Mike Spencer grew up in the New York City suburb of Wilton, Conn. His first bylines as a journalist were at age 16, and he pursued a reporting career at daily newspapers in Virginia, California and Florida. He graduated from Franklin and Marshall College and UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He covered natural disasters, police and crime, general news and wrote features. For more than 20 years, he has run Spencer Investigations based in Oakland and in Walnut Creek, Calif. He specializes in legal cases for trial attorneys in criminal defense, civil matters and family law cases. He also locates and serves legal process on especially dodgy subjects, including a former Archbishop of San Francisco.