Jessica Powell is not your average lawyer. She was working at 12, living on her own at 16. Jessica enrolled in college — and on Mother’s Day in 2005, she graduated magna cum laude from Eastern Kentucky University with a degree in English Literature.
Law school wasn’t the obvious next step. She went to work for the Commonwealth of Kentucky as a disability adjudicator, spending over a decade evaluating claims and learning, up close, how institutions handle the people who need help most. When she felt the time was right, she decided to pursue her dream of becoming a lawyer. She found it at Salmon P. Chase College of Law, which offered a nighttime program. For three and a half years, she worked full-time during the day and attended classes at night. She graduated summa cum laude, first in her class.
During law school, Jessica served as an extern for the Kentucky Innocence Project, an Associate Editor for the Northern Kentucky Law Review, and a member of Chase’s Client Counseling Competition team. She had a note published in the Law Review and was a presenter at Chase’s “Miranda at 50” symposium — early signals of the kind of attorney she was becoming.
After graduating, Jessica clerked for a Kentucky Circuit Court Judge before joining a firm focused on product liability and mass tort litigation. That work was national in scope, with clients in nearly every state going up against large pharmaceutical and medical device companies — cases where millions of dollars were at stake. She also spent a brief stint at an insurance defense firm early on. She didn’t stay long. Defending insurance companies wasn’t why she went to law school.
Today, Jessica practices personal injury law at Kruger & Hodges, and the reason is straightforward: she likes helping people, particularly people who find themselves up against large, powerful companies. Her background as a disability adjudicator gave her an unusually deep understanding of how insurance systems work — knowledge she now puts to use on behalf of her clients rather than against them. She has negotiated six- and seven-figure settlements and earned recognition from the National Trial Lawyers as a Top 100 Civil Plaintiff attorney in 2020 and 2021, Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch from 2021 through 2024, and Super Lawyers Rising Stars in 2023.
Her approach to client relationships is shaped by personal experience as much as professional philosophy. She keeps her focus on the individual — not the volume. Being injured is stressful enough; the last thing a client should have to worry about is whether their attorney is going to return their call. Jessica makes sure they don’t have to wonder. And because she has lived in five states, in cities and small towns alike, there aren’t many situations — or people — she can’t relate to on some level.
She now lives in Adams County, Ohio, and she noticed something when she moved there: too few professionals are willing to leave the cities to serve people in rural communities. Jessica doesn’t think that’s right. People in small towns deserve the same quality of legal help as anyone else — and she intends to provide it.
Outside the office, Jessica has been married for 26 years and is the proud parent of one son. She’s an avid gardener and is steadily transforming her small piece of rural Ohio into something beautiful. She keeps chickens, shares her home with two rescue basset hounds, and is a committed DIYer who has refinished furniture, hung drywall, and remodeled kitchens and bathrooms with her own hands. The same tenacity that carried her through night law school shows up everywhere else in her life, too.