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Kathy Jo Cook is the founder and managing partner of KJC Law Firm. She represents people who have been injured and people and businesses that have suffered an economic loss. This includes individuals who have been injured in a car crash, on a construction site, or by a doctor, nurse or lawyer. This also includes individuals and businesses that have been harmed by another as a result of unfair business practices or discrimination in employment.
Kathy Jo grew up in Champaign, Illinois. Her dad was a plumber and her mom a legal secretary. She got married right out of high school, had two kids by the time she was 20, and embarked on her career as a hairdresser. Eleven years later, she had four kids, ran a successful Beauty School in Houston, Texas, and was on the National Board of Accreditation for Beauty Schools.
But that was not what she wanted. Kathy Jo had always wanted to be a lawyer so she could help people in need and make a difference in their lives. She set her mind to achieving that dream. She finished college by taking a double load and came to Boston for law school. At Suffolk Law School, Kathy Jo was a star. She won the national law student trial advocacy competition and three national writing competitions.
Kathy Jo began her legal career at Lubin & Meyer, P.C. during law school as a law clerk. She joined Keches & Mallen, P.C. thereafter, where she handled complex claims on behalf of injured plaintiffs for 13 years. Kathy Jo litigated the first successful claim in Massachusetts to hold that an insurance company’s meritless appeal of an injured worker’s verdict was a bad faith insurance practice and violated the Consumer Protection Statute, securing the original multi-million-dollar judgment and an additional multi-million-dollar punitive judgment against the insurance company for that practice.
In 2010, she prevailed in Law v. Griffith, 457 Mass. 349 (2010), a case which was deemed to be one of the most important decisions of the year and one which continues to aid plaintiffs seeking damages at trial for medical expenses. Kathy Jo was on the Steering Committee in the Columbia Gas cases, which obtained a settlement of $143 million for residents of the Merrimack Valley who suffered losses as a result of explosions there in 2018.
Kathy Jo’s outstanding abilities have been recognized by her peers and legal observers. In 1999, she was named by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly as one of the top five "up and coming" attorneys in Massachusetts, and in 2007, she became the third lawyer ever to be inducted into the Lawyers Weekly "Hall of Fame." In 2008, Kathy Jo was named as one of the Top 50 Women Lawyers in Massachusetts by Law & Politics Magazine (Best of Boston), and she has been named as a Super Lawyer by that same publication every year since. In 2016, she was recognized by Lawyers Weekly as one of the Top Women of the Law, and in 2021, she was inducted into the Circle of Excellence by that same publication.
More recently, she was named as a “Best Lawyer” and her firm named a “Best Law Firm” by Best Lawyers and U.S. New & World Report. Kathy Jo has also been rated as “AV Preeminent” by Martindale-Hubbell Law since 2006. This is the highest rating possible and is given only to lawyers who have very high to preeminent legal ability and who embrace very high professional standards. She has also been rated by Avvo as “Superb.”
In 2010, Kathy Jo was admitted to the American Board of Trial Advocates, a distinguished organization which is open by application only to those with significant trial experience, and she currently serves as secretary of the Massachusetts Chapter. She serves as the Massachusetts Chair of the Business Interruption Litigation Committee of the American Association for Justice. She is a former President of the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys and the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts, where she continues to serve in leadership. She has served in numerous capacities at the Massachusetts Bar Association, the Massachusetts Employment Lawyers Association, and the Boston Bar Association.
About her work Kathy Jo says, "My focus has always been on justice. To me justice means working to promote equality, to protect important civil rights, and to help individual people, workers and consumers when they are injured.”
Timothy Wilton is an experienced litigator and trial lawyer with over 50 years of practice in both civil and criminal cases. He has handled numerous trials and appeals in state and federal courts around the country and in the Supreme Court of the United States. He is also a tenured Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, where he is the Director of the Trial and Appellate Advocacy Concentration.
Professor Wilton began his career as a trial lawyer while still a student at Harvard Law School, representing criminal defendants and incarcerated psychiatric patients with the Harvard Voluntary Defenders. At the same time, he worked part time for a well-known Boston trial lawyer and a prominent civil liberties advocate, representing plaintiffs in personal injury cases, federal civil rights and civil liberties litigation, and criminal defense.
