The POWER List: R. Kent Sellers

Lathrop GPM, Kansas City  

R. Kent Sellers has a sense for cases that run up to higher courts.

In 2017, he helped Tesla win a case before the Western District Court of Appeals. The court found that an automobile dealers association lacked grounds to challenge Tesla’s sales model that targeted consumers directly. 

He also had a hand in the 2008 case of Clay County Realty Company v. City of Gladstone. The Missouri Supreme Court recognized a property owner’s right to sue a city for declaring its property to be blighted but failing to redevelop it on time, if they could show the city caused undue delay. 

Sellers also represented Harrah’s North in a five-year dispute regarding the expungement of a doctor’s arrest after a mistaken accusation that he had cheated at the casino. The matter ran through the Missouri Supreme Court twice. 

Sellers clerked for Judge Joseph E. Stevens Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, after he earned his law degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1980.