‘What Would Patty Do?’

About two months out of law school, Patricia McKinnon joined the newly created Marion County public defender agency to represent parents either trying to get their children back or facing involuntary termination of parental rights. One month later, she was thrust into her first civil trial—alone. She had worked extensively with the client, who consented to let relatives adopt all of her children except one, and she was counting on the woman to demonstrate on the witness stand that she was, in fact, a good mother.

“So when you discipline your son, you use an open hand on a padded butt?” McKinnon began.

“No, I whup him.”

“By whupping him, you mean an open hand on a padded butt?” McKinnon repeated.

“No, I whup him good.”

The judge looked straight at McKinnon and raised his eyebrows. “And,” she recalls, “I thought, ‘I just lost this trial from my own question.’” She was right. “It makes me look bad, but young attorneys need to know you can survive these kinds of stories. I did these kinds of cases for five years as a public defender, and won one termination in trial and one on appeal. That’s what you face,” she says.

“Being a public defender on Child in Need of Services (CHINS) and termination cases is like being in the front line of a war,” she says, using one of her signature “Patty-isms.” “You learn how to dodge the bullets a lot faster than the people in the back writing the orders, but you get a lot bloodier in the process.”

Focusing on family law as a solo attorney in the same office space for the last 30 years, McKinnon, 64, is widely respected for her thoroughness and preparation. “I can be very intense,” she says. Her commitment to pro bono has garnered numerous kudos, including the 2008 Indiana State Bar Foundation’s President’s Award for her push for indigent legal services, the 2010 Edmund S. Muskie Pro Bono Service Award from the American Bar Association, and the 2019 Kids’ Voice Guardian ad Litem of the Year honor.

“She listens carefully to what the client’s goals are and works diligently to help the client reach those goals,” says Indiana Legal Services executive director Jon Laramore, who has worked with McKinnon in various capacities for more than 30 years. “She is often in family law cases that present difficult interpersonal issues, and she uses the law to help her clients get good outcomes in those cases while simultaneously providing the personal support clients need.”

Laramore adds: “She is also a great cheerleader. When she finds a cause she believes in, she supports it 100% with her time, talent and treasure, and she spreads her enthusiasm by recruiting others to support that cause.”

McKinnon grew up in Bellwood, Illinois, a small Chicago suburb that produced two astronauts, including Eugene Cernan, the last person to walk on the moon. A member of her high school’s flag and rifle corps, she served as the first female president of the student council and went on to become the first woman at the University of Notre Dame Law School with a new baby to finish in three years.

“I’m used to breaking new ground as a woman,” she says.

Unsure about a legal career, she tested the waters by working as assistant to a New Jersey solo practitioner. By the end of that year, she was convinced. “At that time, in the very early ’90s, late ’80s, people going into law were the best of the best. I never thought that I was the smartest in the room or that I was going to be the best lawyer. I just wanted to have the ability to help people who didn’t have the power. That’s how I ended up a public defender.”

Sworn to the bar on Halloween Day 1994, McKinnon set up her own office and began handling civil cases part time for the Marion County Public Defender Agency. “I loved that work, but my caseload grew so large that I couldn’t spend enough time on my private practice to build it up,” she says. “So after five years, I resigned. It broke my heart, but I think I was getting like $1,800 a month, plus a pager and $58 a month for rent on my office. And that wasn’t enough to live on.”

As a public defender trying CHINS and termination cases, she’d already acquired a primary skill needed in family law: the ability to deal with strong emotions and people in crisis. But it wasn’t until about 10 years into her practice that McKinnon realized she needed to alter the way she interacted with clients. “I had to try to reach clients at their level and communicate in the best way for them. Some clients want to do everything themselves. They want to do their own legal research. They want to check everything online. Some need me to hold their hand and explain basic things,” she says. “My theory is that what the client wants to do, as long as it’s within the funnel of normal, I’m fine with it. It’s when they go outside the funnel and want to take a deal that’s really bad for them that I ask them to let me withdraw because they don’t need me to get that bad of a deal.”

Her Patty-isms sprout from that desire to communicate, using images her clients can relate to. “Your case is like the Budweiser beer wagon,” she’s been known to say. “You’re one of the horses and I’m one of the horses. The wagon isn’t going to move forward unless both of us do our work. I can’t pull the wagon by myself.” At other times, she tells them, “Court is like a card game. The judge is the dealer, and the dealer is looking to see who has the better hand—you or the other side. The facts are like a deck of cards, sometimes with aces, sometimes deuces. I can’t make those facts, and I can only play the cards you give me.”

As an attorney, McKinnon notes, “Your legal skills matter, in most cases, as much as your ability to connect with your clients.”

Connecting, however, doesn’t mean unfettered access, a lesson McKinnon learned early in her career. “How I survived as a solo where other people haven’t survived is that I put limits on my clients. I try not to check email on weekends. I don’t routinely check email late at night unless there’s a trial coming. I set boundaries to keep myself from burning out because I knew that I was getting close. No client ever has my personal cellphone number, period.”

Another Patty-ism—one she repeats to herself as needed—helps temper the quest to be perfect. “I’m never the best at everything. I might be the best attorney, but I’m never going to the best attorney on the same day that I’m the best wife or the best mother. I’m just good enough.

“That doesn’t come naturally to attorneys because we’re all overachievers,” she adds. “We want to be the best at everything all the time.”

