Posts Tagged ‘Cooley’

The Auburn Hills campus of Thomas M. Cooley Law School will hold a Veterans Day ceremony on Wednesday, November 11 at 5:00 p.m. The program, sponsored by the new student organization Cooley Students for Veterans, will be held at 2630 Featherstone Road, Room 145, Auburn Hills. Light refreshments will be served.

Scheduled speakers are Wayne Smith, UAW Local 412 Veteran’s Committee Chairman; Mike Schloff, Oakland County Bar Association Veteran’s Committee Chair and a former President of the OCBA; Capt. Tom “The Adjutant” Mengesha, US Army, author of The Service Members Guide to Deployment; and Lt. Col. Rodney Williams, Human Relations Manager for the Michigan National Guard. Other participants include Cooley Professor James Carey, who will play the bagpipes during the ceremony.

Cooley Students for Veterans includes veterans, those who are interested in serving in a professional capacity following law school (particularly in the JAG corps), and those who want to support our service members. In addition to many other activities, Cooley Students for Veterans plans to help students support and work with Cooley’s Service to Soldiers: Legal Assistance Referral Program, which provides free legal counsel to military personnel throughout Michigan.

[Examiner]

Of course, we wish that we did not have to increase tuition, but the reality is that the cost of operation escalates and enrollment varies. The May 2009 class came in below the usual size, and transfers remain too high. Our operating revenue is tuition-based, so tuition must be set based on projected enrollment numbers. This year, the cost of financing our facilities at Lansing, Grand Rapids, and Auburn Hills increased due to the dislocation in the financial markets (the Ann Arbor facility is leased, so it does not contribute to the increased financing cost). It is in everyone’s interest to recruit new first-year students and to retain them in the second and third year.

[Above the Law]

For the past few years, the Town Center Building at the corner of Capitol Avenue and Kalamazoo Street in downtown Lansing has been little more than a storage facility.

By early next year, it will be an annex to Thomas M. Cooley Law School’s library. The two story structure is in the midst of a $6 million renovation, which will add an all-night study lounge, additional classrooms and 25,400 linear feet of stack space.

The renovated facility, called the Center for Research and Study, will open in piecemeal fashion, a first floor study area and student lounge first, space for books as it’s needed, further study spaces and classrooms on the second floor sometime in the next year or two.

The reason for the project is growth, said Jim Robb, associate dean of development.
When the Brennan Law Library opened in 1993, Cooley had about 1,500 students. Today, enrollment at the school’s Lansing campus is more than 2,200.

“The current library is very nice, but it could be bigger,” Lynnette Hill, a second-year Cooley student. “If it was bigger, a lot more people could actually use it.”

[Lansing State Journal]

Enrollment at Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Grand Rapids hit nearly 700 students this fall, pushing the local campus further toward its capacity target.

Three years after Cooley Law School began offering its full law program locally, incoming first-year law students again pushed the Grand Rapids campus to its highest enrollment level ever.

Cooley Law School’s enrollment in Grand Rapids totaled 681 students across the entire law program. That compares to a total enrollment of 560 students a year earlier.

The Lansing-based law school now has enrollments locally across every year of the program, which accounts for the sizable year-to-year growth rates at the Grand Rapids campus in its early years.

“We’re kind of built out now, in a sense,” Associate Dean Nelson Miller said.

Cooley Law School opened the campus on the south end of downtown in May 2003 and, after securing accreditation, began offering its entire program there in 2006.

[m-live]

On Wednesday, Tom Izzo stood in front of a few hundred students with court aspirations.

It wasn’t the type of court Izzo usually patrols during basketball season, though. Izzo was speaking to a group of law students as part of the keynote address for the fourth annual Howard Soifer Memorial Lecture in Sports and Entertainment Law at the Thomas M. Cooley Law School.

Soifer, who died in 2003, was a Cooley grad and longtime MSU fan. He was the agent for Spartans great Steve Smith and negotiated the $2.5-million donation Smith made to the university in the late 1990s for the construction of the Clara Bell Smith Student Athlete Academic Center. It’s the largest monetary gift from a professional athlete to his alma mater.

“Speaking to lawyers and agents and things, that’s a little different for me,” Izzo said. “It’s a privilege to be here when I think of who it’s for, not just the school but Howard in general.”

[Free Press]

Plenty of troubles could have kept Edwin Johnson from finishing law school.

He had a heart attack about a week before he started his first year.

His car slid off the road and into a ditch on the way to orientation.

Then he injured his knee playing softball one summer, and a swarm of bees attacked him while he was mowing his lawn, causing a seizure.

But the Vietnam veteran and former Cass County commissioner and salesman did not quit.

On Saturday afternoon, Johnson, 54, graduated from Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing as the oldest student in his class.

“You’re never too old to learn, there’s no one, regardless of age, who can’t learn something,” he said.

Johnson quit a full-time job selling insurance to go to school. He had found his work as a salesman — selling everything from cars to swimming pools — unfulfilling and had an itch to scratch, an itch he had been ignoring since elementary school.

The Thomas M. Cooley Law School recently announced that Joan Vestrand, professor of law and assistant dean at the Auburn Hills campus, has been promoted to the position of associate dean and will lead the school’s Ann Arbor campus.

“Dean Vestrand has played a vital role at Cooley already through her distinguished work in redesigning the school’s professionalism and ethics program,” said Don LeDuc, president and dean of Cooley. “This is such an exciting time in Cooley’s history and Joan’s extensive experience and enthusiasm make her an outstanding choice to head the new campus in Ann Arbor.”

[Examiner]

In September 2009, Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan will begin new LL.M. programs in Corporate Law and Finance and a U.S. Legal Studies LL.M. for Foreign Attorneys. A “Self-Directed” LL.M. program is also expected to begin this fall.

The law school has also planned the launch of a new LL.M. program in Insurance Law in September 2010.

[LLM Guide]