Joyce-Marie Garay’s Pursuit of Learning Helps Ryan

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Joyce-Marie Garay is a voracious learner with a tenacity that has been with her since her youth. The VP of legal and head of litigation at Ryan had a vision for her future from a young age, and she’s never looked back.

“I had this dream of going to an Ivy League school, and my counselor told me I would never get in,” Garay says. “When I went home and told my mom, she couldn’t believe that this was the person responsible for helping me chart my future.”

Garay applied to Yale anyway, and she got in.

Natural curiosity was simply part of growing up, Garay says. Her father, a second-generation Mexican American, and mother raised their daughter with a strong work ethic and an inquisitive mind.

“My mother was ahead of her time in so many ways,” Garay says. “She was not able to complete her formal education, but she had wisdom beyond her schooling and age. She was always asking questions. What did I want to do when I grew up? What did I think about this movie or book? She prompted me to think critically about my experiences at a very early age, and I’m so thankful for that.”

“I’m so proud to see that small seed I planted grow into this enormous oak tree with branches that touch so many aspects of what young lawyers are doing in our community.”

Joyce-Marie Garay

Building a Firm Foundation

After completing her studies, Garay’s career path took her to Bell, Nunnally & Martin, where she spent twelve years representing commercial litigation and labor and employment management clients and earned an equity partnership. Garay then moved in-house to her long-time client BlueCross BlueShield of Texas.

During her time there, an intriguing invitation came for her to establish a regulatory compliance function in HR, which stretched her practice outside of law completely. Garay worked on the business side and developed her skills, however the work didn’t have the ties to the legal world she craved.

Garay sought to transition back to an in-house legal team and landed an opportunity that propelled her to her current role as global head of litigation at industry-leading tax services firm, Ryan—where the growth opportunities continue to be endless.

“I am so grateful to our former general counsel Melissa Drennan for giving me the opportunity to help this organization get ready to scale,” the VP says. “She recognized the value I could bring from an employment law and litigation perspective. More importantly, she let me handle anything that she couldn’t fit on her plate, which accelerated my learning curve.”

In her first year at Ryan, Garay’s drive and initiative led to her promotion as vice president. One of her most enduring long-term projects has been establishing a foundation for Ryan’s process, procedure, and case management for its in-house legal team.

“I started with the fundamentals of our intake forms and went from there,” Garay says. “We had spent so much time trying to ‘keep the wheels on the bus,’ so to speak, while it was barreling down the road, that we needed to take the time to stop and develop proper processes and efficiencies to benefit the whole organization.”

Garay then turned her focus to helping the firm be as fiscally responsible as possible. In 2021, the legal team implemented a case management and e-billing system to more effectively track Ryan’s legal spending. Her pursuit for efficiency and embracing technologies has been a factor in her ongoing success.  

“Along with leveraging the functionality of our e-billing tool, I’m educating myself on our new e-discovery platform and how we can utilize technology to better understand our data and use it to our advantage,” Garay says. “Our focus is on data management and determining how to best deploy these tools to add value to the organization.”

Lifelong Dedication to Education

Garay’s pursuit of legal and institutional excellence is on brand. She’s spent countless hours outside of her day job working to better connect her legal community and better herself. She has been an active advocate for DEI initiatives throughout the Metroplex since the ’90s. The list of the associations for which she has volunteered is as long as most people’s resumes. As President of the Dallas Association of Young Lawyers, Garay founded a young lawyer’s leadership class that, after twenty-six years, is stronger and more far-reaching now than ever before.

“I’m so proud to see that small seed I planted grow into this enormous oak tree with branches that touch so many aspects of what young lawyers are doing in our community,” Garay says.

For every bar association Garay has devoted time to, she’s also invested heavily in her own education. Garay notes that often, lawyers lack opportunities to learn how to be good leaders. Garay forged a different path by taking opportunities both at BlueCross BlueShield and Ryan to participate in leadership programs. She even volunteered to be a pilot of an executive coaching program at Ryan.

For the VP, she seeks out opportunities for her continuous improvement. She, indeed, is always learning and engaging.

“I just want to be better, whatever I am doing,” the lawyer says.

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