Practice Focus

Mary Kennedy joined Arnold & Porter LLP as trial training counsel. Ms. Kennedy’s responsibilities include providing advocacy training through in-house training and by co-counseling pro bono criminal cases with eligible lawyers. Ms. Kennedy has over 20 years of litigation and training experience, including over 50 jury trials, numerous bench trials, and countless trials during which she supervised other attorneys.

Before entering private practice, Ms. Kennedy spent two years at the Federal Defender Training Group. The bulk of Ms. Kennedy’s trial experience came from her 11 years at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (PDS), where she represented both adults and juveniles at every stage of the criminal process. Ms. Kennedy was the Training Director at PDS during her last four years with the agency. Her responsibilities included training all new attorneys hired by the agency and providing monthly training to lawyers appointed to represent clients pursuant to the Criminal Justice Act.

Ms. Kennedy taught trial advocacy for many years as an adjunct at George Washington University Law School and continues to teach trial advocacy to the Prettyman Fellows at Georgetown Law School. Since 1990, Ms. Kennedy has been on the faculty of trial skills programs around the country, including the Trial Advocacy Workshop at Harvard Law School, the Western Trial Advocacy Institute in Laramie, Wyoming, the National Trial Advocacy College in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Institute for Criminal Defense Advocacy in San Diego, California.