About Jenny Burman
Jenny Burman is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. Her work has been published in the Los Angeles Times, LAWeekly, Los Angeles Magazine, Cincinnati Magazine, and Tin House, among other publications.
Articles written by Jenny Burman
In the Bees
If Jeff Spangler isn’t advising banking clients, he’s most likely out checking his hivesWeekdays, Jeff Spangler advises bankers on recovering debts and making loans. Weekends, he’s often intent on keeping his beehives happy and healthy. The co-managing partner at Dagger Law of Lancaster, Ohio, has been focusing on creditor rights for 12 years; wrangling bees on his 21 acres outside town since 2014, when a friend was moving away and needed to rehome his colonies. “I thought [beekeeping] was a fascinating science,” he says. “They essentially impact every piece of the food …
The ‘Architectural Downfall’ of Fred Joseph
How the Louisville attorney worked his passions for civil rights and building into a community-based real estate practiceWhen Louisville native Fred Joseph went north to Wesleyan University in the early 1960s, his course seemed charted. As the son and grandson of Louisville architects, he expected to return to Kentucky to follow in their footsteps, perhaps designing distilleries—a former specialty at Joseph & Joseph Architects. He was dissuaded. Joseph quips that three of his professors—in art, physics and calculus—“argued that I had less talent in their respective fields than anyone that they had run …
The Tax ‘Angel’
Elizabeth Copeland spearheaded a program to help low-income taxpayers stand up to the IRSNearly 10 years ago, Elizabeth Copeland established the State Bar of Texas’ Tax Court Pro Bono Program, offering free legal assistance to low-income taxpayers in trouble with the IRS. It now serves as a model for more than 20 states. It also has welcome side benefits. “I can promise you that none of my paying clients has ever called me ‘an angel who came straight down from heaven,’” says the tax attorney with Strasburger & Price in San Antonio. “I’ve gotten that more than …
Looking Around Corners
Janet Gilligan Abaray is all about doing the research, learning the science, then visualizing how the pieces of a case will come togetherThe wall of windows in Janet Gilligan Abaray’s 20th-floor Cincinnati office looks down on the Ohio River. To the left is Great American Ball Park, where the Reds play. A tilt of the head to the right, Paul Brown Stadium—home of the Bengals—sits like a huge candy dish. On practice days, she can watch the team play. Abaray, managing shareholder at Burg, Simpson, Eldredge, Hersh & Jardine, has some history with the Bengals. In 2000, the plaintiff’s class action and mass torts attorney …
A Planner and a Poet
Susan Wheatley likes things organized—in estate plans or stanzasSusan Wheatley describes herself as a planner. That’s good, since she practices the ultimate kind of planning—helping clients get organized for the time when they’re gone. She has been the estate planning and probate lawyer for many leading families in her hometown of Cincinnati. But she also has a healthy respect for intuition and seizing the moment. Over coffee at a popular downtown lunch spot, Wheatley says she intended, as a second-year law student at Northwestern University, to …
Disaster Duty
Gulfport lawyer Teri Wyly looks after the land, come hurricane or oily waterOn the way home from a Louisiana Bar Association convention 33 years ago, Teri Wyly’s car overheated—serendipitously, in front of a real estate office in the coastal Mississippi town of Bay St. Louis. She and her husband, both lawyers, were newly married and living in New Orleans. They immediately fell in love with Bay St. Louis and signed the contract for their first house that same day. Since then, Wyly, an environmental lawyer at Balch & Bingham’s Gulfport office, has helped keep …
Defending the Product
Cincinnati litigator Carolyn Taggart takes the sting out of facts that might trip up a juryNicholson’s in downtown Cincinnati at noon, with its tiled floors and high ceilings, is lively and noisy, the kind of tavern where a group of old law-school friends could meet and not worry about laughing too loudly or being overheard. “I have a group of attorneys from the class of 1978, and this is one of the places where we’ve met just to get a beer and get caught up,” says Carolyn Taggart—Candi to those who know her. It’s also where her University of Cincinnati College of Law …
That Samurai Charm
For her work in his defense, one client gave malpractice attorney Susan Blasik-Miller a sword as a thank you giftSusan Blasik-Miller walks with a jaunty, athletic stride across the 19th floor of an office building in downtown Dayton, where she is a shareholder at the firm Freund, Freeze & Arnold. Her corner office is full of family photographs—and not just a few vacation and portrait shots are on display. The office is an exuberant shrine to her three daughters, her husband and her golden retriever. Then there are the recognition plaques and awards, and gifts from clients, like a red glass heart. …
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