A Career With Purpose

Brooks opened up Kevin Adam's world to possibilities beyond a hockey career. Now, he's a budding star in the legal world who routinely handles multi-billion dollar litigations. But, his pro bono involvement in a civil rights suit on behalf of a wrongfully convicted man was, he says, the highlight of his career to date.

When Kevin Adam '01 arrived at Brooks, he was focused on a future ice hockey career. He matriculated from a Catholic school in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, and he says he thought he'd go on to play big-time college hockey.

That's not the story Adam's life took, though. Adam is now a litigation associate in the New York and Boston offices of international law firm White & Case LLP. He's a member of the firm's global competition group, where he focuses his practice on large class-action and antitrust litigation cases. Typically, his cases reach into tens of billions of dollars at issue and litigate, for example, pharmaceutical companies clashing over patent settlement agreements or allegedly anticompetitive conduct.

"It turns out that I ended up on a different path," Adam reflects now, "and I think I owe almost all of it to Brooks." He explains that his time at Brooks helped him realize his academic talents and helped him dream of a career beyond hockey. "When I started at Brooks, I was a handful," he says. "I wanted to play sports, and academics were definitely second. But I had a lot of awesome teachers who kept steering me in the direction of writing, for example. [Former faculty] Kevin Breen, for example, would pull me aside to help me with my writing, and he'd encourage me to look into writing more."

Adam credits his time at Brooks with helping him learn how to prioritize academics. "When I got to college, things really started to fall into place," he says, "and I think a lot of that came from Brooks. Coming from the North Shore, everyone felt very similar. Brooks was eye-opening. It certainly opened my eyes up to other things I could be doing, for sure."

After Brooks, Adam played junior hockey before landing at Suffolk University, where he majored in sociology with a distinction in criminology and law. Again, one of his teachers saw promise and guided him toward his potential. "I was taking a constitutional law class and I was working on some projects with the professor," Adam says. "He pulled me aside and told me that I should think about law school. I started looking into it, and for me, that was this 'a-ha!' moment."

Adam enrolled in Suffolk University Law School's night program while working and interning at a local courthouse. He loves the law, he says, because of its combination of rules and creativity. "There are set guidelines," he says. "Case law, statutes, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. But, within those guidelines, there's this unlimited creativity. You can come up with different ideas for making different arguments, of doing different things that other people haven't thought of or haven't tried."

A Meaningful Purpose

"I wanted to be in court, I wanted to be on my feet, and I wanted to be writing," Adam reflects. He's handled several large-scale litigations, but he says it was a pro bono matter that has been one of his most meaningful career highlights to date. Adam was part of a team of attorneys from White & Case that represented Mark Schand, a man who spent almost 27 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of murder in 1987. After criminal charges against Schand were dropped in 2013, White & Case helped Schand bring civil rights charges against four police detectives from the Springfield, Massachusetts, police department. The suit alleged violations of Schand's constitutional rights: New evidence had emerged in Schand's criminal trial that revealed new witnesses, recanted testimony, and unduly suggestive photo arrays and lineups that predisposed witnesses to identify Schand as the perpetrator.

Adam felt humbled by the chance to represent Schand. And, he says, he jumped at the chance to take more of a leadership role at trial. "To be able to get up and do those cross-examinations of the police officers, to do direct examinations of our expert witnesses," he says. "I fell in love with trial work that day."

In September 2019, the jury found in favor of Schand, finding that his civil rights had been violated and awarding him damages of more than $27 million. Adam describes the moment in the courtroom when the verdict was announced as emotional. "I'll never forget that moment," he says. "I represent large pharmaceutical companies. When we're trying cases, sure, the client is there, but it's a lot different when you're sitting next to Mark Schand for the entire trial. Everyone burst into tears, and a lot of people were hugging. You try to keep your composure, but it was difficult."

Adam describes the reading of the jury verdict to another feeling that means a lot to him. "Those 30 seconds," he says, "I could feel my chest pounding. It's the same thing, the excitement I used to get from a big hockey game. It feels like stepping out on the ice in a big hockey game."

Adam is proud of the pro bono efforts of his firm. "I think large firms like White & Case, these global, international law firms, I think we have an obligation to set a certain standard for pro bono work," he says. "If we're not doing it, then who's doing it? We're in a position where we can do that, and I think we have an obligation to do it at the level at which we do our billable work, and that's what we did here."