also gives a solo practice the technology leverage of the large firms across the table, without the overhead that comes with them. That difference shows up in his rates.

His practice spans commercial agreements, data privacy and AI, mergers and acquisitions, financings, executive compensation, and general corporate advisory. His clients include companies in the software (including SaaS), technology, digital platform, creator economy, consumer products, health and wellness, entertainment, energy, manufacturing, and services industries. He also advises several publicly-traded Latin America-based corporations and foreign law firms on U.S. legal matters, and high-net-worth individuals and families on personal investments.

John is licensed in Washington and Texas. He practices from his office on Bainbridge Island, Washington, travels frequently to Austin, and is fluent in Spanish, serving clients in Mexico and Latin America in their own language.

John began practicing in 2004. Before starting his own firm, he was a corporate partner and co-chair of the international practice group at Strasburger & Price in Austin, Texas, then a 200-lawyer firm and now part of Clark Hill. He is also of counsel to Cain & Skarnulis PLLC in Austin.