APRIL 1998
Don C. Keenan is an Atlanta attorney who grew up in Newbern, NC., a small town where the lawyers were the most respected people in the community. He saw lawyers take the lead in public service and social change. This had a great impact on him as a child and made him want “to be a lawyer because of the good things he saw them do”. Mr. Keenan represents children in automobile, professional negligence, and product liability cases. From this personal injury practice, he has learned many lawyers lack the expertise to adequately represent children in such cases.
In response, three years ago he set aside funds and staff for the Keenan’s Kids Foundation. Originally, the Foundation collected from the firm’s case preparations the names of people who had done outstanding work with children - individuals such as the lady in the hospital who painted murals on the walls or a special education teacher who went out of his way to help children. For the past three years, the Foundation has made cash awards; however, this year the Foundation will host a banquet to honor these outstanding community servants.
The firm has a full-time staff person who coordinates the Foundation’s programs, and it is hiring another 40-hour per week employee to work on the projects. Last year, the Foundation decided to engage in several new projects, and community response to one project, a clothing drive, has been overwhelming. The Foundation has now collected over 10,000 items, and Mr. Keenan explains the clothing drive has “branched out way beyond lawyers, and we’re now receiving clothes from as far away as Cedartown to the north, Madison to the east, and Columbus to the south. The more clothes we received -- the more these seemed to be a need out there”.
Mr. Keenan points out that all of the firm’s staff assists in the community service efforts of the Foundation. When the phones were ringing off the hook with people wanting to donate clothes, everyone helped out, including the firm’s seven lawyers. In addition, for the past 14 years the law office has been making and delivering between 200 and 300 sandwiches on a weekly basis to The Open Door Community, a homeless shelter on Ponce De Leon Avenue.
Mr. Keenan also noticed that too little emphasis is given in law schools to arguing damages in child injury cases. To stimulate interest in this issue last year, he created a law student closing argument competition and awarded cash prizes to the winners.
In addition, the Foundation’s Air Bag Awareness Program addresses the great dangers children face from these devices through education materials for parents and adults with child passengers.
In May, the Foundation is sponsoring a two-day legal seminar for over 200 lawyers on the representation of children. The seminar will include sessions on: 1) recognizing certain cases they may have overlooked; 2) choosing proper expert witnesses; 3) preparing presentations of damages; and 4) making effective closing arguments. When speaking of the satisfaction he receives from helping others, Mr. Keenan says there is not one project he can point to where Foundation volunteers “have not reaped a thousand times more benefits from just feeling good than [they’ve] given to anybody. All you have to do is put a brand new coat on a homeless kid who has never had a brand new anything, and if that doesn’t bring tears to your eyes, nothing is going to”.
He says that too often these days we look for something that will make a major change in society, and if that is not possible, we do not want to be involved. People often ask him why he makes 100 bologna and cheese sandwiches each week for the homeless. They say that this is not doing anything to end hunger in society. Undaunted, Mr. Keenan responds, “We’re not curing hunger that way, but we’re making some change. We’re putting food in somebody’s stomach. It’s sort of like throwing rocks in the lake. One little ripple is not much, but if you get everybody down there throwing rocks, sooner or later you’ll have a tidal wave going on. If you ever stop to think that all you are is a little ripple, then you would never do anything. We keep focused on the fact that it’s affecting somebody!”