“Be prepared for everything you do and do it with passion.” Rob has followed those principles his entire life and he learned them growing up in a small town in Eastern North Carolina. His father was an FBI agent who later became a Methodist minister and his mother was a school nurse. They modeled these principles to him in everything they did. Rob played basketball and football in high school and went on to play football at the University of Virginia. Athletics is a lot like civil litigation. You have to be prepared for every game, and once the game starts you play with absolute passion. In his early years Rob was mentored by two of the best trial lawyers in the history of North Carolina, Howard Manning and Tom Harris.