Following law school, Professor Wilton was recruited by the Roxbury Defenders Committee to represent criminal defendants charged with life imprisonment felonies and thereafter was appointed to be the Director of Law Reform Litigation for the Prisoners’ Rights Project in Boston. In these roles, Professor Wilton tried dozens of cases in the Superior Court in Massachusetts and litigated numerous Constitutional issues in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and in the federal trial and appellate courts.
Professor Wilton began his teaching career at Harvard Law School, while studying for his advanced legal studies (LL.M.) degree. He was awarded a two-year Teaching Fellowship and taught several classes in litigation and trial practice. From there, Professor Wilton continued his teaching career, first at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit and, since 1984, at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. Professor Wilton has taught courses in Civil Procedure, Evidence, Public Interest Litigation, Constitutional Law, and Trial Advocacy. He designed and is the Director of the Trial and Appellate Advocacy Concentration program at Suffolk University Law School, and he heads up Suffolk Law’s National Trial Team, which is ranked as one of the top law school trial advocacy training programs in the nation.
Professor Wilton has continued to practice law over the course of his teaching career. Before representing individual plaintiffs in high stakes civil cases, he defended numerous major manufacturers and insurance companies. His knowledge of how cases are defended has proved to be invaluable to presenting a winning case at trial. He has also been called upon to develop and participate in programs to train practicing lawyers in advanced techniques of trial and appellate litigation.
Professor Wilton was the first Executive Director of the National Board of Trial Advocacy, which provides Board Certification for experienced lawyers in the fields of Civil or Criminal Trial Advocacy. He served as Chair of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s Committee on Certification of Lawyer Specialization and was appointed by the President of the American Bar Association to the ABA Standing Committee on Specialization. He was Vice-Chair of the Committee on Products, General Liability and Consumer Law of the Section of Tort and Insurance Practice of the American Bar Association, Chair of the Litigation Section of the Association of American Law Schools, and a member of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Legal Advocacy Educators. He has served on the Judicial Administration Section Council, the Juror Communications Task Force, and as Co-Chair of the Amicus Committee of the Massachusetts Bar Association. Professor Wilton has been featured on multiple local and national news programs, and he has been named repeatedly as a “Best Lawyer” by Best Lawyers and U.S. New & World Report.
Professor Wilton grew up in Wallingford, Connecticut. He received a scholarship to attend The Choate School, a nationally known preparatory school in Wallingford, as a “townie,” a local day student. After graduating, he attended Harvard College and then Harvard Law School, all on full scholarship. At Harvard, Professor Wilton earned not only his undergraduate degree, but his law school and advanced law school degree, making him a “triple Crimson.”
Professor Wilton has published numerous book chapters and articles on litigation topics in law reviews and practice journals around the country.
Benjamin Duggan is a litigator and trial lawyer. Ben devotes his practice to representing the “underdog,” plaintiffs up against corporations and insurance companies, and people who have been charged with crimes. Ben’s practice includes a wide array of cases, including personal injury, wrongful death, medical malpractice, breach of contract, consumer protection, employment discrimination, and criminal defense. Ben has successfully tried numerous cases to a jury, both civil and criminal. He has authored dozens of memoranda of law filed in Massachusetts District and Superior Court and the United States District Court. He has also written several appeals briefs filed in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the Massachusetts Appeals Court, and the First Circuit Court of Appeals.
Ben’s father was a Boston trial lawyer. One night, when he was young, Ben asked his father how he could represent someone he knew was guilty. His father answered: “In every case, I have two clients, the individual and the Constitution. It’s my job to make sure both get a fair trial.” Ben has known what he wanted to do ever since. He grew up surrounded by the law. As a boy, Ben would go to his father’s office on the weekends and his father (who never learned how to use a computer) would dictate all kinds of correspondence and legal memoranda while Ben typed. By high school, Ben was drafting his father’s briefs. He went straight to Suffolk Law School when he was done with college, graduating summa cum laude in 2012.
While at Suffolk, Ben was a member of the Suffolk Defenders student clinic, where he was appointed to represent indigent defendants in the Boston Municipal Court. Ben received several academic accolades, including awards for Distinguished Oral Advocate and Distinguished Brief. He was also a member of Suffolk’s nationally ranked mock trial team, where he won a regional championship in the American Association for Justice’s annual competition, advanced to the regional final in the National Trial Competition, and was invited to compete, along with advocates from the top 16 mock trial programs in the country, in the “Top Gun” tournament at Baylor University, where he advanced to the semi-finals. For several years after graduating from Suffolk, Ben worked as an adjunct faculty member helping to coach Suffolk’s national mock trial team.
