Scott McCreight is the most important lawyer in this firm that you will never see. He runs our appellate practice, handles the trial court motion practice on our biggest cases, and builds the record from day one so that what a jury gives our clients is still there years later. Appellate lawyers across the country know his name, and defense teams know that a verdict at this firm is not going to fall apart on review.

McCreight began his career as a federal law clerk for the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit — experience that still shapes how he briefs, argues, and thinks about preserving error. He is also one of the region's genuine authorities on insurance coverage, and lawyers throughout Missouri and Kansas call him for help on hard coverage and appellate questions in their own cases.

Anyone who has watched our trial team work in a courtroom will find McCreight in the gallery, a few rows back, steady. If you are paying attention, you will see the lawyer standing in front of the jury glance back toward him at a critical moment — and a simple nod, or a small shake of the head, come back. That exchange takes half a second, and no one on the other side of the courtroom knows it happened.

This firm does not try cases for headlines. A verdict only matters when it survives — when it becomes money in a family's hands and a real price paid by the company or the carrier that upended their lives. McCreight is the reason ours do. He has shepherded multiple multi-billion-dollar jury verdicts, and the multi-billion-dollar settlements that followed them, through the trial court and out the other side of appeal intact.

He is the lawyer the rest of us go to when the issue is hard, the deadline is short, and the answer has to be right. Much of what this firm has accomplished rests on work McCreight did before anyone else saw the problem coming.