Adam Fred Peoples

Adam Peoples is a first-chair jury trial lawyer who focuses on high-exposure disputes. Since joining Hall Booth Smith in 2017, Adam has accumulated more than 1,800 hours of jury trial time. His trial experience is concentrated in high-exposure matters, including disputes involving eight- and nine-figure demands, with proceedings typically lasting two weeks and as long as seven weeks.

While every case presents unique facts, Adam’s experience has shown that jury outcomes are often shaped by recurring risk archetypes that appear again and again in high-exposure disputes. This volume of courtroom exposure has placed him repeatedly in the kinds of high-risk jury environments most clients hope never to face, including:

• Highly personal disputes where both sides have acted badly
• Multi-claim “shotgun” complaints designed to overwhelm
• Deeply sympathetic party narratives
• Technically complex cases requiring simplification
• Public-sentiment cases where the client is presumed to be the villain
• Hindsight-driven “if only one more thing had been done” claims
• Matters constrained by adverse pretrial rulings
• Cases involving admitted mistakes but disputed legal liability
• Multi-defendant finger-pointing cases
• Underdog cases against better-resourced opponents

Repeated exposure to these patterns allows him to identify early which issues truly matter to jurors — and which do not — shaping a focused approach to issue selection, witness preparation, and jury persuasion that centers on what actually influences verdicts. As a result, Adam's perspective is always juror-focused, developing persuasive trial themes, preparing witnesses for live testimony, and presenting cases in court when the outcome depends on effective courtroom performance.

Before entering private practice, Adam served as a law clerk to the Honorable Martin Reidinger of the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina. He later joined the Asheville office of Hall Booth Smith, where he built a practice centered on defending high-exposure professional and commercial liability claims.

Adam earned his Juris Doctor from Mercer University after graduating summa cum laude from Columbus State University with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. Prior to law school, he worked as a project manager in the healthcare and software development industries.

He is AV Preeminent® Peer Review Rated™ by Martindale-Hubbell.