Claudeth Henry’s (BSN 1987) interest in becoming an attorney was rooted in her sense of justice after having grown up watching her mother suffer from a work injury with no support.

One of six children who immigrated from Jamaica when she was 10, Henry’s parents both worked two jobs to support the family. As a nurse assistant, her mother shared how valuable and important nurses are, but in those days, Esmelin Clarke was overworked and underappreciated. After being hurt on the job, Clarke had no choice but to work through excruciating pain because the minimal compensation was insufficient to care for her family.

Even as a child, Henry knew her mother’s circumstance was unjust. Having a passion for helping others, Henry pursued a nursing career herself and earned an associate’s degree in nursing from Central Florida Community College in 1982. Her 10-year career as a registered nurse included orthopaedics, intensive care, cardiovascular surgery step-down and patient education.

After returning to school to obtain her BSN from UF, Henry’s path was changed by now-retired Professor Jodi “Annalee” Irving. In a recent newsletter from Henry’s law firm, she shared: “Professor Irving, one of my nursing professors, sparked the light that led me to my dream job by asking me a simple question: ‘In your heart of hearts, if you could be anything you’d like to be, what would it be?’”

Henry responded to Irving that she would like to be a lawyer like Perry Mason, a defense attorney from a TV series in the 1950s.

“Professor Irving didn’t laugh at me or tell me it was ridiculous. She only asked, ‘What’s stopping you?’ After listening to all my reasons (excuses), Professor Irving picked up the phone and within days, I received an application to the College of Law at the University of Florida in Gainesville. A year later, Professor Irving was one of my application references … and the rest is history.”

Henry has three children — all of whom were born during a different educational program. Jason was born while Henry was completing the pre-requisite courses she needed for the BSN program. Her second baby, Courtnei Annalese, was born her last semester at UF and was named after Jodi Annalee Irving. Her last baby, Avery, was born one semester before she graduated from law school in 1992.

Henry opened her own law practice in 2009. CJ Henry Law Firm, PLLC, is located in Ocala, Florida, with a staff of six. The firm focuses on representing individuals who have been denied disability insurance benefits. She said it all goes back to her mother’s work injury and wanting to right the wrong that happened.

“I wanted to be a lawyer because I hate injustice,” Henry said. “As a nurse, I remember seeing lots of caring professionals, as well as patients who were mistreated by those charged to care for them. I wanted to make a difference in the system. I’ve always had that sense of justice and what’s right or wrong — whether it’s in patient care or just how you treat your neighbor.”

As a graduate of one of the first BSN classes from UF, Kathleen Touby (BSN 1965) was impressed by how accomplished and respected the College of Nursing’s founding dean Dorothy M. Smith was among colleagues, students and throughout the health care industry. Without realizing it, Touby modeled her own career after Smith’s, albeit in a different field.

“When I was in school in 1963, it was not a time when nurses, teachers or women in general were considered more than a disposable commodity,” Touby said. “Seeing someone like Dean Smith who had chosen more than just a mainstream marriage and children with a career as a sideline was very unique. She had a large personality and moved and spoke with authority. I was attracted to that role model.”

Touby graduated with the intent to continue with the Master of Science in Nursing program, but fate had other plans. After an internal dispute resulted in Touby’s delayed admission to the program, she decided to redirect her career path. She entered the graduate program in vocational rehabilitation at UF, which offered courses that combined her passion for medicine with her interest in helping others through counseling and psychological training.

After completing her master’s program, Touby married and worked as a rehab counselor in Chicago. She then returned to Miami, her hometown, to work for the department of vocational rehab. The next several years were spent working and starting a family.

After her second son was born, Touby’s personal and professional lives collided. A law school opened at Nova Southeastern University, not far from her house. This gave her the opportunity to pursue her interest in law. But, she was unsure that the years since college and the demands of her marriage might have made that desire just an empty dream. She decided to take the required Law School Admissions Test, or LSAT, and let that result show her whether this was the right path. At that time, she had a toddler, a newborn and her husband was recovering from a bleeding ulcer. He had been restricted to his bed for an entire year.

Although Touby was doubtful that she could perform well enough on the LSAT to be admitted to a law school, she took the test and scored the highest in her law school class. She entered Nova’s first law class in 1974.

In her last year of law school at Nova, Touby took an internship with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami. She hoped to be hired at the end of the internship.

“At that time, they didn’t hire interns or women,” she said. “I had a lot to overcome.”

While she was there, she said she worked herself to the bone hoping to make a good impression. After graduating in 1977, the government imposed a hiring freeze, so her dream looked remote.  But the hiring freeze also meant that there were fewer lawyers to do the work, so Touby offered to continue to work full-time without pay.

“I showed up at 7 a.m. after dropping the kids off at school. I worked all day, took work home. They were impressed. When the hiring freeze was lifted after eight or nine months, I was offered a job.”

After working for several years in the public sector, Touby made the shift to the private sector. She was the first woman hired by a prestigious defense firm. This was notable, since 40 years ago there were very few women in the courtroom.

After a few years as an associate in that law firm, she left and joined another firm as a named partner. A few years later, she founded her own litigation firm. Eventually, her firm grew to 25 people and moved to downtown Miami. The firm represented insurance companies, as well as individuals who had been injured or damaged. This included personal injury, medical malpractice and product liability cases. Touby retired from Touby & Woodward, PA, in 2014.

