John Shea's Big Case

continued

After court wraps up at 1 p.m., Shea takes Kilpatrick home. Then, "I drive back to the office to work on the case, or work on some other aspect of my practice, or to attend to administrative things. And I get up the next morning and I do it again."

Though the trial has dominated his practice these last five months, it hasn't taken it over. He credits his associate attorney, Uwe Dauss, with "doing a lot of heavy lifting" and "keeping my practice alive" while he's in Detroit.

"We have not closed shop," Shea says. "We are still open for business.

"Sometimes [a prospective] client has said, 'I think I'll find somebody else who is not quite so busy,' and sometimes the client has said, 'I'll continue with you and trust that you can give it the attention that it needs.'"

It also helps that he brought in a second associate, Alex Brennan, to share the workload. "I hired her fresh off of an ACLU Fellowship last January, a year ago, to assist me with two cases. I had to finish up a federal murder case, and then I had to jump into getting into the final prep stages of this. There is a reason why there are multiple defense hands on the defense team, for all defendants. This is not the kind of case you can handle by yourself.