We make power legible.
RAVN is an attorney-led intelligence and communications firm. We find what the record actually says, then build the argument, the message, and the response on top of it. For campaigns, companies, advocacy organizations, and people whose name is about to be in the news.
Four things we do. All of them end in a document you can act on.
Opposition research and intelligence
Court records, campaign finance, corporate and property filings, litigation history, network maps. Every claim in the brief is tied to a primary source you can open yourself. Delivered as a brief that holds up under cross-examination.
Political and crisis communications
The statement, the message, the surrogate plan, and the prep for the hostile version of the question. We build for the tracker with the camera, not the friendly caller.
Regulatory and public-policy communications
Comment letters, coalition messaging, and public explainers on rulemakings and litigation. We translate the docket into something a reporter, a legislator, and a voter can act on.
Media and narrative
Op-eds written, hits booked, the on-camera answer rehearsed before the light goes on. We know what a producer needs by 4 p.m. and what a reporter will do with it after.
The standard is a filing, not a feeling.
RAVN exists to make power legible. Most political intelligence is a rumor with a letterhead. Ours reads like a brief because it is one.
- Primary sources first
- Filings, transcripts, dockets, and data before anyone's summary of them.
- Fact, then inference
- Every brief separates what is proven, what is reported, what is alleged, and what we think.
- One principal
- The person you hire is the person who does the work. No hand-off to a junior team.
- Built tooling, human sign-off
- Proprietary collection and analysis systems move fast. Michael reads everything before it ships.
Some of the work has a name on it. Most of it never will.
- Presidential and U.S. Senate campaigns
- Statewide and municipal officeholders
- A national association of elected officials
- Federal contractors facing congressional oversight
- Technology and digital-asset companies
- Education and consumer-technology companies
- Recording artists and professional athletes
- Advocacy organizations and legal defense funds
RAVN takes a limited number of engagements at a time. Two are open now.
Michael Starr Hopkins
Attorney · Maryland and New York bars
Democratic strategist · Presidential and statewide campaigns
Cable news analyst · Columnist
RAVN is a strategic consulting firm. It does not provide legal services or legal advice, and an engagement with RAVN does not create an attorney-client relationship.
Michael has worked presidential campaigns (Obama 2008, Clinton 2016), statewide races, and Senate races, on the side of the room that has to answer the question. He built RAVN because the intelligence campaigns and companies were buying was slow, expensive, and too often wrong in the one paragraph that mattered.
He appears as an analyst on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News and writes for The Hill. He also writes Burn the Playbook, an independent accountability newsletter built on public records and campaign finance data.
Clients get him, not a deck about him.
Tell us the problem.
A sentence or two is enough to start. We run a conflicts check before anything substantive is discussed, and every inquiry is handled as confidential. RAVN is a consulting firm, not a law firm: sending this form does not make your message privileged, so keep the first note general.