Credentials

J.D., summa cum laude

University of Akron School of Law, 2019

Law Review and Moot Court

Constitutional Law Center Senior Fellow and Knight Foundation Fellow

Patent examiner extern, USPTO

Art Group 2685, Alexandria — and a U.S. patent holder in his own right

Law clerk, Federal Trade Commission

Federal antitrust: merger and market power analysis

Extern to Justice O’Donnell

Supreme Court of Ohio — research and recommendations on motions and appeals

Eleven years in software engineering

GE Healthcare, Caradigm, IDX Systems, Premera Blue Cross, Highmark

Four years as his own IP firm

JNP Legal PLLC — patents, copyright, trademarks, trade secrets

Architect of Civil Rule 26

The authorized-retrieval discovery method published at civilrule26.com

Education

Juris Doctor, summa cum laude

University of Akron School of Law · 2015–2019 Law Review; Moot Court; Constitutional Law Center Senior Fellow; Knight Foundation Fellow; IP and Technology Law Group

Visiting third-year student

University of Washington School of Law · 2017–2018 Antitrust, employment, intellectual property, securities, and non-profit law

Graduate series in biomedical and health informatics

University of Washington School of Medicine · 2005–2006 Twelve credits across clinical interfaces, molecular biology, public health, and research

B.S., Computer Science Engineering

The Ohio State University · 1994–2000

Eleven years moving regulated data between institutions

John took a computer science engineering degree from Ohio State, and almost all of the career that followed sat on the same problem: getting sensitive records to move correctly and provably from one institution to another. He built electronic data interchanges for business-to-business transactions at Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, then X12 and HIPAA transaction systems at Premera Blue Cross. At IDX Systems he designed and installed electronic medical records systems for major healthcare institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom — and took a graduate series in biomedical and health informatics at the University of Washington School of Medicine while he was doing it.

He spent five years at GE Healthcare leading development of an ontology management platform and its run-time services, and was repeatedly brought in to rescue projects that had gone off the rails. At Caradigm he led development of the designer and debugger for the core data ingestion platform, and the early prototyping around clinical decision support. Along the way he contributed to machine learning in healthcare, work for which he holds a U.S. patent.

Financial discovery is the same problem wearing different clothes: regulated records, held by institutions that will not release them casually, that have to arrive complete and provably unaltered. Very few attorneys have ever built that kind of system. John spent a decade doing it.

Law school, the patent office, and the FTC

John entered law school in 2015 and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Akron in 2019, on Law Review and Moot Court, as a Senior Fellow of the Constitutional Law Center and a Knight Foundation Fellow. He spent his third year visiting at the University of Washington School of Law, reading antitrust, securities, employment, and intellectual property — which is how a Seattle practice grew out of an Ohio degree.

Along the way he externed for Justice O'Donnell of the Supreme Court of Ohio, researching motions and appeals for the Justice; at the United States Patent and Trademark Office as a patent examiner extern in Art Group 2685; and at the Federal Trade Commission on federal antitrust, doing merger and market power analysis. He also ran the North East Ohio Student Venture Fund, investing in early-stage technology companies and leading the University of Akron's technology transfer delegation.

Four years running his own firm

From 2019 to 2023 John practiced as JNP Legal PLLC, handling the full spectrum of intellectual property — patents, copyright, trademarks, and trade secrets — for technology companies. Because non-compete and franchise arrangements are only lawful within the scope of legitimate intellectual property, that work ran straight into federal antitrust, which is exactly the ground he had covered at the FTC.

Family law, and the method he built for it

In 2023 John joined McKinley Irvin, one of Washington's largest family law firms, where he worked hundreds of matters alongside dozens of attorneys and learned the field at volume. He founded Broadview Family Law in 2025 to practice it with the engineering discipline the work actually demands — the client portal, the billing, and the discovery tooling are all software he wrote, which is why a two-attorney firm can run a matter with the transparency of a much larger one.

Dissolution turns on what an account held on one particular day, and that date almost never lands on a statement close. The conventional answer is a subpoena to the bank: weeks of waiting, a custodian's fee, and monthly summaries a court is then asked to interpolate between. John designed and built the alternative. At civilrule26.com, the account holder authorizes a read-only, revocable retrieval at their own institution, and the records return at transaction level — every posting date and amount, enough to compute a balance for any day in the window and to pull it again later to confirm nothing moved.

He also wrote the memorandum that puts the method in front of a court: Rule 26(b)(1) proportionality, Rule 45(d)(1) burden on the non-party institution, and authentication under Rules 901(b)(9), 902(13) and 902(14). It is published for any attorney to adapt. Very few family law attorneys can explain, in a declaration, why the record they are offering is reliable at the level of the system that produced it. That is the part John built.

Why the engineering matters to your case

A dissolution is a financial reconstruction problem wearing a legal caption: balances on a fixed date, transfers traced across institutions, a business interest to characterize, a support calculation that has to survive scrutiny. John's background means those questions get handled directly rather than delegated and hoped over. Every case is treated as mission critical, with exacting tolerances on every figure in every document — not because speed is the goal, but because accuracy is.

Practice areas

• • Divorce and legal separation
• • Child custody and parenting plans
• • Child support
• • Spousal maintenance
• • Relocation
• • Unmarried couples
• • Military family law
• • Business interests and closely held assets

Why family law

"I practice family law because helping people and making a difference is so important to me."

John has navigated divorce himself, as a parent. He knows what parenting plans, negotiation, and mediation feel like from the other side of the table, and what it costs to go through them while trying to hold a family together. He works alongside his father, has two children, teaches sailing at the Center for Wooden Boats, and teaches snowboarding at Alpental.

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