"Life's most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others."
~Martin Luther King
I suppose when I reflect upon it, it all began to take shape on that night when I snuck into the second balcony of the Oriental Theater and watched Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch leave the courtroom defeated but determined to fight on for Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird. His courage and his caring in the face of prejudice and injustice beaming from the movie screen into the recesses of my adolescent brain, to be filed away in my subconscious, along with the teachings of the nuns at St. Angela's Parish and the speeches of John F. Kennedy about the necessity for service in America during the early sixties.
My widowed mother had been relentless in teaching her four young children the value to be derived from an education. It was the only way, she would say, to succeed
in a world of unfairness, without wealth, without privilege, in the face of often overwhelming adversity. She was a child during the Great Depression, tried and tested again and again, but never succumbing to hopelessness, never giving in to pessimism or cynicism. After all, she had a family to raise, by herself. Her husband had been inexplicably taken from her and her children in his youth; a Boston policeman who passed away from a blood clot earned in the line of duty. She would become our salvation and our guiding light while growing up in the City. There would be other guiding lights, but none that shone as long or as brightly as May Kenney.
During the sixties, Boston was a primitive place, where different tribes held sway over different neighborhoods. It was the place of my birth and my upbringing. It would nurture and define me. I would forsake it for the glitter of Hollywood, California in the late sixties and the companionship of a "movie actor" older brother. In that "golden state" I would learn, from those who were admired, but especially from those who picked fruit in the fields and those who toiled in factories, that all that glitters is not gold.
It was during the summer of my 19th year, while returning from a day of surf and swimsuits at Zuma Beach. He would pick me up hitchhiking back to Hollywood. Incredibly, he was manly handsome and driving a golden Porsche Targa with a typewriter and blue backed legal briefs in the back seat. When I asked him what he did, his reply was "trial law." When I asked him if he liked it his reply was "love it."
We conversed at length as he went out of his way to drop me off at the corner of LaBrea and Sunset. As I walked toward my stifling bungalow on Citrus Avenue, it all began to make sense. It wasn't exactly like being struck from a horse on the way to Damascus but it was pretty close. I wanted to be a trial lawyer and represent those in need of an even shake. To do so, I would have to forsake the seduction of southern California and return to Boston to buckle down.
"The only real lawyers are trial lawyers and trial lawyers try cases to juries."
~Clarence Darrow
Boston University Law School was a very competitive laboratory where I bore working‑class witness to an interesting array of challenging peers and professors. Many were better educated, but not necessarily better equipped, to take up the mantle of a trial lawyer. It was there that I discovered that most lawyers never went to court; never laid it all on the line for a client or a cause that demanded their utmost effort. Law school and its tedium was simply the price one paid to be eligible for the practice of trial law. To take it to the next step and learn the craft of courtroom advocacy, I decided that it would be more advantageous to focus on the clinical opportunities that law school offered and observe real lawyers in action on real cases through weekly sojourns to the wondrous Suffolk County Superior Courthouse.
After my first year of study, and a crash course in legal research in my work‑study job as a clerk in the law library, I was able to convince those who awarded me a work‑study grant that a summer internship in the Norfolk County District Attorney's Office would enhance my chances of making a living. There, I was assigned to the preparation of homicide cases and witnessed the challenges of the courtroom from a second chair. It was simply exhilarating, and it confirmed to me that the men and women who practiced criminal trial law were often charismatic performers who made their living, not by seeking to overwhelm and intimidate with their intellects, like some of my law professors, but by the preparation and presentation of their clients' cases in the courtroom. In a word, the trial lawyers that I met and admired on both sides of the homicide cases that I helped to prosecute were courageous.
"There is never a deed so foul that something couldn't be said for the guy;
that's why there are lawyers."
~Melvin Belli
After the Watergate fiasco brought down the President and the Vietnam War came to a merciful but unsatisfactory conclusion, it was an anti-establishment time in America. It was a time when many of the best and the brightest in business and the law sought to march to a different drum, to take up the cause of the powerless against the
powers that be. There were thousands who graduated from law school and passed their states' bar examinations with aspirations of representing the downtrodden and the desperate. I became a public defender with the Massachusetts' Defenders Committee, earning a pittance, but perfecting my craft in the criminal courts of the Commonwealth, representing the indigent accused. It may have been the best experience I would ever receive in becoming a trial advocate.
