At a pivotal time in American health care, Jan Murray has an interesting perspective on the landscape. She has worked as a lawyer with nearly every major hospital in Northeast Ohio whether negotiating an affiliation between Southwest Community Hospital and University Hospitals or studying how MetroHealth would function as a privatized organization. She is now deputy general counsel of the Cleveland Clinic, overseeing a staff of about 30 in-house lawyers who handle the internal and external legal needs of the world-renowned hospital.
Murray, the oldest of six children, was born and raised in a small town in Vermont. Her father was a draftsman in the granite industry, and her mother was a registered nurse.
She started skiing as a kid on Vermont’s notoriously steep, icy slopes. “My very first ski experience was to ski right through a split-rail fence. I started at the top of a hill, and I wanted to see how fast I could go but hadn’t figured out how to stop. I was stopped by the fence. I probably had a mild concussion.”
She traveled the country as part of the University of Vermont’s debate team.
She worked for a year with migrant workers at a food stamp office in Florida.
Murray earned a master’s in social work at the same time she earned her law degree from Case Western Reserve University.
“If someone had said to me as a 20-year-old, ‘You’re going to spend the rest of your life in Cleveland,’ I would have been speechless. All I knew about it was that the river caught on fire and the mayor’s hair caught on fire.”
“To be in a city that has one of the world-class academic medical centers and research institutes is a real advantage given what my career path has been.”
Rather than join a law firm, she started at the Institute for Child Advocacy, a public interest organization, and worked to improve the foster care system. From there she became an academic.
“I didn’t care for teaching all that much, especially the large law school classes.”
Murray became an expert on regulatory law relating to clinical trials when, as a partner at Squire Sanders & Dempsey, she developed a biotech practice. “Squire Sanders suggested I might want to launch this practice, so I said, ‘Yeah! I’ll do that!’ and then I thought, How am I going to do that? I don’t really know how to do that.”
She worked with biotech companies launching international clinical trials for rare genetic disorders. “Squire Sanders had a wonderful international platform, so you could help these companies with issues that came up anywhere in the world. I developed a real expertise in an area where there weren’t a lot of lawyers working in at the time.”
“I have a home in Cape Cod. It’s about a mile from the bay. I love going any time, even bundling up and going down to the beach.”
She’s on the board of the LIT, Cleveland’s Literary Center. Her favorite books include The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears and Postcards by Annie Proulx. “I realize those are both very dark novels,” Murray says. “I also like David Sedaris. He is very funny. I’m just howling when I read his books, and his monologues on NPR just crack me up.”