I am a FinTech, digital rights and free speech lawyer with Byrne & Storm, P.C., and a Senior Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute. I am a dual-qualified US attorney-at-law and English solicitor. I am also the architect of the GRANITE Act and the Adam Smith Institute’s Freedom of Speech Bill, an effort to launch a coordinated transatlantic legislative response to foreign censorship enforcement. I have worked for nearly two decades at the intersection of emerging technology and international regulation.
If your company has been targeted by a foreign censorship agency, fighting foreign censorship is what I love to do. For that, or for any other business legal problem for that matter, get in touch. For media or professional inquiries, contact me via this contact form or on LinkedIn.
Commercial work.
About half of my practice consists of FinTech compliance and product counsel work. This includes a wide range of commercial legal advice building and fixing compliance systems, product design, data privacy, investigations, litigation strategy, law enforcement requests, board reporting, and corporate governance. I also have experience managing disputes, including cross-border commercial litigation and international arbitration.
Digital rights work.
The other half sits at the intersection of the First Amendment and the sprawling global regulatory apparatus that foreign governments have built to circumvent it, focusing on social media and related platform regulation. This work is primarily concerned with defending the constitutional rights of American Internet companies and their users from foreign regulatory intrusions.
In 2025, I aggressively defended every American target of formal enforcement proceedings from UK Internet censorship agency Ofcom, which has issued 197 separate investigative demands to US-based companies without using a single diplomatic or treaty channel. My clients are, to date, the only American companies publicly known, in the lawful exercise of their constitutional rights, to have refused those demands. Ofcom’s success rate in compelling their obedience to the UK’s speech regulatory regime is 0%.
The result of my clients’ dogged resistance to foreign censorship enforcement on American soil is (1) a case that leading transatlantic law firms describe as a “landmark moment in the debate over who governs the Internet,” (2) increased awareness of the foreign censorship problem across the United States, and (3) active movement on law reform proposals that continue to reshape policy debate on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the United States, that legislative movement includes the GRANITE Act, a foreign censorship shield law I conceived in October 2025 that went from a blog post, to passing a chamber of the Wyoming state house, to State Department confirmation of federal consideration in under four months. The Wyoming GRANITE Act, introduced last-minute in January, passed the Wyoming House of Representatives 46-12 in February 2026 during a short budget session, has been taken up as a committee bill in the interim and will be back aiming at full passage in the general session in early 2027. State GRANITE efforts are underway in several other states. Senator Eric Schmitt has vowed to introduce a GRANITE-style shield bill in the US Senate, and the US House of Representatives is reportedly considering its own companion legislation. The GRANITE Act proposal would allow Americans to sue foreign sovereigns in American courts for substantial damages awards if they are victimized by foreign censorship enforcement attempts.
In the United Kingdom, I sit on the Legal Advisory Council of the UK Free Speech Union. I am also lead co-author of the Adam Smith Institute’s Freedom of Speech Bill 2026, model legislation designed to replicate the First Amendment’s legal protections within the UK’s constitutional system, published in April 2026. This fully-formed Model Bill is derived from an earlier policy paper and Article 10-style prototype enacting statute I proposed in 2020. The Model Bill has generated immediate parliamentary engagement, described by one sitting member of the House of Lords as a “fantastic contribution to this discussion [that] has already created a lively debate that hopefully adds to re-energising the growing campaign to make speech less strangled by law” and described by another as “extremely good.”
My free speech work spans nearly a decade of defending US technology companies against domestic and foreign censorship. I have represented Americans against attempts to censor or chill constitutionally protected speech online by public bodies acting under the authority of numerous countries and international organizations, including the United States, the UK, France, Germany, the European Union, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Brazil.
Prior work.
Earlier in my career I worked as a securitization lawyer in BigLaw in London. I co-founded and served as COO and General Counsel of Monax Industries, an early enterprise blockchain company that forked Ethereum in 2014 to build the first Ethereum DAO prototype and the first permissioned blockchain client — work that evolved into Apache-licensed Hyperledger Burrow, the Hyperledger Project’s first Ethereum Virtual Machine, subsequently used by Intel and IBM. I have taught cryptocurrency law at Fordham Law School and Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.