Super Lawyers - Minnesota 2011

The Quiet Passion
of Shamus O’Meara

The Johnson & Condon attorney advocates
for those with developmental disabilities

BY ROSS PFUND PHOTOGRAPH Y BY LARRY MARCUS

In June 2008, Shamus O’Meara was
working at the Edina office of Johnson

& Condon when he heard the awful news: Keith Kennedy, a 25-year-old with developmental disabilities, had gone missing from a special needs camp in Wisconsin and was lost in the woods.

O’Meara was shocked. Linda Kennedy, Keith’s mother, had been one of the first professionals to work with O’Meara’s oldest son, Connor, who is autistic, at the Rondo Early Education Program in St.

Paul several years earlier.

The soft-spoken attorney’s voice trembles with emotion as he tells the story. “We had kept in touch with the Kennedy family for years, and when I heard that Keith was lost, I dropped everything and went out and looked for him,” O’Meara says. “There were hundreds of people out there. In fact, when I returned with a search party that had come back [to the staging point for the search operation], we were walking through mud and swamp and briars, and everybody was covered. I walked off the bus and there was a friend of mine, Ted, a lawyer who had just heard about the search and came over. He was there in his suit, in his good shoes, and he had tears streaming out of his eyes. His son, Jack, like my son Connor, has autism.

“So there was Ted, crying in his suit, as
I got off the bus. We hugged each other,
cried a little bit, and he got on the bus [to
continue the search],” O’Meara says. “I’m
proud of the disability community and
the legal community’s involvement on
issues like that.”
Kennedy was found a week later and has
since recovered from the ordeal.

O’Meara, modest to a fault, would never say it, but his own contribution to the state’s disability community has been significant. In a lawsuit filed in 2009, he represented the families of three adults with developmental disabilities who were locked into ankle cuffs and handcuffs for “minor behavior problems,” according to a 2008 investigation. State law only allows for such restraints to be used for safety reasons. In September 2010, the state settled the lawsuit for $3 million and agreed to overhaul its policy on the appropriate use of restraints.

“It’s not really about the money,”
O’Meara says. “It’s about the change that
we’re affecting. The Department of Human
Services, we think, recognizes that. We’re
building into the settlement agreement
positive behavioral techniques and
reinforcement so that we can avoid the use
of handcuffs and leg irons. So that we can
treat people with respect.”
Being able to change the treatment and
perception of people with developmental
disabilities is particularly rewarding for
O’Meara. “This is real change, not just for
the parties in the lawsuit, but for everyone
that has a developmental disability that
touches state government,” he says.

Progress is slowly being made, O’Meara
says. “It wasn’t too many years ago that
people with autism and developmental
disabilities were institutionalized. There
was a deinstitutionalization of people with
developmental disabilities several years
ago, but the institutionalization effect
continues in access to services, in access
to justice, in how we treat and think about
these people. What we’re trying to imbue
into lawyers, in particular, is a sense of
what these people are really all about.”
O’Meara hopes that more attorneys will
get involved to help guide families of people
with developmental disabilities through
the process of getting assistance from the
state. “It’s a bureaucratic morass out there
to wade through all the language of these
benefit programs and other areas of the
law and regulations that they need to get
through,” he says. “They need a lawyer.”
O’Meara knew early on that he wanted to
be one of those lawyers. After graduating
from the University of Minnesota with
degrees in political science and economics,
the Brooklyn Center native—“back when
it had potato fields,” he says—sold life
insurance, handled financial planning and
worked other odd jobs before enrolling at
William Mitchell College of Law.

O’Meara’s mentor was the late Wayne Tritbough, a partner at Johnson & Condon who took the young lawyer under his wing and introduced him to construction law, which still makes up part of O’Meara’s practice. “Wayne had an extremely colorful personality, was a good guy, and knew the ins and outs of construction law,” he says.