Janet Gilligan Abaray: Attorney, Alumna, Advocate
So we’re sitting in Adriatico’s one fine Friday afternoon in August and the stories start flying around like February flurries.
I ask her (demand of her, really—I have just met her three minutes earlier) why she thinks an English major was such a great idea, anyhow.
She flips it back. “Do you know about Richard III’s bones?”
I nod. “You mean the ones they found in the parking lot?”
“Yes!” The passion blazes through her professionalism and grace. “Such a fascinating news story – because it’s the 21st century and it’s about a parking lot – and it’s about Shakespeare.” She pauses. “It’s all about the way fact and fiction intersect.”
To be or not to be—an English major. That was Counselor Abaray’s question. Well, not really her question, but one she fielded as an undergrad. Ms. Abaray, BA summa cum laude in English in 1979, says of that time, “We [English majors] were all getting pressure from our parents. They were all asking us, ‘What are you going to do with that degree?’
“So I tried to also get a certificate in business,” she says, stirring her lemonade with a flourish. And then, spoon poised in air for punctuation, “I was miserable. Luckily my friend Jane (Ziegler Gorsky, BA in English, 1979) and I got closed out of managerial accounting and took 16th Century Literature instead. It was the highlight of my undergraduate education. My best revenge for having to take those business classes was it came in handy when I sued an accounting firm!
Respected attorney, mother of two successful civic-minded adult children (and, as she proudly reminds me, grandma as well), humorist, wine and pizza connoisseur, English club co-founder, softball splitter —this is just the beginning of her resume.
Abaray knew she wanted to be a litigator. “I didn’t like reading the Wall Street journal, so I knew corporate law was not for me,” she explains. “It’s all about the stories you can sink your teeth into. You have to be a good storyteller to be a good trial lawyer.”
With this, the stories come out of our checkered departmental past – of Uncle Woody’s and Pickle Barrel (gone but not forgotten), of Jon Kamholtz and Nancy Armstrong, of soliloquys and Shakespeare Day. Of the UC English Department softball team. Janet gleefully admits, “We were terrible! Except for Jim Hall. He was pretty good.”
But then there was the consolation of good laughs and of good burgers—zipping to Zip’s or Millions was part of the package. There, Abaray dishes, Jim Cummins would sing “El Paso!” accompanied by the juke box —loudly and with great animation. “He’d act the whole thing out. It was the karaoke before the karaoke!”
She no longer frequent Millions, as she has instead become a Delta Million Miler. Yesterday’s campy El Paso is today’s career-related Chicago. Abaray, who litigates a range of cases from pharmaceutical to business, is particularly proud of her success with an age discrimination suit that made new law.
Given her own experience, the happy times and the hardy preparation, it is no wonder she has committed to hiring UC English alumni into her firm.