One client was caught on video knocking his fiancée out cold in an elevator. Another took a plea for child abuse after hitting his 4-year-old son with a switch.

Jeffrey Kessler has had his work cut out for him defending football players against discipline by the National Football League. He surmounted negative publicity and bad facts, he said, by finding the “right themes, the right points that are going to resonate” with fact-finders.

“The NFL has been unique among the major sports as being the last bastion of trying to operate an off-the-field disciplinary system for the players, in which [the NFL does] not deploy neutral arbitrators,” the Winston & Strawn litigator said.