Bradley L. Kelly

I was born and grew up in Texas with three brothers and one sister. I went to undergraduate school and law school at The University of Texas at Austin. I graduated from both with honors. I became fully self-supporting during my sophomore year in college and, knock on wood, have stayed that way ever since.

I paid for my education (and recreation) by working on oil rigs and pipelines, pouring concrete on a new expressway, and building and painting houses. When you do those kinds of jobs, you learn how to get along with hard-working people whose collars are blue and whose necks are red, and you find out the ways that those people are different, and not so different, from the ones in the so-called ivory towers. I believe that the lessons I learned outside of the classroom, as much as any I ever learned in it, have helped me to become the trial lawyer that I always aspired to be.

I started my trial career as a criminal and then civil Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. I left public service to go into private practice as a defense attorney in nursing home cases. I have defended hundreds of nursing home cases over the last quarter of a century and have handled numerous trials all over the country. I “lost” only one of those trials, in a case in D.C. Superior Court some fifteen years ago. The jury returned a verdict for the plaintiff for just under $22,000. That number was (1) far less than my client’s last settlement offer; (2) less than half of what the plaintiff’s counsel assured me he had spent just to take the case to trial; and (3) a tiny fraction of the plaintiff’s final six-figure pretrial settlement demand.

In one of my favorite defense cases, the plaintiff’s lawyers turned down my client’s settlement offer of five million dollars and then received a final arbitration award of nothing after my co-counsel and I bested them in a week-long evidentiary hearing in Milwaukee. Zero.

Over the course of my career, I have been quoted or mentioned in articles in such publications as Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and The Legal Times of Washington, and I have even been called upon from time to time to give some legal commentary on television news programs. I have made countless presentations to trade industry groups and legal associations, most recently on potential litigation issues arising from the Covid19 pandemic.