Mary defends companies against complex individual and class product liability actions in courts throughout the country. She has considerable experience in high-stakes litigation and has served on more than 20 trial teams in multi-week jury trials. Mary often serves as legal issues and appellate preservation counsel at trial, and has substantial experience briefing and arguing expert issues, jury instructions, preemption, punitive damages issues, preclusion, constitutional questions, and many other complex issues.
Mary leverages her significant trial and legal issues experience in overseeing pretrial strategy and briefing in all product liability cases filed against one of her manufacturing clients in Massachusetts. She has identified and briefed legal arguments resulting in cases being dismissed or truncated through motion practice. When a trial begins, Mary collaborates with her teammates to execute strategies to win the trial—with an eye towards preserving and setting up important issues for appeal.
Mary’s perspective as both a trial litigator and appellate lawyer provides her clients with continuity because she handles cases from inception through appeal. Mary has protected her clients’ defense verdicts on appeal as well as briefed appeals reversing multimillion-dollar judgments against her clients.
Mary is an active ally and leads the firm’s Project Affirmation, a pro bono name change and gender marker amendment clinic serving the transgender community in and around Kansas City. She has represented and counseled hundreds of adult and minor trans clients in obtaining accurate government-issued identification documents, including litigating before hostile judges and negotiating with counsel for state vital records offices throughout the country. Mary is a well-known advocate for the trans community, and her pro bono practice entails navigating undefined and at times non-existent state law schemes that discriminate against trans people. Advocating for the trans community is Mary’s greatest honor and favorite thing to do as a lawyer.
Presentations and Publications
How to Not Lose Your Appeal Before It Begins, Update of the Law CLE webinar, June 2, 2022.
Cultural Competency: Assisting Transgender Clients With Name Changes & Gender Marker Corrections, Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association, Kansas City, Missouri, November 15, 2018.
Pin the Tail on . . . Somebody: The Kansas Supreme Court’s Decision to Expose Firearms Dealers to Unwarranted Liability, 62 U. Kan. L. Rev. 1401 (2014).