Anne Phillips Ogilby's documented education took place in Massachusetts and Virginia. She completed her undergraduate studies at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then attended the University of Virginia School of Law in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her legal career developed in Boston, where she was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1985 and went on to practice for several decades.
Ogilby received a Bachelor of Arts degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard College in 1980 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Harvard College, the undergraduate college of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was founded in 1636 and is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States.
She later received a Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1984. The law school was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 as part of the university he established, and it is the second-oldest continuously operating law school in the nation. Its tradition combined legal training with instruction in government and public service, a purpose reflected in its long record of educating lawyers for public life.
Her education therefore moved from a liberal arts college in New England to a law school in Virginia. Admission to the Massachusetts bar in 1985 followed the completion of her law degree.
Ogilby's first post-law-school position was as a law clerk to Judge A. David Mazzone of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. A federal clerkship places a recent law graduate within a judge's chambers, where the clerk supports the judge's work on cases before the court.
In 1985 she joined Ropes & Gray in Boston, a firm founded in 1865 by John Codman Ropes and John Chipman Gray, both Harvard Law School graduates. The firm moved toward corporate law after a railroad client joined it in 1878, and during the twentieth century it developed bankruptcy and labor practices. By the time Ogilby arrived, it had become one of Boston's major corporate law firms.
She became a partner in 1993. Her practice concentrated on capital financings for health care and higher education clients, which are typically tax-exempt or taxable bond borrowings used by hospitals and universities. Her Chambers USA profile reports more than 200 such borrowings as borrower, bond, or underwriter's counsel, while her firm biography refers to over a hundred tax-exempt and taxable borrowings.
Ogilby also served as underwriter's counsel and counsel to mutual fund clients in health care financings and workouts. Her corporate work included acquisitions and divestitures of health care and other nonprofit corporations, as well as general counseling for nonprofit boards on fiduciary duties and conflicts of interest. Her firm biography now identifies her as a retired partner.
Authored the 2008 request to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that resulted in a no-action letter permitting tax-exempt borrowers to bid in their own auctions for auction rate securities. A no-action letter states that the SEC staff will not recommend enforcement action for a described course of conduct, so this letter clarified how a specific class of borrowers could participate in auctions during a period of market disruption.
Was principally responsible for capital financings on behalf of Ropes & Gray's health care and higher education clients, including more than one hundred tax-exempt and taxable borrowings, contributing to the firm's specialized practice in nonprofit finance.
Ogilby is a member of the Massachusetts Bar Association, which was founded in 1900 to serve lawyers practicing in Massachusetts and to address the profession's standards and public responsibilities. She is also a member of the New York State Bar Association, established in 1876 as a statewide organization for attorneys in New York.
She holds the title of Chairman Emerita of the Cotting School, a private nonprofit school founded in Boston in 1893 as the Industrial School for Crippled and Deformed Children. It was the first private, free day school for children with disabilities in North America. The school moved from St. Botolph Street in Boston to Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1988.
