About

Our Story

Built From the Other Side of the Table

FDP Law was built around a simple premise: business counsel is better when the lawyer has actually run the business.

Frank Prestia’s experience extends well beyond legal practice. He has founded and operated companies, developed and protected intellectual property, structured and negotiated transactions, invested in and developed real estate, built technology, and worked at the intersection of physical operations and emerging technology.

That experience changes the questions we ask. The issue is rarely just what the law permits. It is also what protects the asset, what preserves leverage, what the company can actually implement, and what gets the business where it is trying to go.

That is what we mean by real-world counsel.

The Premise
“

Business counsel is better when the lawyer has actually run the business.

Inventor, founder, operator and principal before counsel.

How We Think About Disputes
“

Litigation is sometimes necessary. It is rarely the objective.

The objective is to protect the company, preserve its options, solve the problem, and get management back to building.

Our Approach

Strategic Counsel, Not Routine Litigation

Most of our work happens upstream of court: protecting intellectual property and trade secrets, structuring agreements and transactions, building AI and governance frameworks, and advising businesses where the legal decision and the business decision can’t sensibly be separated. Those fields overlap, so we work across all of them.

FDP Law is generally retained where the value of the engagement lies in judgment, structure and strategy, not routine legal process.

Frank D. Prestia, Managing Attorney, FDP Law
FDP Law · Since 2005
Managing Attorney

Frank D. Prestia, Esq.

An attorney who has been the inventor, the founder, the operator and the principal in the kinds of matters he now advises on.

Frank has spent nearly 35 years building and running businesses. He co-founded Melting & Filling Equipment, Inc., the company behind WaxMelters and SoapMelters, and designed the industrial thermal systems now in service at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin and manufacturers in more than forty industries.

He was writing code and studying machine learning in the 1980s, built his first e-commerce site in 1999, and has been in online business ever since. He bought his first investment property in 1991 and has worked in real estate as an owner, investor, developer and commercial broker, and he has founded and run companies in finance, fitness, distribution, manufacturing and franchising.

So when a client is deciding whether to patent a process or keep it as a trade secret, how to structure a deal, or how far to trust a new technology, Frank has usually had to make that same call himself, as the owner.

How We Work Start a Conversation
35
years building and
running businesses
40+
industries running the
thermal systems he designed
1999
first e-commerce
site he built
2005
licensed in
Washington State

Education

  • JD, St. John's University School of Law
  • BA in Philosophy, summa cum laude, SUNY Geneseo, with the Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship and Craig Knoche Philosophy Award
  • Interned with the New York State Appellate and Supreme Courts and the U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District

Bar & Committees

  • Washington State Bar Association, IP and Business Law Sections
  • Federal Bar Association, Washington Chapter, IP and CLE Committees
  • King County Bar Association, IP, CLE and Judicial Candidate Evaluation
  • American Bar Association

Published & Roles

  • Published in the ABA Journal, the New York State Real Property Law Journal and the King County Bar Association Bulletin
  • Co-Founder, Inventor, Chief Legal & Compliance Officer, Melting & Filling Equipment, Inc.
  • Chief Operating Officer, Hydra Capital Group
  • Chief Compliance Officer, PFS Holdings LLC
  • Past President, Justinian Law Society Alumni Association
Our Team

Counsel Around the Table

Lance Yoon, Esq.
Chief of Staff & Chief Legal Consultant

Lance Yoon, Esq.

Lance earned his JD from Hofstra Law School and an LL.M. in Taxation from Georgetown University Law Center. He was a tax associate in KPMG's Mergers & Acquisitions practice, serving clients such as Pfizer, IBM and News Corp, then a Senior Associate at Ernst & Young handling international and domestic transactions for Fortune 500 companies including AIG and NBC and for private equity firms including Silver Lake Partners, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and CVC Capital Partners. He later served as an in-house Tax Analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald, focused on alternative acquisitions, federal and state tax issues, and audits.

Lisa Chiang, Esq.
Of Counsel, International Clientele Liaison

Lisa Chiang, Esq.

Lisa holds a BA from Johns Hopkins University and a JD from Lewis & Clark Law School. She began her career in Seattle as an attorney and commercial real estate broker, then moved to Singapore, where she advised clients on international investment in luxury real estate, international estate planning and tax compliance. She knows the IRS issues that affect Americans abroad, especially those with significant foreign assets, retirement plans and estate tax obligations in more than one country. She is a former Speaker Liaison for Washington Women in Real Estate Law and holds a commercial real estate broker's license.