Plainsboro resident Greta Gooden Brown has a state staff of 230 to deal with civil and criminal insurance-fraud cases.
By: David M. Campbell
PLAINSBORO Greta Gooden Brown said her parents always knew she would end up a lawyer, due to what Ms. Gooden Brown referred to as her "loquaciousness."
As a child, Ms. Gooden Brown liked to talk a lot.
"I could probably blame or thank my family for that, because growing up in our household my parents basically dubbed my older sister and I," she said. "I was going to be the lawyer, my sister would be the doctor. They said, ‘You’ve got to be a lawyer because you talk all the time.’ It set my career path for me at a time when maybe I was too young to question it."
Ms. Gooden Brown, a Plainsboro resident since 1985, says she has no regrets, and judging by her distinguished 18-year career at the state Division of Criminal Justice, she has much more going for her than her love for the spoken word.
Last month, the state Legislature confirmed her nomination to head the division’s Office of Insurance Fraud Prosecutor.
The office, which was created by the 1998 Automobile Insurance Cost Reduction Act, has a staff of 230 to deal with civil and criminal insurance-fraud cases. Edward M. Neafsey, Ms. Gooden Brown’s predecessor, resigned in July after state Attorney General John Farmer named him to the new post of inspector general.
"Greta Gooden Brown has demonstrated strong legal and prosecutorial skills in the course of her career," Mr. Farmer said at the time of her appointment. "I am confident that Greta will build on the solid foundation that the Office of Insurance Fraud Prosecutor has established in its two-and-one-half years of operation."
Ms. Gooden Brown said it was gratifying to be endorsed by the state Senate.
"I really appreciated the fact that this decision was not based on politics I’m not a politician," she said. "I’ve had almost every type of job you can have in the Division of Criminal Justice, and I’m really gratified that that background has enabled me not only to know in my own mind I’m qualified but to have others recognize that as well."
Since 1994, Ms. Gooden Brown served as assistant attorney general of the division’s Prosecutors and Police Bureau, where she aided in the oversight and supervision of law enforcement officers throughout the state, including the State Police and state and municipal prosecutors.
From 1991 to 1994, she headed up the division’s Medicaid Fraud Section. Before that, she led investigations for the Institutional Abuse Unit, a job she said was "very intense."
"Prosecutors have a high burnout rate because of the emotional intensity associated with these cases," she said.
While with the unit, Ms. Gooden Brown prosecuted cases of child abuse and molestation at different institutions throughout the state, such as juvenile detention centers and day-care facilities.
"There is nothing more rewarding than having a positive impact on the life of a child who has suffered that kind of abuse," she said. "It doesn’t get any better than that, when you are able to help a child in that situation."
Ms. Gooden Brown joined the division in 1983 as a deputy attorney general in the Appellate Bureau.
"To this day, I think appellate advocacy is the purest form of law being practiced," she said, because it has to do with litigating legal issues, free of the strategic legal considerations usually associated with court hearings. She said the workload, while it may have been pure, was nevertheless heavy; she and her 40 colleagues handled from 30 to 40 cases at any given time.
She graduated from Rutgers Law School in 1982, and got her first legal job as a judicial clerk in Middlesex County with Judge Judson Hamlin, who handled criminal cases, and Judge Stephen Skillman, who handled civil cases, which turned out to be a healthy mix.
"I got both sides," she said. "It really gives you good preliminary exposure to our system of jurisprudence in this country to work behind the scenes with the people who are making decisions in these cases.
Ms. Gooden Brown said she had not had a particular interest in criminal law coming out of college; her focus at Rutgers was in corporate tax law.
"I applied for jobs in many firms, but at that time, firms were not interested in diversifying their backgrounds," said Ms. Gooden Brown. "In 1983, I sent out 300 cover letters to firms, and didn’t get one reply."
But with the help of Judge Hamlin, she got an interview with the Division of Criminal Justice and her first professional legal job.
The law has been good to Ms. Gooden Brown, but it is obvious from her talk that she regards her family and her home as two of her greatest gifts.
She lives with her husband, Ted, an Essex County prosecutor, in a home the couple built a few years ago on Knights Drive. Jean-Paul Gooden, Ms. Gooden Brown’s son from a prior marriage, is a student at Hampton University, in Virginia.
According to Ms. Gooden Brown, whose own parents saw in her penchant for talk a budding legal career, Jean-Paul has not yet settled on his own path. It may or may not have to do with law, she said.