Kirby Lee Minor

Kirby L. Minor has practiced law in the Independence courthouse for twenty years. He graduated from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law in 2004 and is admitted in Missouri, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, and the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas.

His practice is family law - divorce, custody and parenting time, child support, modification, and paternity - in Lee's Summit, Blue Springs, and across Jackson, Cass, Clay, and Johnson Counties. He also handles personal injury matters, business formation and contracts, and appellate work.

Before concentrating on family law, Kirby spent years on the defense side of injury litigation, representing a large self-insured retailer and serving as defense counsel for national insurance carriers in slip-and-fall, trucking, and wrongful death cases. He knows how a carrier values a claim and how it defends one, because that used to be his job.

Kirby has practiced martial arts for more than forty years and holds a third-degree black belt in judo. He was a member of the U.S. High School Judo Team in 1987-88, when he was an exchange student at three high schools in Japan, and he returned for three years with the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme, teaching high school English in Tochigi Prefecture. He still teaches.

That training is not a line of biography. Contested custody litigation rewards what judo rewards: preparation before the exchange, patience under pressure, and position over force. Kirby builds cases that way - the record assembled early, the weak points found before opposing counsel finds them, the client's position strengthened in the months before anyone stands up in a courtroom. Under Missouri's rebuttable presumption of equal or approximately equal parenting time, the work that decides a case increasingly happens long before the hearing date. These cases are rarely won by the loudest argument in the room. They are won by the party who did the work first.