One hearing can end a career before it starts.
Campus proceedings with life-altering stakes and none of a courtroom’s protections. Students and faculty need real defense counsel in the room.
Netflix told the story. The defense was ours.
When Shonda Rhimes built Inventing Anna, the defense at its center was Todd Spodek’s - argued for the so-called fake heiress in a Manhattan courtroom long before Arian Moayed of Succession played him on screen. What 320 million hours of viewers watched is the method every client of this firm gets, in every federal district.
The record, dated and sourced.
How your case unfolds.
THE FULL PROCESS →Risk-free, in person or by phone. Ask anything, for as long as it takes. Strategy starts the same day.
A notice letter and an investigator on a schedule - counsel engages before the first interview writes the record.
Enforce the hearing rights, cross-examine through the advisor, preserve the appeal - process is the defense, and we take it to federal court when schools cut corners.
Title IX proceedings decide expulsions, terminations, and permanent records under rules that shift campus to campus - limited discovery, no real cross-examination, standards far below reasonable doubt. We prepare the respondent’s case like a trial: the evidence, the witnesses, the hearing strategy, and the appeal - and where criminal exposure runs parallel, we defend both.
A campus process with federal stakes.
Title IX cases move on a school’s clock: notice, investigation, hearing, appeal - each stage building a record that follows you into transcripts, licensure, and any parallel criminal matter. The investigator interviews first and drafts conclusions early. Counsel from the first notice shapes the record everything else inherits.
The sanction outlasts the ceremony.
Expulsion, transcript notation, and a finding that surfaces in every background check - campus sanctions outlast graduation. Where conduct is also charged criminally, statements in the campus process are discoverable. We defend both tracks as one case, because the record is one record.
Process is the defense.
The regulations guarantee live hearings, cross-examination through an advisor, and access to the evidence - schools violate them routinely. Inconsistent statements, excluded exculpatory evidence, and biased adjudicators are appealable and litigable in federal court. Procedure is not a technicality here; it is the whole fight.
The rulebook underneath the hearing.
Campus cases run on the Title IX regulations and the school’s own written policy - a contract courts increasingly enforce. Live-hearing and cross-examination rights, the amended federal rules, and the litigation that followed leave schools applying different rulebooks by state; knowing which one governs your hearing is step one. Findings travel: transcripts, licensure questions, and any parallel criminal case inherit the campus record.
Between the notice and the interview.
Request the full policy and the specific allegations in writing before any interview - vague notice is itself a violation. Preserve messages, location data, and witness names the same week. Choose an advisor who can actually cross-examine. And say nothing to friends about the facts; campus witnesses repeat everything, and the investigator interviews them all.
Know who is on the other side.
The first 72 hours decide the next 72 weeks.
No interviews, no consents, no explaining, no deleting. The words said in hour zero are the exhibits at trial. Write down what was asked and by whom - then stop.
Privilege attaches, facts get mapped while memory is fresh, documents get preserved the right way, and nobody in your orbit talks to agents unrepresented again.
We contact the government as your counsel: target, subject, or witness gets confirmed, deadlines get calendared, and the defense - not the investigation - sets the tempo.
Todd A. Spodek is a second-generation trial lawyer whose defense of Anna Delvey became Netflix's Inventing Anna. He appears on Fox News and CNN as a legal analyst, authored "My Advice to Diddy" in The Spectator, and is quoted by the Associated Press when the biggest federal cases break. The record behind the profile: a complete acquittal in a $26M money-laundering trial, RICO charges carrying a 10-year minimum dismissed, and 6 months on a $12M Ponzi case.
Why this firm.
Five decades of federal courtrooms. Whatever the government has charged, this firm has defended it before.
No allegiance to U.S. Attorneys, agents, or agencies. The client is the only constituency.
Every district in the country, one client portal - documents, invoices, counsel, in real time.
We decline more federal matters than we accept - and every accepted case gets the whole bench.
See who fights for you before you ever call.
Who we are, how we work, and why clients nationwide trust us with their future - in under a minute.
On the record, on the wire.
Get ahead of the case.
Answered within 24 hours, guaranteed. Some stories are better told out loud -
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