Michael Ketchmark represents people who have been hurt by someone with far more power than they have. For more than thirty years he has stood in front of juries for families who lost a child, for workers who lost the use of their bodies, for cancer patients whose medicine was diluted by the pharmacist they trusted, and for homeowners who were quietly overcharged for a generation. He has spent his entire career on that side of the courtroom, and he has never lost his appetite for the fight.

In 2023 he served as lead counsel in Burnett v. National Association of Realtors, brought on behalf of home sellers in Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois. The jury returned a verdict of nearly $1.8 billion, and the way houses are bought and sold in this country changed as a result. Two decades earlier he represented more than 275 families against a pharmacist who diluted chemotherapy for profit, and a jury returned $2.2 billion. He has taken the largest manufacturers in the world to verdict in wrongful death cases. Very few lawyers in America have done this once. He has done it repeatedly.

There are excellent defense lawyers and seasoned claims professionals all over this country. A number of them have made the decision to try a case against Ketchmark. Not one of them has made that mistake a second time. Most defense lawyers know it is a bad bet before they make it — but the call is not always theirs. The insurance carrier wants to roll the dice and see what a jury does. What happens after that is on the results page of this firm, and the road behind him is littered with the people who were certain the outcome would be different.

So defense counsel know what a case at this firm means. It means the file will be worked to the bone, every witness will be deposed by someone who has already read everything they have ever written, and the demand will be backed by a trial date that is not a bluff. Ketchmark does not send cases out to be settled. He prepares every one of them to be tried, and when the other side calculates that he will blink, they are wrong.

He is a graduate of the University of Iowa College of Law and has practiced in Kansas City since 1990. Forbes has named him among America’s Best-In-State Lawyers and Missouri Lawyers Media named him Lawyer of the Year. He speaks regularly to other lawyers about trial work and spends real time with the young attorneys coming up behind him, because the next generation of this bar will decide whether ordinary people keep getting a fair hearing.

None of it is about the verdict. It is about the family that can finally afford the care they were told they would never need, and about a company or a carrier being made to answer, in public and under oath, for a decision it made about someone else’s life. That is the only standard a case here is measured against, and it has not moved in thirty years.