Dr. Lawyer is a linguist, language revitalizationist, language technologist, and expert in the Indigenous languages of California. His book A Grammar of Patwin (University of Nebraska Press 2021) is the first comprehensive description of the structure of the Patwin (Wintun) language, and is based on his award-winning Ph.D. dissertation (UC Davis 2015). He has also compiled the first full dictionary of a Patwin dialect (privately published by the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation in in 2022), built a tool to aid access to Patwin archival materials (shared privately with the Patwin community at calangdoc.com) and established and led the language program for the Cachil Dehe Band of Wintun Indians (2016–2017). He has also done language revitalization work with other Indigenous languages of California, including Konkow and Mojave. He holds 4 degrees in linguistics and one in music, and is an active member of the Dictionary Society of North America. Before joining the faculty of Native American Studies at UC Davis, Dr. Lawyer was the Reference Systems Manager at the Cambridge University Press, where he was in charge of dictionary databases and corpora, and served on the Steering Committee for the Cambridge Dictionary website. His research interests include language description, language revitalization, language technologies, dictionaries, and language typology.