Twenty-six years in one
courthouse.

In December 1999, Lisa McGowan became staff attorney to Judge David E. Lewandowski in the Lucas County Domestic Relations Division. She held that job for twelve years, reading the filings, researching the law, and drafting the decisions that went out over a judge's signature in the hardest cases the county sees.

In 2012 she became a magistrate in the same division, hearing cases and issuing decisions in her own name. In 2014 the voters of Lucas County elected her to the bench, and in 2020 they re-elected her. She has now presided over the division for eleven years, and serves as its Administrative Judge, the judge responsible for how the division itself is run, not only for the cases on her own docket.

Before any of that, she practiced. She clerked at the Ohio Sixth District Court of Appeals, spent a year as an assistant public defender in Toledo, served three years as in-house counsel at Centerior Energy and Toledo Edison, and worked in private practice at two Northwest Ohio firms. She has been on every side of a courtroom before taking the seat at the front of one.