Her most memorable trial, assigned by Pro Bono Indiana, took place in Marion County probate court in the middle of a snowstorm. McKinnon’s client, a woman in her 80s who faithfully took care of her great-grandson with disabilities since his birth, was vying for custody of the boy. The child’s mother wanted custody, too. “And it appeared to be for financial reasons, Social Security,” McKinnon says. “The argument against [my client] was, of course, that she was old. But she was sharp as a whip.”

With the downtown court building nearly emptied by the extreme weather, the boy’s doctors and nurses from Riley Hospital for Children still came to testify. The key moment came when McKinnon questioned the mother.

“You haven’t gone to any of your son’s multiple medical appointments, have you?”

“No.”

“Don’t you get notices from Riley Hospital about your son’s appointments?”

“I see the envelopes, but I just don’t open them.”

“No more questions,” McKinnon said, taking her seat.

“I knew I had won the case at that moment,” she says. “If this great-grandma hadn’t fought back, I don’t know what kind of care the child would have gotten with the mom, or what medical appointments the child would have been to, if any.”

For McKinnon, not every successful case comes with an immediately happy outcome, nor does it need to. “Sometimes, because I’ve been an attorney so long, I can offer an alternative point of view,” she says. “I can talk someone off the ledge of complete panic or the ledge of helplessness. … In a divorce, it’s going to be harder in the short term, but it’s easier in the long run.”

Inspired by her own mentor, Derelle Watson-Duvall, one of the first female attorneys at the Indiana Department of Child Services, McKinnon finds that advising her younger counterparts is “one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done as an attorney. I get so much more back from them than I give to them—their enthusiasm, their curiosity. It helps me to be more compassionate, to keep up with what’s going on.
“These are all people who are going to be stars down the road. I predict some of these women are going to be judges. Some of them are going to head up organizations. It’s just amazing to have this little bit of an opportunity to help nudge them along the way.”

Rebecca Berfanger, a solo attorney who’s practiced probate/estate, family and small-business law for almost a decade, became one of McKinnon’s first mentees in law school and still seeks her guidance. “She is known throughout the legal community in Indianapolis for providing no-frills advice, such as thinking through from the other side’s perspective, considering worst-case scenarios, and what to do if a client isn’t being honest or something seems off,” Berfanger says. “Any time I tell someone, ‘I talked to Patty …’ they know exactly who I’m talking about and know about her approach. I’ve never heard an unkind word about her or how she handles her cases in court.”

Recently, when Berfanger, a former reporter who still freelances, wrote an article for The IndyBar Record, she interviewed several other attorneys mentored by McKinnon. “At least one mentioned that when they are trying to make a decision, they’ll think, ‘What would Patty do?’ which is also something I find myself doing from time to time.”

In 2006, McKinnon and her husband Ken Duggins took up classes at Adamson’s Karate Studios with their first grader as a way to focus the boy’s energy. Three years later, she earned her first black belt, then a second-degree black belt, and kept going after Ken injured his shoulder and had to take a step back. “I was never the best in karate,” she says. “I barely passed, but I passed, and I had to work really, really hard at it. People say, ‘Oh, you did karate for fun,’ and I say, ‘You don’t do karate for fun. You do it because it’s good for your body and your brain.’”

Even so, it improved her confidence in her ability to defend herself. And, she asserts, “Martial arts will improve your driving skills. In martial arts, you are in a combat situation and people are punching and kicking at you, or coming at you with sticks or weapons. You have to learn to activate your reflexes, so you’re ducking and moving to not get hit or punched or kicked. If you do that on a regular basis, over time it translates that, while you’re driving, you’re doing the same things with your eyes on other cars. You’re constantly looking for an obstacle to come at you.”

For now, she’s traded karate for weightlifting, walking 5K races, and marching 10,000 steps a day while watching competitive cooking shows on TV. “I have two rescued greyhounds and I drive them crazy because they hear the noise, and I don’t stop.”

She’ll get back to karate someday. After all, it has similarities to practicing law. “In karate, you get a stripe on your belt when you master certain smaller activities on your way to getting the next belt,” McKinnon says. “In a big case, you take little steps and get rewarded.” 

Quirks of the Court

Throughout her career, Patricia McKinnon has squirreled away brief synopses of entertaining court tales—some clever, some downright hilarious, all true—as a way to bond with other attorneys and let off some steam. “My hobby is collecting these stories, and sometimes sharing them with others. Of course, no names, no identifying stuff,” she says. “If you can laugh about it, then it releases the tension.”

Here, McKinnon shares a couple of her favorites:

“An attorney represented himself, pro se, in a lawsuit in Marion County. He asked himself a question, as his own witness, then objected to his own question, to himself, and asked the judge to rule on the objection. ‘You’re objecting to your own question to yourself?’ the judge asked. ‘Yes,’ the attorney replied. ‘I want to preserve the issue for appeal.’”

“A defendant chose to represent himself in a criminal case pending in the former Marion County Drug Court. While the police officer was testifying, the pro se defendant objected. ‘What’s the basis of your objection?’ the judge asked the defendant. ‘Your Honor, he couldn’t have seen me. I was standing behind him holding the gun against his head. He’s lying.’ The defendant has now put himself at the scene of the crime, holding the weapon, committing the crime. Case over.”