She said nurses make good lawyers because they are organized, insightful and determined.

“To me, law was one endless puzzle and a natural evolution because the thing I liked about nursing was helping people who couldn’t help themselves,” she said. “But I was only able to do that as a nurse in such a small increment, one person at a time. As soon as a patient got interesting and I got invested in their lives, they got better and left the hospital. I wanted to help people on a bigger scale. The law was a way for me to help more people in a more serious fashion and in a larger way.”

After her father died when she was 5, Grace Morse-McNelis (BSN 1990) felt a desire to not only help people but to decipher what actually happened to her father. Her mother did not drive or speak English, so his death remained a mystery to her until she learned more about cardiac issues and medical terminology in the nursing program.

“The mystery of my father dying might have been what drove me to nursing,” Morse-McNelis said. “As a child, I never understood what happened to him and what the medical professionals did for him to try to save his life. I needed to decode and be a part of the medical process. Now, having been a nurse, I understand that families don’t want to be in the dark.”

She said she loved the BSN program at UF because of its holistic approach to patient care. As a Latina, she was raised to use other methods besides traditional medicine to make someone feel better. At UF, the health of the whole person was emphasized, including being present, listening and communicating.

After graduating, she worked as a nurse for four years, mostly in home health. In her last position as an assistant director for a home health nursing company, she was performing more administrative — rather than clinical — duties. She became jaded by some of the trivial legal issues she was exposed to at that level.

“In home health, I remember people filing lawsuits about things that, in my estimation, involved patient non-compliance or the disease process itself and, therefore largely out of the hands of the providers,” she said. “I wanted to be an advocate for health care providers, and that was a better use of my skills than in my administrative role.”

She was accepted to the University of San Diego Law School and graduated in 1997. She has dedicated her 25-year career in law to representing and being an advocate for nurses and other health care providers. She is now one of two nurses at the firm Sands Anderson, the oldest firm in Richmond, Virginia. The other nurse is the firm’s president.

She said she still uses what she learned at the UF College of Nursing every day in her law practice.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t use my assessment and triaging skills from nursing,” Morse-McNelis said. “For medical records, I know which labs are relevant. I use my skills as a nurse to do a focused review of the record, rather than spend countless hours looking at information that doesn’t matter. In defending cases, we have to interface with medical experts. My background gives credibility because the experts know and feel like they can talk to me in the medical vernacular.”

She is also able to use the holistic skills she learned as a nurse to create a more comfortable environment for her clients and communicate with them about the litigation process.

“We always say, ‘Once a nurse, always a nurse,’” Morse-McNelis said. “Even though I don’t have an active nursing license, I can still use what I learned in the BSN program. I am grateful that I was able to get my nursing degree because I use the skills I learned in my professional practice now.”

Nurses are taught to remain calm and think on their feet in stressful situations. For these reasons — and many more — Mark Egner (BSN 1997) thinks nurses make great attorneys. As a former trauma and intensive care nurse, Egner uses what he learned in practice to become a private attorney representing both sides of medical malpractice, personal injury and negligence cases.

“As a trauma nurse, you are often trying to assess everything going on while in complete chaos and pandemonium,” Egner said. “You are required to zero in and focus. You learn that as a nurse, and you also have to be able to do that as an attorney.”

For Egner, law was not his second career choice; it was actually his third. He received his first bachelor’s from UF in anthropology in 1995, with a goal of working in medical anthropology forensics. He ended up working as a tech at Shands, which led him to pursue a degree in nursing.

After graduating, he continued to work at Shands for several years in the ICU. His interest was in pursuing a graduate degree to become a nurse anesthetist before one fateful meeting with a nursing colleague who shared his plans to take the LSAT. Egner always thought law was interesting, so he decided to take the test too.

Although he loved being a nurse, he also wanted the freedom of choice to work independently. He continued to work as a nurse while he put himself through law school at the University of Miami. He took classes Mondays through Thursdays and then worked at the Jackson Memorial Hospital trauma center Fridays through Sundays.

“It was the most refreshing break because I could put my full energy Monday through Thursday into law school. When I stepped into the trauma center on Friday, I could fully devote myself to nursing and not think about law all weekend. As exhausting as it was, it was almost cathartic and a mental reprieve because I was focused and not thinking about anything else in those moments.”

He began his own law practice in 2006, handling cases that ranged from traffic tickets, to divorce, to foreclosures. He then joined as a partner for several years before moving back to his own firm, Mark Allen Egner, P.A., in Miami in 2012. As his practice started taking off, he focused more on personal injury, which allowed him to use his medical background and knowledge. Following the BP oil spill, he also represented many businesses in claims throughout the Southeast.

Egner said his experience with nursing and helping people is what makes him a successful lawyer now.

“In my role as an ER nurse, I was always the first up to talk to the doctor and also the patient’s family,” he said. “I was always the buffer. As a lawyer, I am still the buffer. In both professions, you have to deliver messages while remaining calm. I am able to use what I learned in my experience as a nurse to guide new clients, tell them what to expect and help them understand to get the help they need. It is useful to have the knowledge I have as a former nurse in my current role as an attorney.”