Profile: Kellye Fabian - A Multi-Faceted Life

By: Robert Loerzel

Kellye L. Fabian sure knows how to make the most of business trips. A partner in the litigation practice group at Freeborn & Peters, Fabian went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming last year to take a deposition from one of her firm’s clients.

The deposition was scheduled at 2 p.m. and Fabian woke up early so she would have enough time to explore the mountainous landscape around Jackson Hole.

“I decided to go up and look at this mountain,” she said. “And while I was up there, I got talked into jumping off of it with a big parachute.”

Fabian said it felt almost surreal as she floated down from the top of the mountain. By 2, she had completed that adventure and was ready to take the deposition.

She told the other lawyers in the room how she’d spent her day.

“My opposing counsel is looking at me like, ‘What? You went paragliding before the deposition?’” Fabian said. “My client thought it was great. It was a good story to have going into the deposition.”

Fabian tries to squeeze in sightseeing, golf, or the ballet whenever she’s on a business trip. Even when she’s not traveling, Fabian, 33, keeps busy both during and outside of regular work hours.

Fabian, who is divorced, spends a lot of time with her 9-year-old daughter, Jamie. She also volunteers, including pro bono legal counseling once a week at a food pantry in Hoffman Estates. And she’s written two novels. Neither of those books has been published yet, but Fabian hopes to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming a published author.

Doing all these things does not distract Fabian from working hard at Freeborn & Peters. In fact, she said she feels energized when she returns to the office after an evening of writing fiction or volunteering.

“It gives me the opportunity to think about a case from a much bigger perspective,” she said. “When you have so much work, and you’re so overloaded with hours, all you can hope to do is make it from minute to minute, and you don’t have the opportunity or the time to think about what your strategy is.”

Fabian became a partner at Freeborn & Peters four years ago, after working the previous five years at Kirkland & Ellis. She said she looked for a firm where she could find a better balance between her work and the rest of her life.

“I loved Kirkland,” she said. “But in order to succeed there in the long term, you essentially had to give everything you had. At least, that’s the way I viewed it. I saw people who were senior to me who were working more than me and harder than me, and I just thought I didn’t want my whole life to be the firm.”

Fabian said she immediately clicked with the atmosphere and attitude at Freeborn & Peters, where her typical workday begins around 8:15 a.m. and ends in time for her to catch a 6 p.m. train home.

“We do think it’s essential for lawyers to have some balance in their lives, for sure,” said Michael D. Freeborn, a name partner at Freeborn & Peters. “If you don’t have that, you become so myopic and work-centered that you can’t be as effective. You just can’t relate well to people if you’re consumed by nothing but work. The impressive thing is she’s able to do all these pro bono and charitable things, and it doesn’t diminish her level of work inside the office.”

‘What you’re supposed to be doing’

Earlier this year, Law & Politics magazine named Fabian one of the legal profession’s “Rising Stars.” But she is not one of those attorneys who began dreaming about practicing law at a young age.

In fact, it took Fabian a while to figure out what she wanted to do with her life.

“From the day I was born, I wanted to be a writer,” she said, recalling how much she loved reading books about Nancy Drew and the Boxcar Children when she was young.

Growing up near Clark Street and North Avenue, Fabian attended Holy Name Cathedral High School, where she became obsessed with reading books by black writers including Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright

“It was a period of my life where I was exploring social injustice,” she said.

Fabian’s mother works as a secretary at a personal injury law firm, and Fabian did some clerical work there during her summer vacations from high school.

“During that entire period, I never, ever thought of being a lawyer. I know it sounds bizarre,” Fabian said. “The lawyers I was exposed to — I liked them, but in that position, I had no idea what they did.”

Fabian earned a bachelor’s degree in English with minors in psychology and education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At the end of her junior year, her father — a practical-minded electrical engineer — asked her exactly what sort of job she planned to get with her degree.