Prior to joining the KJC Law Firm, Ben worked as a staff attorney for the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Ben has represented hundreds of clients charged with crimes in the trial courts of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in cases ranging from drug possession to armed robbery to operating under the influence. At trial, Ben has successfully obtained not guilty verdicts on a variety of charges, including reckless operation, firearm possession, and assault with intent to murder. Ben has been equally successful in getting his clients’ cases dismissed prior to trial, prevailing in dozens of motions to dismiss and motions to suppress. And when his clients suffered adverse rulings, Ben has obtained reversals on appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court and the Massachusetts Appeals Court. In one particular case, Commonwealth v. Jessica McDonald, No. 13-P-1365 (Nov. 13, 2014), Ben was able to convince the Appeals Court to reverse a decision against his client, based on a cutting-edge issue in Massachusetts law related to the decriminalization of marijuana. Due to his work in the case, Ben was asked to author a guide for defense attorneys on issues related to changes in Massachusetts marijuana laws. His article, “Recent Case Law Developments Related to Marijuana,” was published in June 2015 by Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education as part of their Cutting Edge Issues in Northern Massachusetts Criminal Law Practice seminar. Since joining the KJC Law Firm in January 2016, Ben has expanded his practice to include a wide range of civil litigation. He brings the same commitment to every case and every client he learned from his father.
Ben’s work has received recognition from his peers and clients, including a 2020 “Rising Star” award by Massachusetts Super Lawyers, a “Top 40 under 40” award by the National Trial Lawyers, and an Avvo “Clients’ Choice Award” in 2018.
Abbie Rosen joined KJC Law Firm in 2020. She graduated from Suffolk University Law School in 2019. While there, she worked with Native American communities in the Indigenous Peoples Rights Clinic and worked as a law clerk in a small Boston law firm that primarily handled plaintiff’s personal injury cases. This was where she really started learning about plaintiff’s personal injury cases in a practical way. Prior to joining KJC Law Firm, she practiced at Keches Law Group, where she worked on cases involving complex litigation and worksite accidents.
Abbie loves to help and fight for people who have found themselves in difficult situations, particularly when they are the victims of negligence or intentional wrongful conduct.
Abbie enjoys live music, biographies and fiction novels. She also enjoys spending time with friends and family.
She is admitted to practice in both Massachusetts State Court and the United States District Court, District of Massachusetts. She is a member of the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys and the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts.
Jacki Ryan is an integral part of the team at KJC Law Firm, joining us after more than 10 years of experience in customer service and administration. Jacki is in charge of the day-to-day administration of the firm, including scheduling events, monitoring the progress of each case, and making sure that client questions and concerns are answered or addressed in a timely manner.
Jacki grew up in Waltham, Massachusetts, and spent the last 14 years in Champaign, Illinois. She recently returned to the Boston area with her husband and daughter.
Diane has worked at KJC Law firm as a paralegal since 2015. At KJC Law Firm, Diane has obtained extensive experience in civil litigation, particularly in the areas of complex litigation, personal injury and employment.
Prior to joining KJC Law Firm, Diane worked as an asbestos litigation paralegal for eight years. She then took time off to raise her two young daughters before coming back to the legal field.
Diane earned her undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Boston in 1999 and obtained her paralegal certificate from Northeastern University in 2000.
She currently resides in Braintree with her husband and two teenage daughters.
Kimberly Simpson joined KJC Law Firm in 2021. Over the course of Kimberly’s career, she has worked in litigation in numerous practice areas, including employment, criminal and family law. In her work, she has been involved in cases from the beginning to the end, including conducting legal research, drafting pleadings and other documents and preparing for and assisting with mediation, arbitration and/or trial.
She is passionate about helping clients through challenging situations. Prior to working in the legal field, Kimberly worked in customer service and administration for many years.
Kimberly was born and raised in Central Massachusetts. She graduated from Narragansett Regional High School. Thereafter, she went to the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire where she studied sociology. She later moved to Tennessee where she met her husband and started her family. After several years in Tennessee, Kimberly and her family moved back to Massachusetts.
Kimberly loves watching her children’s sporting events, cooking and baking, and working on her never-ending remodeling project.
Five Tips to Survive Your Lawsuit and Help Make It a Winner
Five Tips to Survive Your Lawsuit and Help Make It a Winner
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