By AMANDA LOVIZA
Glasgow Daily Times
GLASGOW —
Although she didn’t know it at the time, Laura Day DelCotto’s part-time job working for her dad’s law firm on the Glasgow public square, Richardson, Barrickman and Dickinson, was the beginning of a long and successful legal career.
“Those were some of the greatest lawyers in Glasgow history,” said DelCotto, recently featured as one of Business Lexington’s Leading Women of Central Kentucky for her accomplishments as a bankruptcy lawyer.
Despite working for such great lawyers and having lawyers for both a father and a grandfather, DelCotto was not intent on being a lawyer herself when she graduated from Glasgow High School in 1979. DelCotto left Glasgow, where her family had lived for generations, and went to Sewanee, The University of the South, in Tennessee. She majored in geology, and when she finished her undergraduate degree and still wasn’t sure what she wanted to pursue, DelCotto decided to go to law school.
“I never really had any grand plans to be a lawyer,” DelCotto said. “I think I just went to law school because I didn’t know what else to do.”
DelCotto moved to Lexington to begin law school at the University of Kentucky, and she never left the city. After graduating law school DelCotto was hired at the large firm of Stoll Keenon and Park, and it was there that she was first assigned to bankruptcy law. As she put it, “And here I am, 25 years later.” She likes bankruptcy law because it encompasses a lot of areas of law, DelCotto said, and it never gets boring.
“It’s always remained interesting to me, and I feel like I’m helping people who need help …” she said. “I’ve just always liked it and never really thought about doing anything else.”
Being a bankruptcy lawyer involves a lot of negotiating, people skills and fairness, DelCotto said. It is important to convince everyone to share a little bit of pain in a bankruptcy case, and have those involved compromise.
“We need more compromisers in the world,” DelCotto said with a laugh.
Unable to pick a favorite case she’s worked on, DelCotto said all of it is one big interesting puzzle.
“They have so many issues, it really is like a puzzle where you have to fit all the pieces together,” said DelCotto, who credits her childhood addiction with Nancy Drew as the beginning of her love of solving puzzles.
DelCotto left Stoll Keenon and Park to form Wise DelCotto in 2003 with fellow female lawyer Tracey Wise. When Wise left about a year and a half ago, the firm became DelCotto Law Group, with Laura Day DelCotto at the helm as founding and managing member. This year she was named a Best Lawyers’ Lexington Lawyer of the Year, in the category of bankruptcy and creditor debtor rights/insolvency and reorganization law.
“I just plug along every day with some little success,” DelCotto said.
DelCotto has been married for 20 years to banker Mark DelCotto, and she has a stepson, Ryan, 25, son Matthew, 22, and a daughter, Ellen, 18. It doesn’t look like any of her children will follow in her footsteps, but DelCotto said she is OK with that.
“None of them have ambitions to be lawyers so far,” DelCotto said. “I want them to do what they want to do, what they’re passionate about.”
As she has gotten older, DelCotto has developed more of an appreciation of her childhood in Glasgow with her parents, the late Henry Dickinson and her mother Emmy Lou Dickinson, who still lives locally.
“I think it was a great place to grow up,” she said. “I had a great family, lots of friends, very stable. It’s just like Mayberry.”
