After migrating to Australia from Iran - twice - missing four years of school in the process, partying his way through law school and working on the doors of Canberra nightclubs throughout the 1990s, he finally worked out that he was going to be OK. It was no small revelation for someone with his background. Life until then had been a disjointed series of new beginnings and setbacks.

Today, the 41-year-old has a flourishing law firm - with a massive sign on his office building to prove it - and picks and chooses his clients. He’s interested in helping those “accidental” criminals, the ones whose lives have spiralled out of control. Most of them are men, and many are violent.

“At the end of the day they're vulnerable, and you help them through,” he says.

Saeedi knows what it’s like to be vulnerable, to walk into a room and be the only person who has no idea what’s happening. It was normal state of being for him until he was out of university - still a migrant, still finding his way.

The first time his family fled Iran, it was 1986. The Iran-Iraq war was in full swing, and the family was accepted as migrants because his father had studied in the United States. The young Saeedi missed two years of primary school while the family waited for their official letter, and finally arrived in Queensland in 1988.

“The war had ended by then, but it was still a mess. We had sold everything, we had virtually nothing,” he says.

The family lived in Brisbane for two years, and Saeedi completed his first two years of high school, picking up workable English along the way. But the recession hit Australia, and his father couldn’t find work, so in 1991, they moved back to Iran.

“It was a nightmare. It was a mess, I couldn't readapt, they couldn't recognise my Australian education,” he says.

“I was 13 when I went back, and they wouldn't accept me at school there properly...My parents realised I had no future there. I missed year 9 and 10, then we came back, this time to Canberra, mainly because of me.”

Canberra was also an attractive prospect because of the climate, almost identical to the industrial town, Arak, where he’d grown up. The Australian economy had improved, and the family settled in Tuggeranong, where Saeedi finished his schooling at Lake Tuggeranong College.

Like many children of middle eastern families, he says, he was expected to study either engineering or medicine, but it was seeing the movie Primal Fear, starring Richard Gere as a high-profile defence attorney, that made him eventually choose law.

“Trouble is, it was the typical middle-eastern sort of story - when I hit 18-19, I really hit the immature stage,” he says.

“I was just rebelling. Home was very disciplined in our system, I was too shy to even take a girl home if I met a nice girl. Then I had a bit of freedom at uni, so I started going out a lot.”

He did door security for several years, which turned out to form a surprisingly good network for future clients.

“Everyone kept asking me for legal advice, even though I wasn't a lawyer, and I wasn't shy at the time to offer opinions,” he says. He completed his degree and practicing certificate, applied for a two-week placement at a local firm at the last minute, and was offered a job at the end of it.

“I haven't had a resume in my life,” he says, only half-boasting. His practice - he set up his own firm in 2008 - has grown steadily, and he’s had several high-profile cases, but he’s quick to point out that he’s had the help of some important mentors along the way.

One of his first big cases involved defending a young man accused of running over and killing his girlfriend as she lay on the road after a late night argument - a “rough, tough” case. Saeedi won on all counts; his client was found not guilty of manslaughter, and escaped without even a conviction for negligent driving.

He also successfully defended local nightclub owner Maurizio Rao, who stabbed a man in self-defence during a brawl outside Cube nightclub.

It’s cases like these he used to chase, when he was growing his business and his profile. He worked alone, with no employees, but as the years went on, he realised he would need to grow the firm.

“It depends what you want out of it. You really have to make some decisions, whether you want to be a lawyer or you want to be a businessman,” he says.

“You're always a hybrid of the two but it depends on which way you want to lean more. I still enjoy the law more than the business of it.”

It’s worth pointing out here that Saeedi is visibly successful; his practice occupies an entire floor of a building he owns right across the road from the Supreme Court. But he says most of his money has come from property, rather than legal work.

“Fortunately or unfortunately, if you add up all the money that I've made out of the law, it's probably one tenth of what I've made out of property,” he says.

Food being one of his passions, he’s also part-owner of Urban Pantry in Manuka, and Double Shot Cafe and the pizza shop Locale in Deakin. But he says it’s being a lawyer that gets him up in the morning.

“If you want to make big money, you're better off becoming a builder - you solve some problems and you make good money. But we're all problem solvers at the end of the day,” he said.

The firm now has nine lawyers on staff, including himself. And, with the financial freedom to pick and choose his clients, Saeedi finds himself more and more drawn to the types of cases that once repelled him.

“It was very much, ‘You're a woman basher’, in the old days, but now my attitude is there's more going on,” he says.

“I'm not justifying it, but... labelling someone a woman basher is not helping. The fact is the poor fellow is not dealing with his problem.”

When he finds himself sitting across the desk from a police officer with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, he sees the futility of labels.

“There are very few that I've seen across the table that I feel are that strong, dominant character that they're made out to be, or evil,” he says. “They're in crisis, and when you step in and are dealing with their problems, you get multiple dividends. One of the dividends is helping them, but you're actually learning lessons for your own life.”

It’s the kind of psychological evolution that comes from having a family and turning 40, and all the twists and turns both have entailed. Saeedi was appearing for a client before then-chief justice Terence Higgins in 2009, when he locked eyes with the judge’s research assistant, Carly. The two met properly that afternoon, eloped a month later, and have just welcomed their fourth child, nine years down the track.

Carly, also a lawyer, ran for the Greens in the seat of Fenner in 2017, and is currently spending time with the couple’s new two-month-old baby.

“When you're 25, a win to you or a success to you is very differently defined to when you're 40,” he says.

“When I was 25, I was quite happy to walk out of court with whoever it was and go have a drink, if we'd won a case or not.

Over the last 12 months, I've had to reexamine a few things.”

“The reality of it is, the firm will still do all those [high profile] cases, and yes I'll be involved with them if they're interesting, but if you ask me what I'm chasing and what I'm enjoying, it's the ones where I can unpack them.”