Judges have repeatedly handed him other lawyers’ litigation to manage. The Complex Litigation Section of the 19th Judicial District Court for East Baton Rouge Parish appointed him special master to oversee one hundred first party insurance claims arising from hurricane damage to homes and businesses. The United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana appointed him as one of the neutrals to facilitate resolution of more than seven hundred pending federal hurricane lawsuits. Roughly one hundred cases, in two court systems, entrusted to him by the bench.

He serves as an arbitrator on the American Arbitration Association International Centre for Dispute Resolution seafarer and cruise line panel, on the London Maritime Arbitration Association for seafarer injury and wage disputes, and on the Louisiana State Bar Association fee dispute arbitration panel, where he decides disputes between lawyers and between lawyers and their clients. He is a registered mediator in Louisiana. He has participated in more than one hundred alternative dispute resolution proceedings involving American and foreign nationals, and he studied negotiation through the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

That work pays a direct return to his clients. Sitting as the neutral teaches a lawyer what actually moves a defendant and an adjuster, what authority a carrier holds and when it runs out, and where a demand stops persuading and starts costing. Most cases resolve at mediation rather than at trial. He prepares for one with the thoroughness of the other.

He has litigated arbitration and jurisdictional questions at the highest levels. His practice includes cases under the Federal Arbitration Act and the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, and he has represented parties in the development of the Convention’s application to United States maritime law for both American and foreign seamen. He has briefed forum non conveniens, forum selection, and arbitration questions to the Louisiana Supreme Court, the Texas Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court of the United States. He was counsel of record for amicus Global Maritime Ministries in Touchet v. Estis Well Service, L.L.C., where the Supreme Court granted leave to file on whether seamen may recover punitive damages for a shipowner’s breach of the duty to provide a seaworthy vessel. Lawyers from his firm also appeared as amici, alongside maritime law professors, in Lozman v. City of Riviera Beach, the 2013 decision redefining what qualifies as a vessel under the Jones Act and general maritime law.

He has made law in his own state. In Sawicki v. K/S Stavanger Prince, the Louisiana Supreme Court held that Louisiana Revised Statute 23:921(A)(2) is a strong expression of state public policy voiding a forum selection clause in a seaman’s employment contract unless the seaman expressly and knowingly ratified it after the injury. The court reached that question only because jurisdiction had been secured by attaching the vessel itself, which was released after the defendants posted security. Courts and commentators still cite the decision, and it remains a principal reason a foreign seafarer injured aboard a foreign flag vessel can have his claim heard in a Louisiana court.

His trial practice runs well beyond the water. He has tried and resolved claims arising from industrial plant explosions, products liability and burn injury, trucking and automobile collisions, and traumatic brain injury, where he has made extensive use of diffusion tensor imaging to demonstrate damage that conventional imaging does not show. Partnering with firms from Dallas and Lake Charles, he obtained a thirteen million dollar trial court judgment for an injured undocumented worker after persuading a jury that the employer was substantially certain its conduct would cause injury, which is among the most difficult showings a plaintiff can make in Louisiana. He has litigated against the State itself, challenging the administration of unclaimed property by the Secretary of Revenue and the State Treasurer in matters reported at Albach v. Kennedy and Hooks v. Treasurer. Courts have appointed him lead and co lead class counsel representing hundreds of class members in Louisiana state and federal proceedings.

Maritime work is the deepest single area of his practice and the one he came to first. Kenny is one of the lawyers appointed to represent the International Transport Workers’ Federation, the largest federation of seafarers’ unions in the world. He has represented injured seamen, merchant mariners, and the families of those killed at sea in matters arising across the globe, and that work has taken him to the Philippines, Thailand, India, Ukraine, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, New Zealand, Panama, Peru, Chile, Guatemala, Australia, and Canada. He pursues Jones Act and unseaworthiness claims, maintenance and cure, unpaid wages, and wrongful death, and where jurisdiction over a foreign vessel owner must be established he pursues arrest and attachment of vessels calling in United States ports.

He came to that work honestly. Kenny is a first generation college and law school graduate from a New Orleans family of merchant mariners, commercial fishermen, and union dock workers. He grew up working the water with his father and grandfather aboard commercial fishing vessels in the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Borgne, and Lake Pontchartrain, and he spent his college summers as a long line commercial shark fisherman out of Venice, Louisiana. He understands what a vessel owner owes the people who work his boat because he grew up among them.

From 2007 through 2021 he taught Admiralty Law and Maritime Personal Injury to second and third year students at the Southern University Law Center, and he advised the school’s Maritime Law Society and its admiralty moot court program. He has taught international maritime law for Tulane University Law School in Rhodes, Greece, in a program co sponsored with the Aegean Institute of the Law of the Sea and Maritime Law, and lectured at Marmara University in Istanbul on United States maritime law, forum selection, and forum non conveniens. He has presented to the Sixth International Congress on Maritime and Admiralty Law in Istanbul on establishing maritime jurisdiction in the United States over injuries to non American seafarers occurring abroad, and to the International Symposium on the History of Maritime and Insurance Law on the meaning of seaman status under the Jones Act. He has lectured for the Louisiana Association for Justice on vessel automated information systems and on Louisiana statutory immunities. He and his partner endowed the Dodson & Hooks Professorship at the Southern University Law Center and the Dodson & Hooks Maritime Chair at Louisiana State University.

Kenny is admitted in all Louisiana state and federal courts, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and the Supreme Court of the United States. He has been admitted pro hac vice in the state courts of Texas, Mississippi, and California, the federal courts of Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Puerto Rico, the bankruptcy courts for the District of Columbia, and the High Court of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, one of the largest ship registries in the world.

He is AV rated by Martindale-Hubbell, has been selected to Louisiana Super Lawyers every year from 2011 through 2024, and his firm has been ranked Tier 1 by Best Law Firms of U.S. News & World Report. He belongs to the American Bar Association, the Louisiana State Bar Association, the Baton Rouge Bar Association, the Federal Bar Association for the Middle District of Louisiana, the American Association for Justice, and the Louisiana Association for Justice, on whose Board of Governors he has served.

Kenny earned his Juris Doctorate from the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University in 1997, where he was a research assistant to Distinguished Professor Lucy McGough and to the executive director of what is now the Louisiana Association for Justice. He holds a B.S. in finance from Southeastern Louisiana University.

Lawyers throughout Louisiana and across the country bring him cases that require experience they do not have or resources they cannot commit. The firm advances the cost of that litigation, which is often the only reason a good case gets brought at all.

He has been married for more than twenty five years and has a daughter who recently graduated from law school. He spends his free time fishing the southern Louisiana marshes, following LSU athletics, and riding with the New Orleans Mardi Gras Krewe of Bacchus.

If you would like to speak with Kenny, call or text his cell phone at 225 235 3380. If he cannot help you, he will do his best to find someone who can.