PHOTO BY CLIFF RITCHEY
KEN NUNN
I
ndiana plaintiffs’ attorney Ken Nunn has been fighting insurance companies on behalf of the injured and the surviving families of those who suffered wrongful death since he founded his firm, the Ken Nunn Law Office, in 1967. Nunn began his practice humbly, in a small office with a folding card table, a set of chairs, and some homemade cinderblock shelves, and his firm now boasts a team of 92 employees and 17 expert attorneys. What is most intriguing about this is that Nunn himself—now 75 years old—still works as hard as ever, six days a week. He has a policy of not letting people wait for him in his conference room longer than two minutes, and even spends holidays and his Saturday afternoons returning phone calls to his clients. “Those Saturday afternoons are my golf,” Nunn says. “You talk to a guy and say, ‘What’d you do Saturday?’ and he says he went out and played golf and loved it. If that was me, I’d say I came down to the office and returned some phone calls—I love it.” Nunn grew up the son of a single mother. They were very
poor—he recalls them being evicted from their home seven times over 12 years of his childhood. Nunn dropped out of high school early, but changed his mind about education, decided to go on to college, and made it through law school, as he tells it, just by the skin of his teeth. Yet, with the odds stacked up against him, Nunn is a great success—in life, and in the courtroom. “I was determined to be a lawyer, but after I became a lawyer, I learned that law school didn’t teach me everything I needed to know,” he says. “When I started out, I didn’t have any money—and if you didn’t have any money and you graduated at the bottom of your class, you’ve got to do something—so I worked hard. The first eight years of my practice I did not take a vacation and every lawyer in town beat me up. They were the gray-haired guys—and now I’m a gray-haired guy! But the challenge is still that I’m up against well-educated lawyers and up against insurance companies. My job is to represent individual clients who may not be as sophisticated and give them an even playing field: I love that challenge.”
104 South Franklin Road | Bloomington, IN 47404 phone 812.332.9451 | fax 812.331.5321 www.kennunn.com