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Kevin
P. Byers has an eclectic professional history which has proven beneficial
in his practice defending healthcare practitioners before various
licensing and regulatory agencies.
After receiving
his undergraduate degree in social work from Bluffton College, a
tiny Mennonite college in northwest Ohio, Kevin worked for six months
as a child abuse investigator in Lima, Ohio. He then moved on to
work as an adult parole officer and supervised over one hundred
felons released from prison in a west-central Ohio rural area covering
four counties. This work was quite challenging and required many
independent investigations and arrests of parole violators. Cooperation
and effective communication with a wide variety of law enforcement
and social service agencies were essential traits of this position.
In both of these investigative positions Kevin honed his sense of
objectivity and learned to make decisions which were time-sensitive
and had long-range consequences upon the lives of others. It was
from these work contacts that Kevin was first encouraged by police
officers, lawyers, and judges to consider pursuing law school.
After four and
one-half years of fieldwork in parole, Kevin was promoted to a mid-management
administrative position in the central office in Columbus, Ohio.
He also was accepted into law school and began attending evening
and weekend classes while continuing to work fulltime for the state
of Ohio. After two and one-half years in parole management, he accepted
a position as a law clerk with a trial court in Columbus. This enabled
Kevin to participate and learn about the inner workings of a trial
court. He continued to attend law school in the evenings and weekends
and received his juris doctorate in May 1988 from Capital University
Law School after four years of study.
After passing
the July 1988 bar examination, Kevin was admitted to the Ohio Bar
in November 1988 and presided at trial as a judicially-appointed
court referee the very next day. He continued to work for the court
system as a fulltime referee, presiding at over thirty civil trials.
Within his first year of working as a court referee, Kevin also
saw three of his decisions selected for publication in the official
reporter of court opinions in Ohio. Kevin found his duties as a
judicial officer to be a vibrant area of practice and he enjoyed
the challenge of presiding at trial and controlling the various
aspects of litigation. An additional attraction was the rather academic,
detached, endeavor of researching and drafting a decision based
only on the admitted evidence and the applicable law.
After about
one and one-half years as a trial court referee, Kevin moved on
to the State Medical Board of Ohio where he served as an administrative
law hearing examiner. During his thirty-two months on the staff
of the Medical Board, he presided at sixty-five administrative hearings
regarding physician licensure, discipline, and regulation. It was
through this experience that Kevin saw the great need for legal
counsel who was experienced in administrative litigation, intimately
understood the workings of the Medical Board, had personal contacts
with the Board staff and Board members themselves, and possessed
knowledge and experience with both the substantive and procedural
aspects pertinent to this particular niche of law.
In November
1992 Kevin opened his practice dedicated to the defense of physicians
and other healthcare professionals. Kevin has had the benefit of
representing hundreds of physicians before the State Medical Board
of Ohio, various licensing boards in other states, varied branches
of the federal government, and private entities such as hospital
privileging committees and insurance reimbursement panels. He has
also defended physicians, nurses, and dentists in criminal court.
Although the
majority of Kevin's clients have been physicians, he also maintains
an active practice before the Ohio Board of Nursing, the Ohio State
Board of Pharmacy, the Ohio State Dental Board, and the Ohio Board
of Psychology. Additionally, Kevin has represented allied healthcare
professionals before other boards in Ohio such as respiratory care,
speech language pathology and audiology, and chiropractic.
From his extensive
practice in this limited area Kevin has developed a network of attorneys
in other states who possess comparable experience with their respective
healthcare licensing and disciplinary boards. As appropriate, referrals
are made to involve other attorneys to afford the most complete
prophylactic, remedial, and defensive legal representation to his
clients. Kevin has also worked extensively with other Ohio attorneys
to jointly represent licensees before the various Ohio healthcare
licensing boards.
Kevin's focused,
meaningful experience representing physicians, dentists, pharmacists,
and nurses has resulted in an unmatched reputation for thorough,
effective legal representation with consistently optimal outcomes. |
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