For four and a half rewarding years, I fought the good fight for the disenfranchised and the despised. I became immersed in the bloody business of criminal law on an every day basis while learning the anatomy of trial work up close and personal. I would conduct the cross and direct examinations of witnesses and present summations to judges and juries so often that they became second nature.
Unlike most of my law school colleagues who aspired to the mantle of the trial lawyer by accepting positions with prestigious law firms and learning their trade through years of preparation for senior partners, I was thrust directly into the fray to fend for my accused client in the courtroom. Slowly, I began receiving recognition. I had become an up‑and‑coming young criminal lawyer with the right combination of experience and energy to make a name for myself and a very good living. A decision needed to be made right there and then. Did I really want to take the next step in representing those that society saw fit to prosecute and imprison for anti-social behavior, or did I want to make a break from criminal law, learn a new lyric and answer a different calling in service to society?
While waiting for a jury verdict in the Norfolk County Superior Court, a conversation with one of my public defender compatriots soon became opportunity knocking. He told me of a former assistant district attorney whom I knew and admired and the small suburban law firm that he had helped create. A law firm that was looking for a young associate with trial experience to do civil litigation and labor law. Incredibly, within the month, I would accept a position with this firm and broaden the scope of my trial experience to include personal injury litigation and unfair labor practices.
"There is little of all that we do that the eye of man can see.
But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes;
we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts,
we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state."
~John Davis
To walk into a courtroom or an arbitration hearing with clients who were not in jeopardy of losing their freedom was a new and satisfying experience. Working for attorneys who gave me the opportunity and the guidance to learn the ropes of personal
injury and labor law was a godsend. The most valuable components of my association with this small but dynamic law firm, however, was in learning how to cultivate and keep clients, while managing a law practice. This knowledge, along with the self‑reliance made necessary by my upbringing, instilled in me a yearning to form my own law firm and to be my own boss. All I needed was the wherewithal to do it. On a Saturday morning, while teaching part-time students in search of their MBA's a survey course in products liability law, that opportunity arrived.
I noticed her standing in the rear of the makeshift classroom as I finished loading up my briefcase. She seemed distressed about something. She was a registered nurse and wanted to know whether I could assist her friend who was dying from cancer. She told me that his treating doctor had been negligent but nobody would undertake the case. I told her I would help her friend if I could. It was then that I embarked upon the first failure to diagnose cancer case to be resolved in favor of a plaintiff in the history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The painstaking preparation and the risk undertaken over the next three years were only surpassed by the courage and the devotion of my client. He was 23 at the time that the case was commenced. Tragically, the cancer that should have been diagnosed sooner and would have resulted in a cure would claim his life. Together with his beautiful young wife, he endured suffering that was biblical in its dimensions. Their love and devotion in the face of such unjust adversity inspired me to rise to a level of advocacy that I had never before attained, resulting in financial security for a widow and her new born daughter, whom her father named Victoria.
Of all the hundreds of dramatic trials and hearings that I had experienced as a criminal defense lawyer, or a labor lawyer on behalf of working men and women seeking dignity in the workplace, nothing, absolutely nothing, matched the drama and the satisfaction derived from that case. I was now ready to accept the challenge; start my own law firm and follow the calling of representing catastrophically injured clients.
"To housebreak, domesticate and authenticate power
is the non-delegable responsibility of the trial lawyer."
~Thomas Lambert
Twenty‑five years have passed since our law firm was created. Twenty‑five years of taking up the cause of those catastrophically injured and killed through carelessness and disregard. Twenty‑five years of fighting for the disabled and the dead against powerful corporations and insurance companies whose resources and influence are virtually limitless. Representing plaintiffs who have had their lives dramatically altered or ended through neglect, armed only with the truth and the law, in the courts of the Commonwealth and throughout the country, is not a calling for the faint of
heart. It is a battle for justice, especially now, when the power and the propaganda of the multi-national corporations and their minions have placed trial lawyers and profoundly injured plaintiffs in their cross hairs.
Make no mistake about it, in America today, powerful business and political interests are spending millions to manufacture lies and deception about our civil justice system. Their goal is to poison the hearts and minds of potential jurors against worthy plaintiffs who have been victimized by negligence, effectively closing the courthouse doors to the most deserving, thus endangering us all. In the face of this unprecedented abuse of power we stand defiant and determined to fight on for the catastrophically injured and the Constitution, in and out of the courtroom. This is our challenge. This is our calling as trial lawyers.
Paul F. Kenney
February 3, 2011
