Abby devoted her 49 year legal career to public service. In her first year out of law school, Abby clerked for Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Menor. When her clerkship ended, she spent the next ten years working with the State of Hawaii as Deputy Attorney General, Special Assistant to Governor Ariyoshi and as Director of the State’s Progressive Neighborhood Program. She was appointed by Governor Ariyoshi to serve as Deputy Director of the State’s Department of Health’s with responsibility for the State’s 12 hospitals. This allowed her to achieve greater access to medical and emergency care at those hospitals serving rural and outer-island communities.

In 1994, Abby began a ten-year stint with the City and County of Honolulu. During this time, she served as First Deputy Corporation Counsel, Director of the Department of Community Services, and then Chief of Staff for Mayor Jeremy Harris. In 2004 – representing the City and County – Abby addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York as part of the General Assembly’s campaign to ban nuclear weapons. Abby retired from public service in 2005 but continued in the solo practice of law for another ten years thereafter from the Law Offices of Abelina Madrid Shaw.

The fuel that drove Abby’s successful career was her pride in her Filipino heritage – she wanted to show that Filipinos, especially Filipino women, could excel in whatever professional and other fields they chose to pursue. The same pride was behind her participation in and support of numerous Filipino and other community organizations. She served as Chairman of the Board of the Filipino Community Center, as President of Hawaii Filipino Lawyers Association, as an officer of the Filipino Chamber of Commerce and on numerous other nonprofit boards. Along the way she adopted the Hawaii contingent of some 260,000 Filipino veterans of World War II who elected to reside in the United States post-war. She spent countless years supporting the group’s efforts to get "parity" in federal retirement benefits for her Filipino veterans — to get the same benefits as received by the American soldiers alongside of whom they fought to re-take the Philippines. Although the group was not successful in obtaining the benefits, the group played a key role (together with the support of Hawaii’s Senator Mazie Hirono and other members of Hawaii’s Congressional delegation) in getting Congress to pass the Filipinos Veterans of World War II Congressional Gold Medal Act in 2016. One of Abby’s proudest moments was sharing credit at the Hawaii banquet "Presentations" in 2017 and 2018 at which more than one hundred of the Hawaii Filipino Veterans of World War II (or their widows) were awarded Congressional Gold Medals of Honor in recognition of their military service on behalf of our nation.