KU News Release

New law school center to promote excellence in legal advocacy

LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas School of Law and the law firm of Shook, Hardy & Bacon have announced a partnership aimed at connecting experienced trial lawyers with the students who will follow in their footsteps.

The Shook, Hardy & Bacon Center for Excellence in Advocacy will capitalize on its namesake’s distinguished history in litigation to cultivate a new generation of trial lawyers.

“Much ink has been spilled about the divide between the practicing bar and the legal academy,” said Gail Agrawal, dean of the law school. “While I don’t join the chorus of those who lament the relationship between the educational and the practicing arms of our profession, I do agree that our shared profession is stronger when we create opportunities to work together on the preparation of the next generation of lawyers, law professors and judges. It is an important task — perhaps one of the most crucial ones we undertake — that none of us can do alone.

“That is how I view this new center. The center will create not a physical, but an intellectual space for an ongoing dialogue and shared teaching mission between the KU law school and practicing lawyers.”

Apart from its core mission — to enhance the learning experience of students who aspire to be trial lawyers — the center will also create opportunities for mentorship between experienced litigators and law students, provide a forum for practicing trial lawyers to share information with one another and create outlets to educate the public about the role of litigation in a democratic society.

In that spirit, the center will invite distinguished trial lawyers to campus to give public lectures and serve as practitioners-in-residence, create environments in which law school faculty and legal practitioners can provide trial skills training to students and host a Judges’ Forum that draws sitting members of the judiciary to campus.

The center will be led by co-directors Dennis Prater, the Connell Teaching Professor of Law at KU, and Stan Davis, a partner at the firm’s Kansas City, Mo., office.

The law school and the firm are planning an inaugural lecture named for Larry O’Neal, a KU law alumnus and former Shook, Hardy & Bacon partner who passed away in 2007 after a long battle with cancer.

Shook, Hardy & Bacon routinely hires KU graduates and counts among its partners and associates 80 attorneys who are alumni of the law school. The firm and individual lawyers have made five-year pledges to endow the center, which will be housed at the school.

Shook, Hardy & Bacon is internationally recognized for successfully resolving litigation matters for public and private companies of all sizes. In January, the firm was named the American Lawyer’s Product Liability Litigation Department of the Year. Shook, Hardy & Bacon has built substantial practices in areas including products liability, intellectual property, environmental and toxic tort litigation, employment litigation, commercial litigation, corporate compliance and public policy. The firm’s attorneys serve clients from nine offices worldwide.

Davis has represented businesses, educational institutions and professionals in court in a variety of commercial, business tort, products liability, employment and regulatory disputes. He began his career in 1976 at Winthrop Stimson Putnam and Roberts (now Pillsbury Winthrop) in New York. After four years as a litigation associate, he served as an assistant United States attorney in the southern district of New York. From 1984 until he returned to private practice in 1993, Davis was a law professor at KU. During this time, he also taught as a visiting professor at his alma mater, the University of North Carolina, taught with the London Law Consortium affiliated with University College in London and was a founding partner of Advocacy Research Associates, a trial consulting firm based in Lawrence. Davis is chair of Shook, Hardy & Bacon’s Business Litigation Section, comprising more than 90 lawyers. He also serves as coordinator of the firm’s Professional Development Program.

Larry O’Neal was an attorney at Shook, Hardy & Bacon for more than 30 years, and his practice focused on representing pharmaceutical and other companies in product liability cases across the country. Before joining the firm, O’Neal was a law clerk for Floyd R. Gibson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. O’Neal obtained his undergraduate degree in 1969 and his law degree in 1972, both from KU. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Order of the Coif.

Dennis Prater, a 1973 graduate of the KU School of Law, practiced law privately in Vermont and Kansas before returning to the law school as director of the Legal Aid Clinic in 1985. He received the Immel Award for Teaching Excellence in 1993 and a W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence in 1998. Three times — in 1989, 1994 and 2004 — Prater has received the Dean Frederick J. Moreau Award, given annually to a faculty member who, in the eyes of law students, has been particularly helpful in advising and counseling students. He was named the Connell Teaching Professor of Law in 1999. An authority on the law of evidence, he is the leading author of the popular evidence textbook “Evidence: The Objection Method.”

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