More than the judge

For most children, a judge is someone who sits at the front of a room. For Cole Adams Maier, it was simply what her mother did for a living.

“It never occurred to me I couldn’t be a judge, because she was one,” Cole said. “To me, that was an ordinary job.”

Her mother, Julie Adams, was one of the first women to serve on the bench in Kentucky, after practicing law at a time when, as Cole puts it, people thought women shouldn’t be.

Cole took a different road to the same room. She clerked for judges in law school, worked as a Supreme Court staff attorney and then became a public defender near Bowling Green. The questions she asked as a small child, like whether someone was a bad person, were answered at home the same way every time: “There really aren’t that many folks that are truly bad people. Everybody makes bad decisions. You’ve got to be accountable, but that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.”

Cole came home to Clark County, ran for district judge in 2018 and has been a circuit judge since 2021. When people tell her stories about appearing before her mother, she has a ready reply: “She’s division one on your docket and in your heart. If you expect me to be her, I’m a poor facsimile. If you expect me to be myself, you get what you get.”

Their work overlaps most in drug court, a program Julie started in the county in the 1990s and one her daughter later took over.

The judge’s days carry two sets of schedules. There are swearing-in ceremonies, hearings and planning for a new justice center, and there are two daughters, soccer practices and a husband, Mark, who works as deputy general counsel at the University of Kentucky. They trade school pickups. They are also both training for the same November marathon, though never at the same hour.

Family and work blur in this town. Her father’s real estate office sits across the street from the courthouse, and her brother now works there. Her own office was once her mother’s, and it still holds some of her things.

“If you asked either one of us at 16 whether we’d work with our parents, we’d have said absolutely not,” she said. “We’re some sort of reluctant cliché, but it happened.”