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Attorney Kim Bueno was mentioned and quoted in The Atlantic in a story titled, “What It Takes to Be a Trial Lawyer If You’re Not a Man.”
The following is an excerpt from the article:
But Jill, who has a doctorate in education policy, also comes from a family of lawyers—including our father, her husband, and three sisters. Bueno told me later that she was counting on jurors like her: highly educated individuals who would listen to both sides and apply the law to the facts.
I’m confident my sister did exactly that, but she told me she had been impressed by more than just Bueno’s command of the law. Jill had related to her. She was the only woman lawyer in a courtroom packed with attorneys. The men were dour and dull; Bueno was personable and dynamic. She referred to the female anatomy with confidence and ease. By contrast, Adkins’s all-male team struggled when forced to ask personal questions. “If you can’t say the word vagina, you are probably not the best lawyer for the case,” Jill said. By tiptoeing around their client’s injuries, Adkins’s male lawyers undersold her pain and failed to prove its direct link to Ethicon.
A turning point in the trial, Jill told me, was Bueno’s cross-examination of Adkins. “She kept her same friendly demeanor while asking some very tough questions. She had to break [Adkins] down and demonstrate that she was not a reliable witness. And she did it without seeming mean or horrible.” In a case involving complicated issues relating to female genitalia, my sister said, “I trusted her more because she was a woman.”
In a sweeping victory for Ethicon, the jury found that the mesh had been defective but that Adkins had failed to prove that it had caused her injuries. (In August 2017, the judge overrode the jury’s verdict; Ethicon has appealed.) When I spoke with Bueno, she told me that she has been involved in hundreds of mesh cases. “A woman is able to cross-examine a female personal-injury victim with greater sensitivity,” she said. “She can probe a little further without coming across as attacking the victim.”
