Judith Conway, ’14, vividly remembers one day during her first-year torts class when Professor Scott Hershovitz asked the students if anyone wanted to practice tort law.
“I raised my hand, and he joked, ‘You know, I’ve taught this class six or seven times. You’re the only person who’s ever raised their hand—I had a perfect record.’”
Conway followed through on that pledge and now works as an associate at Cooney & Conway, a midsize plaintiff’s law firm in Chicago. She represents victims of serious personal injury and wrongful death, specializing in cases involving asbestos-related diseases. For her efforts, she won the 2024 Young Lawyer of the Year award from the Illinois State Bar Association and Forbes named her one of Chicago’s Best Wrongful Death Lawyers of 2024. While she also works on wrongful death cases and mass torts, the majority of her work involves victims with asbestos-related diseases.
Holding the powerful to account
During her law school days, Conway remembers feeling like she was seeking an “alternate career” by pursuing plaintiffs work and not going into Big Law or public interest law like her classmates. But she says she has enjoyed working on behalf of her clients against the people and corporations who have harmed them.
In her asbestos cases, she enjoys fighting for the “little guy” against those companies who knowingly chose to expose her clients to cancer-causing asbestos. Most of her clients are shocked to learn that corporations and manufacturers would act as badly as the asbestos litigation defendants have in knowingly exposing them to asbestos to protect their bottom line. She views holding bad actors to account as a foundational aspect of the justice system, finding the work both important and gratifying.
Conway says the work is fulfilling but acknowledges that it is difficult and time consuming. As part of her cases, she has had to immerse herself in the minutiae of her clients’ diseases, learning the medical and scientific aspects of her cases. She works with physicians and experts such as economists, who can show a client’s lost earnings, and industrial hygienists, who can quantify and evaluate a client’s asbestos exposure.
But she never forgets the days when she first started working and had to “Google almost every other word.”
“I try to take the most complicated concepts and distill them into something that juries can understand—and eventually get them to the conclusion that my client was injured and that we have to hold the defendant responsible,” Conway says.
Judith Conway, ’14A lot of them are coming to me at some of the worst times in their lives, after they've been diagnosed with terminal cancer or lost a loved one. I fight with every ounce of my being and make sure that they get the best representation they can.
Working against unforgiving disease
For her asbestos cases, the diseases her clients contract happen because they inhale asbestos fibers, often at work, or they experience secondhand exposure from the clothing or shared living quarters of a loved one. The fibers then become trapped in the lining of body cavities (the mesothelium) or lungs and, after a latency period that lasts decades, cause asbestosis, cancer, mesothelioma, and other diseases. People have been exposed to asbestos in a variety of products, from insulation materials and car brake linings to talcum powder and cosmetics.
“Mesothelioma progresses rapidly,” says Conway. “A lot of our clients present to the ER with fluid on their lungs, difficulty breathing, shortness of breath—and then through biopsies will get diagnosed. Unfortunately, some don’t get diagnosed until they pass away.
“We have yet to have any client survive and beat mesothelioma,” Conway says. That results in another challenge in her work: knowing that many of her clients, to whom she has grown close, won’t make it to the end of their trials.
“A lot of them are coming to me at some of the worst times in their lives, after they’ve been diagnosed with terminal cancer or lost a loved one,” she says. “I fight with every ounce of my being and make sure that they get the best representation they can. It never gets easier to lose a client, but knowing that I’m protecting their access to courts and that I’m fighting for them inside and out of the courtroom is really important to me.”