“And all of a sudden I thought, ‘Yeah, what am I going to do with an English degree?’” Fabian said. “Really, ultimately, I wanted to write, but I thought that didn’t seem practical.”

Getting a law degree did seem practical, so Fabian enrolled in DePaul University College of Law.

She did not feel drawn to the profession, but almost as soon as she began studying law, she knew that she loved it.

“It was like being in a dark room and somebody turned the lights on,” she said.

“Like, this is what you’re supposed to be doing. It was just immediate that I knew I would succeed at this. I loved it. And I was such a dork.”

Fabian said she was always the student who knew the answers, the one professors called on when the rest of the class was stumped.

“I was totally obnoxious in that sense, because there was never a time when I wasn’t prepared,” she said. “My professors would know that if nobody would respond, they could call on me. I was totally into it. I didn’t care what people thought, because I just loved it so much. Looking back on it, I have to laugh.”

“She told me to tell you that she was a dork,” says Wayne Lewis, a law professor at DePaul who taught Fabian in a contract law class during her first year. “I disagree with the dork stuff. Kellye worked about as hard as any student I’ve known. But it wasn’t because she wanted to get good grades or a good job and eventually make a lot of money. … It was really, I think, because she honestly loved the study of law and the process of learning itself. She was always asking questions that kind of challenged me and added to the base of knowledge of the entire class.”

Lewis recalls a joke he heard when he was a law student: If someone asks, “Do you like law school?” and you answer, “Yes,” that means you didn’t understand the question. Fabian was one of those law students who would say, “Yes,” to that question and actually mean it, Lewis said.

Her legal interests

One of the things that Fabian loved the most about law school was analyzing the complex systems of rules that govern evidence, civil litigation, and securities regulations.

“Those were my three favorite classes,” she said. “It was really the combination of all three of those — and trying to work out how they play together — that I loved. What series of rules and what combination apply to a particular circumstance? Any litigator needs to know the civil rules of procedure. And any trial lawyer needs to know the rules of evidence. But when you combine the rules of procedure and the rules of evidence and securities regulations, that’s where I thought I could have a particular skill.”

That skill has been useful at Freeborn & Peters, where Fabian often deals with securities litigation, ranging from big class-action lawsuits to smaller disputes. Fabian hesitates to call securities litigation her specialty, however.

“I’ve tried not to specialize over the years,” she said. “A good litigator can learn most any topic area and try a case in that area.”

Fabian has also handled accountant and auditor malpractice cases, bankruptcy litigation, partnership disputes, breach of contract cases, and toxic tort. Whatever sort of litigation she is dealing with, Fabian knows how to find her way through the complicated rules and laws and masses of evidence, according to her colleagues.

“She’s handled such a wide variety of complicated business matters,” Freeborn said. “She gets up to speed very quickly in analyzing what’s at issue.”

“She has the ability to cut right to the core issue very quickly,” said Joe Fogel, a partner at Freeborn & Peters.

Fogel said he was impressed with the way Fabian questioned a witness in a recent Delaware arbitration involving a dispute over patents between Freeborn & Peters’ client, Vehicle IP, and the firm DigaComm. One of the big questions involved a conversation this witness had with a company lawyer.

Depending on what he’d said, his company, Vehicle IP, might or might not have owed money to DigaComm for lining up a business deal. When this witness finally took the stand, Fabian wasted no time in asking the question everyone was wondering about.

Fogel said, “Rather than 20 minutes of background and a bunch of other stuff, on the very first question, she just said, ‘You know, there’s been a lot of testimony about what you meant. You know what? Tell us. What gives?’ ”

Fogel believes the arbitrator overseeing that case appreciated the way Fabian went straight to the key question. And ultimately, the firm won that case for its client.

Rachel Lei, who worked with Fabian at Kirkland & Ellis and is now assistant general counsel for litigation at GATX Corp., said Fabian’s personality is also one of the keys to her success.

