Independence Square

Meanwhile, as a lawyer, McClain was learning how to win in court. In 1985, he was recruited to another firm that represented the Independence School District. The district was one of the first in the state of Missouri to sue a company over the asbestos products that were then being removed from school buildings because of health risks.

The eventual $1 million verdict for the district was not lucrative for the firm, which had been billing by the hour. But in 1989, McClain's firm made a similar case on a contingency basis for 21 other Missouri school districts, which made for a much larger payday.

McClain says he realized he had a knack for in-depth, technical cases, and that taking such cases on contingency, though a risk, could pay off in large ways.

Four years later, he used that strategy to make legal history.

By 1993, McClain was a partner in the firm Humphrey, Farrington & McClain, and he'd drafted a new employee into a risky case. Greg Leyh had joined the firm that August after leaving a career as a professor of political philosophy.

"Not two weeks after I went to work for him, he came into my office and said, 'We've got to go after big tobacco,'" Leyh recalls.

To Leyh, the request sounded idiotic. Few people were pursuing personal injury cases against the tobacco companies, and no one was winning.

"Nobody was doing it in '93, other than small-time guys who just got their heads handed to them by Shook, Hardy and other firms," Leyh says.

Tobacco industry attorneys were known for fighting every court motion and never settling lawsuits. And they were undefeated on personal injury claims.

McClain, however, had a personal debt to settle. His father had died of lung cancer at 50.

Leyh went to work and found the Tobacco Liability Project at Northeastern University in Boston, which had a case that no one else would touch.

In the 1940s, Janet Sackman was a beautiful strawberry-blond model who made smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes seem all-American. When she was 17, an ad exec told her that she should start smoking to better look the model part. She became addicted, stopping only when she was diagnosed with throat cancer. She would have her larynx and part of a lung removed.

McClain and Leyh filed a personal injury case based on her illness, only days before the statute of limitations was to expire.

"He was basically the only lawyer in the country willing to take the case," says Richard Daynard, executive director of the Northeastern University group.

Against heavy odds, McClain and Leyh were able to wrest a few key documents from Chesterfield cigarette maker Liggett Group, which showed that the company had taken steps to make its product more addictive.

"It was the Rosetta stone in a very real way to unfold the secrets of tobacco industry," McClain explains.

The case settled. Details of the payoff are confidential, but even $1 would have been more than any other lawyer had wrung out of a tobacco company on a personal injury claim related to smoking.

"It was the first time any tobacco company ever settled a case," Daynard says. The victory proved that such cases could be won, and Daynard says it established McClain as one of the ten most important lawyers in the country in tobacco litigation. "He's really a very important national figure in this area," Daynard says.

When the state of Missouri began contemplating a lawsuit to collect for health-care costs connected to smoking, McClain was on the short list to help represent Attorney General Jay Nixon. With McClain's help, Missouri was offered $4.5 billion over 25 years from the tobacco industry.

"Ken is the best trial lawyer I've ever seen," Leyh says. "He once told me there is no place he's more comfortable than in the courtroom. ... There is nothing that befuddles him."

McClain's latest cause was on behalf of workers at a Jasper County popcorn factory. The workers spent their days laboring around vats of boiling butter flavoring, and many suffered from rare lung and throat illnesses.

In 2004, McClain convinced a jury that the company knew the chemicals in the flavoring were harmful and won a $20 million verdict for one of the employees. Last year, another worker won a $15 million verdict. McClain has another 70 plaintiffs lined up to make cases of their own against the factory.

The cases earned him recognition as one of Missouri Lawyers Weekly's 2004 Lawyers of the Year.

"I've always regarded Ken McClain as a utopian," Leyh says. "These are guys who imagine the world a certain way and create communities around how life should be.... He's setting up a community out there he thinks will help people to enjoy life."

McClain's legal victories have funded his personal urban-renewal campaign.

It started with Saddle Ridge.

By the mid 1990s, with his legal career a success, McClain and his wife, Cindy, were ready to build a new house that would accommodate their six children. But Independence didn't then have what McClain called an "executive subdivision," a new development with the kind of upscale homes they had in mind.

"Independence wanted it in the worst way," McClain says. "How do I say this? I like these people. I wanted to help."