20+ year of experience
Trial ready
Personal attention
He takes cases where he can actually help.
Sometimes that means staying on a file long after the budget should have closed it, because closing it means a child doesn’t come home.
If you call our office, you will not be sold to. You will be asked questions — sometimes uncomfortable ones — about what happened, what the social worker has already documented, and what you’ve already signed. Mo will tell you honestly what your case looks like and what the road ahead is going to require.
He will also tell you that he is going to fight for you. Not in a way that promises outcomes no lawyer can promise — but in a way that means every part of the case where there is room to push, he pushes. Every report he can object to, he objects. Every witness he can challenge, he challenges. Every motion that can be filed in your favor, he files.
That is what we mean when we say honesty. Honesty in this practice is not pessimism. It is telling the parent what the case actually looks like, what the realistic outcomes are, and then doing absolutely everything within those realities to get the best result possible.
A dependency case is not a transaction. It is twelve to eighteen months — sometimes more — of hearings, status reviews, social worker interactions, evaluations, visitation conflicts, and small daily decisions that add up to whether a child sleeps in their parent’s home or doesn’t.
Mo finishes cases. He does not hand a parent off to a junior associate at the six-month review. He does not stop returning calls when the original retainer has been spent. If he started the case, he finishes it.
That principle has cost the firm money more times than is good for it. Mo keeps doing it. The reason is simple: a parent who hired private representation should not show up to a critical hearing without the lawyer they retained, because the file got expensive and the case moved on without them. So when a case runs longer than the budget anticipated — and dependency cases often do — the work continues.
Because the work is not about Mo, and it is not about the firm. It is about whether a specific child whose name is on a specific petition gets to come home.
Every dependency case has a parent on one side and an agency on the other and a child caught between them. The agency has unlimited resources, full-time social workers, dedicated County Counsel, and institutional inertia on its side. The parent has whatever they walked in with — usually fear, usually exhaustion, usually a story no one in the system has bothered to listen to carefully.
A lawyer who shows up minutes before the Detention Hearing, reads the report for the first time at counsel table, and submits because the calendar is heavy is not malicious. They are overworked. But the gap between “overworked” and “the right outcome for this family” is what private representation is supposed to fill. If private representation operates on the same time pressure as appointed counsel, there is no point hiring private representation at all.
Mo decided early in his career that he was not willing to be that lawyer.
Sometimes parents call us after the hardest part has already happened. They’ve given recorded interviews. They’ve signed forms a lawyer would have told them not to sign. They’ve answered questions they didn’t have to answer. By the time they reach us, the agency already has a record built largely from the parent’s own words.
These are some of the hardest cases in dependency law. Mo takes them.
What he won’t do is promise to make the existing record disappear. The damage that’s already in the file is in the file, and a parent deserves to be told that honestly. What Mo will do is everything that comes next: contest the parts that can still be contested, build a counter-record through evaluations and independent witnesses, push for the case plan most likely to lead to reunification, and fight every status report that misrepresents the parent’s progress.
A case that started badly is not a lost case. It is a harder case. Parents who walk into our office in this position get the same fight as anyone else — plus a clear-eyed conversation about what the road actually looks like.
Mo will not tell a parent what they want to hear just to take the case.
If the case is going to be a fight, he says so. If the realistic outcome is reunification within twelve months, he says so. If the realistic outcome is harder than that, he says that too. Parents sometimes leave the first call with a more sober picture than they came in with — and that is the point. A relationship that may last eighteen months and decide whether a child comes home cannot start with a lawyer telling the parent what they want to hear.
This is the part of the practice that some clients value above everything else. They have already had the conversation with the lawyer who promised them the moon. They want a different conversation. They want to know what is actually true, what the strategy actually is, and how hard the lawyer is actually going to work.
That is the conversation we have.
Fight in this context does not mean theatrical. Dependency court rewards preparation, not posturing. The lawyers who get the best results in this system are the ones who:
This is the work. It is mostly invisible. It is what Mo has done across more than 2,000 dependency cases.
If you are reading this, something is probably already happening to your family. A petition has been filed. A social worker has visited. A child has been detained or is about to be. You are trying to figure out who to trust, and you have probably already had at least one conversation that left you feeling more confused, not less.
A few honest things:
The free consultation is real. It is not a sales call. It is a conversation about your case, where we listen first and tell you what we think. We will tell you what your case looks like, what the realistic outcomes are, and what the next steps need to be — whether or not you hire us.
You will know if you’ve found your lawyer. Not because they promised you the moon. Because they asked harder questions than the last lawyer did, and because the answers they gave were specific to your facts — not generic to “CPS cases.”
The most important question to ask any dependency lawyer is “how many of these cases have you actually handled, all the way through.” Not “how long have you been a lawyer.” Not “what are your reviews like.” How many dependency files. Mo has personally handled more than 2,000. There are not many lawyers in California who can say that and mean it.
Call (866) 811-4255. Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The first conversation is free. It will be honest. We will tell you what your case looks like, what we believe is achievable, and exactly how hard we are going to work to get there.
We don’t need every case. We need the ones we can fight for, all the way through. And we know the difference.
— ALL Trial Lawyers