Before becoming a judge, he was a partner at Haynes and Boone, where he founded the False Claims Act practice group and worked on healthcare litigation.[3]
In December 2020, Texas Republican congressman Louis Gohmert and others filed a suit in Kernodle's court, naming vice president Mike Pence as a defendant in arguing he constitutionally has "sole discretion in determining which electoral votes to count for a given State, and must ignore and may not rely on any provisions of the Electoral Count Act that would limit his exclusive authority."[9][10] Pence and the Justice Department asked that the suit be dismissed, with the DOJ arguing that the suit "does not properly lie against the Vice President, and
plaintiffs’ suit can be resolved on a number of threshold issues," and that the suit was not filed in a timely manner to justify "expedited declaratory judgment and emergency injunctive relief against the Vice President."[11][12] Kernodle dismissed the suit on January 1, 2021, ruling that Gohmert and the other plaintiffs lacked standing, and that Gohmert "suffered no legally recognizable injury".[13]