LEGAL EAGLES
Deborah Kernan —
Safeguarding Her Clients’ Rights
Becoming a lawyer in November, 1993 was
the beginning of a second career for criminal
defense attorney Deborah Kernan. Her under-
graduate degree is in finance and accounting,
but instead of safeguarding her client’s money,
Kernan ended up working for clients by helping
them safeguard their constitutional rights.
When her career path took an unexpected
turn, Kernan decided to go to law school by
doing some brainstorming with someone who
knew her best: her brother.
Since that time she chose the law, she never
looked back.
“As soon as I made that decision, I always
knew what I wanted to do — I wanted to be
a prosecutor in Tarrant County — and went
after that goal,” she said. She graduated from
Southern Methodist University, and after pass-
ing the bar in November of 1993, she started
working in the Tarrant County District Attorney’s
office. After three years of trying cases that ran
the gamut from DWIs to murder, she left and
opened her own practice.
Along the way, she credits a number of
people who made a difference in her law career,
including law school professor Walter Steele,
50
who helped her define how she defends her
clients. According to Kernan, Steele points at
one group that defends the nation’s rights — not
the police, the judges or the prosecutors, it’s the
criminal defense lawyers who have that assign-
ment. She also points to Dallas attorney Mike
McCollum, who asked Kernan to try her first jury
trial while still in law school, and court chief
Sharon Johnson, who Kernan describes as a bril-
liant lawyer and teacher.
The practice of law is changing because tech-
nology is changing the way we handle monetary
transactions. She said she would expect the
number of theft by check cases to continue to
decline, but the number of cyber-crime cases to
keep rising. She also surmises that there could
be a legislative change that will mean less mari-
juana cases in the next 10 years.
Kernan says that she couldn’t choose just one
case that is the most interesting, because all of
her cases are interesting. She enjoys being a sole
practitioner and said, “I am very blessed for so
many reasons, one reason being that I absolutely
love what I do and have been able to make a
living at it. There is never a dull moment. And I
take protecting our rights very seriously.”