Richard B. Ulmer Jr.

Richard B. Ulmer Jr. spent his boyhood in tiny Yorktown, amid the cornfields of Southwest Iowa. He spent his teen years in Omaha, Nebraska, where he graduated from Benson High School and the University of Nebraska at Omaha. After years as a student journalist, Ulmer had a ten-year career as a Nebraska newspaperman, at the weekly Omaha Sun (Warren Buffett's first newspaper), the Lincoln Journal Star, and, finally, the Omaha World-Herald.

Dick Ulmer decided to change careers as his 30th birthday approached. He blames Black Friday. He explains, "After writing the day-after-Thanksgiving shopping story for the third year in a row, I decided to try law school." He graduated from Stanford Law and enjoyed a successful career in the high-tech world of the Silicon Valley as a civil litigator on trade secret cases for clients such as Adobe, Genentech and Apple.

In 2009, he was appointed a Superior Court judge in San Francisco. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife, attorney Anita Stork. Their daughter, Rikki, attends college in New Orleans.

This is his first book.