“She’s got a soft-spoken demeanor. She’s sort of small in stature, with a soft voice,” Lei said. “She is very no-nonsense, and she speaks in a way that’s very clear. She’s not doing it to sound impressive. … And she’s funny, very understated and very deadpan. You think of her as maybe this quiet, conservative person, but then she’s really got this edgy, great sense of humor.”

An eclectic practice

That humor comes out when Fabian lists some of the quirky subjects she has learned about during her legal career, ranging from uranium milling and satellite telephones to beef jerky and the ideal temperature for mashed potatoes.

Fabian’s connection with beef jerky comes from Freeborn & Peters’ work representing Jack Link’s Beef Jerky.

“As a result, there’s often — and this is weird, I realize — beef jerky just lying around the firm,” Fabian said. “So if you’re hungry, you can get a beef jerky snack almost in any office.”

And Fabian found out more than she ever wanted to know about mashed potatoes when she was at Kirkland & Ellis, successfully defending the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers against the charge that it bore some responsibility for the bankruptcy of Boston Chicken Inc.

During the nine-day deposition of a restaurant executive, Fabian listened as the lawyers on the opposing side asked him one question after another about potatoes.

“Ask yourself how this could possibly be relevant?” she said. “He was asked about what temperature was the right temperature for mashed potatoes to be held at. What about the chicken and the green beans? It was unbelievable. We were sitting in this conference room for day after day after day. It was unbearable.”

Clearly, that’s not the sort of direct approach Fabian likes to take with witnesses.

There’s another reason Fabian left Kirkland & Ellis for Freeborn & Peters.

She wanted to work at a firm where she would have more opportunities to take cases to trial.

That was something she never got the chance to do at Kirkland, but she’s been on the legal teams for three trials since joining Freeborn & Peters.

The law firm lost the first of those cases, Tyson, et al. v. Amerigroup, Illinois Inc., et al. Fabian and her colleagues defended Amerigroup against a lawsuit claiming the health insurance firm had purposely limited the enrollment of pregnant women.

“We lost that at trial, which was obviously disappointing,” Fabian said. “It was very hard. You can’t take it personally, but it’s hard not to, because you put so much effort into it. You really put your blood into it.”

Fabian and other lawyers from Freeborn & Peters won the next two trials she was involved with. In October 2008, their client, Vehicle IP, won that Delaware arbitration.

Earlier this year, Fabian and Michael Freeborn prevailed in a bankruptcy case in Kansas City, persuading a judge that their client, Indeck Power Equipment Company, owned a boiler inside the factory of another company that had gone bankrupt.

“What makes or breaks a trial lawyer is understanding from the very beginning where a case is going and preparing it for trial,” Fabian said.

Outside the office

Fabian serves on the boards for Housing Opportunities for Women and Shama Ministries, a not-for-profit organization that runs a transitional home for women who have just been released from prison. She’s also a sponsor with LINK Unlimited, mentoring a student at De La Salle Institute.

And, along with Michael Freeborn, she volunteers her time every Tuesday evening to give legal advice at a suburban food pantry associated with Willow Creek Community Church.

Fabian said most of the questions she hears have to do with consumer debt and home mortgages.

“It’s really a form not only of providing legal services,” she said. “It’s also a way of providing compassion to people who really need it.”

Fabian continues to enjoy writing fiction and poetry. Her first novel was about a father coping with his son’s arrest for murder.

Her second book is about a female attorney working on a case with political intrigue.

“There are very few female attorney lead characters out there,” she said. “They always say write what you know, and this is an area I’m obviously familiar with.”

Fabian, who has also written articles for the Seton Hall Law Review and the DePaul Law Review, said writing a good legal brief is not all that different from writing a story.

“Every word should mean something,” she said. “Otherwise, you should get rid of it.”

And all of that creative writing gives Fabian yet another experience outside of the office that makes her a well-rounded lawyer.

“When you have different facets of your life,” she said, “each of the facets gets stronger.”