Massaro: Paralyzed mom sworn in as lawyer

By Gary Massaro, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

WHEAT RIDGE - Janette Law-ler could have given up a long time ago when doctors told her she'd never walk again.

But she didn't.

"How boring would that have been?" she asked.

Instead, she went back to school - twice - and now is ready to begin her newest career as a lawyer.

She spends most of her time in a wheelchair that she maneuvers with a mouthstick.

She also uses the stick as a finger to poke her computer keyboard.

"My laptop and I are close friends," she said. "I wouldn't have been able to accomplish what I have without it."

Lawler, 41, graduated from Wheat Ridge High School in 1983.

"I went straight up to Boulder," she said.

She graduated from the University of Colorado, where she studied advertising.

She moved to Chicago to work in the Hyatt hotel system.

In November 1992, she was coming home.

"I was driving back to Denver for Thanksgiving to do a little skiing," she said. "I hit some black ice by Sterling and rolled a couple of times. That's how I ended up in the chair. I'm paralyzed from the neck down."

She was in "lots of rehab."

"It was five months between Swedish and Craig hospitals," said Law-ler, a single mom with a son in high school.

She decided to go back to college.

"I started slowly back to school," she said. "I took one course, two courses."

She enrolled at the University of Colorado at Denver "to see what real life was like."

It wasn't really real for her on campus, which she called "the bubble of school, where it is half real and half protected."

She earned a master's degree in social sciences, emphasizing disability studies. She thought she was going to teach, which she did and then decided it wasn't for her.

"I stayed home a few years, raising my son," she said.

She still felt there was something missing.

"I wasn't interested in law," she said.

But she took the law school entrance exam "just for kicks."

She scored well enough to be accepted at CU.

She graduated in May 2004.

"I spent the next year sort of recuperating," she said. "I had some surgery."

Then she took the bar exam in February 2005. She bombed it.

After all she had gone through, don't think for a minute she was finished. She took the exam again this year and aced it.

She was sworn in last week.

And at the swearing-in of the woman who at one time had no interest in law, was her father, Larry Lawler, who some friends fondly call "Loophole Larry," a lawyer himself.

When Gary Massaro listens, people talk. massarog@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5271