Meet Mark
Autistic special education attorney. Parent-rights strategist. Builder of the Ask an IEP Lawyer Show.
I’ve been practicing law in Utah since 2014. Early on, I built my practice around one thing: standing up for families when schools stop making sense.
I launched Utah IEP Advocates because I saw how badly parents needed someone who could explain the law, understand the system, and actually help them move forward.
Over the years, I’ve worked with families in nearly every district in Utah, coordinated with service providers across the state, and spent thousands of hours helping parents understand their rights in special education.
Why Families Reach Out to Me
Parents usually do not call me because everything is going smoothly.
They call when school has become confusing, overwhelming, unfair, or impossible to figure out. They call when something feels wrong, when the school’s explanation does not make sense, or when they know their child is being failed but do not yet know how to explain it.
That is where I come in. My job is to turn confusing school problems into clear legal strategy. I help parents organize the facts, understand what matters, identify the pressure points, and figure out what to do next.
How I Got Here
I didn’t plan on becoming a special education lawyer. I planned on being a prosecutor. But then I started working with families in the disability community, and I realized something: the system wasn’t just complicated—it was often fundamentally broken for the people it was supposed to serve. I saw parents who were experts on their children being treated like they didn’t understand the 'educational jargon' being used to deny them services. I saw schools hiding behind procedural technicalities. I decided then that I would rather spend my career helping parents break through those walls than building them.
Why I Work Differently
My neurodivergence is my greatest professional asset. Because I am autistic, my brain processes information as systems and connections rather than isolated events. When I look at three years of school records, I am not just reading pages; I am looking for the glitch in the logic.
I see patterns.
I see systems.
I see pressure points.
I see contradictions.
While the school sees a 'difficult meeting,' I see the exact legal lever that needs to be pulled to get your child what they need.
What I Actually Help Parents Do
- Identify exactly where the school is failing to follow the law
- Translate school jargon into plain English strategy
- Organized mountains of records into clear evidence
- Determine the 'next move' that actually creates pressure
- Write the emails and formal requests that schools can't ignore
Sometimes that happens in one 45-minute conversation. Sometimes it happens over months of deeper strategy as a paying client. Sometimes it happens because I pointed a parent toward a free resource that gave them the confidence to stand their ground.
My goal is to make sure you never walk into a school building feeling powerless again.
The Ask an IEP Lawyer Show
Special education law is built on patterns, but for parents, it usually feels like a collection of disjointed, high-stakes crises. The Ask an IEP Lawyer Show was created to bridge that gap. I created this show because I saw that when you organize the facts correctly, the law stops being a mystery and starts being a tool.
The sequence is always the same: we take a parent who feels overwhelmed, we organize the facts of their case, we make the law make sense, and suddenly, a strategic path forward appears. To protect families, every consultation starts as a private call. With explicit, written consent and complete anonymization, these sessions are developed into episodes—turning one family's breakthrough into a roadmap for others.
What Parents Need Most
Most parents do not need a performance, they do not need more legal jargon, and they usually do not need a generic answer to a specific problem. They need someone to look at the moving parts of their child's case—the evaluations, the IEP goals, the progress reports, and the school's stated position—and help them make a smart next move. That is what I try to do.
If You’re Here Because School Stopped Making Sense
You are in the right place.
You do not need to understand special education law before you reach out.
You do not need to have every document organized.
You do not need to know whether the school has clearly broken the law yet.
If something feels wrong, start with the call.
Because of the generous support of community members, consultation calls are currently available at no cost to parents.
You do not have to keep guessing.