Drive into Thomas M. Cooley Law School's new Oakland County campus and there is a good chance a small herd of deer will be there to greet you. The deer normally graze in the shadow of Chrysler's headquarters in Auburn Hills on the law school's mostly wooded campus.
"There is a herd of about 15-20 and this is a 67-acre parcel of property so it's a pretty decent size," says John Nussbaumer, the associate dean of Cooley's Auburn Hills Campus. "Since it was vacant for several years the deer came here and no one bothered them and they multiplied."
And they're sticking around despite Cooley turning the 1980s-era GM/UAW buildings into its new satellite campus. The new campus is going for LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council for reinvigorating the existing 65,000-square-foot building with environmentally friendly features galore.
Those include utilizing the building's extensive skylight systems, reusing a number of materials to refurbish it and installing big green features like a 20,000-square-foot green roof. The school's 62,000-square-foot expansion, which it's building now, will also have similar amenities while respecting the surrounding environment.
"We actually tried to design the building in a way that least encroaches on the wetlands," Nussbaumer says. "When people come here for the first time they usually say, 'Jeez, you can hardly believe you're in Oakland County,' especially when it leafs out."
Nussbaumer recently sat down with metromode to discuss the law school's green expansion, its plans for the local economy and where it sees the new economy taking Metro Detroit's law community.
What does Cooley offer to the region that the other law schools don't? What needs do they see themselves filling that isn't being satisfied?
You know that old real-estate saying about location, location, location? That's a biggie. The only law schools in the area are downtown. So anybody who wants to go to law school has to make that commute on a regular basis. When we first started looking toward Oakland, one of the things we found is that if you put Oakland County and Macomb County together in population, it's the largest population center in the country that doesn't have a law school. We did intensive demographic studies. I forget the exact number but I think there are 1.2 million people in Oakland County and about 800,000 in Macomb County. So if you look at areas in the country where there are 2 million people this was the only one without a law school.
Demographically, we thought there was a need here particularly for part-time education. That's kind of our specialty. We have full-time programs and full-time students, but we also have evening and weekend programs for working folks. The main thing we bring to the area is accessibility in terms of location and accessibility in terms of programs. For example, we have all of the students stand up and say why they came to law school, and we will have literally assembly line workers from GM or Chrysler all the way up to corporate executives who say the location of this place and the flexible scheduling options have made it possible for them to come to law school while they're still working.
A large percentage of Cooley's students are from out of state. How does the law school encourage them to stay in Michigan at a time when we're experiencing a brain drain of sorts?
Let me give you some numbers and then I'll answer the question. If you look at all of Cooley, it's about 65 percent out-of-state. We're a little different. We (the Auburn Hills campus) are a little bit different where we're about 75 percent in-state. We tend to draw more from the Metro Detroit, tri-county area. Historically, even though 65 percent are from out of state, about 50 percent of all of our graduates take the Michigan bar exam. So we convince some of them at least that Michigan is a good place.
I'll be honest, we haven't developed any particular programs that say "stay in Michigan", although we do a lot of work on the employment end of things for our students. One of the things that are happening is that the bigger law firms are not hiring. What we've started to target are small-to-medium-sized law firms. Surprisingly, there are still a lot of ordinary people whose legal needs that aren't being met. The big corporations are pretty well served, but a large percentage of the population still is not served. They don’t have a will. They don’t have a medical power of attorney for whatever is going to happen. So what we started to do in our employment efforts is we still target the big firms but we're also targeting the small- and medium-sized firms. A lot of students are becoming general practitioners so they do a little bit of everything.
Can you name some things the school is doing to help nurture talent in the region?
We do a lot of things to keep our students here while they’re in school. A fair number of our students are interested in transferring back home. They came from New York or New Jersey and they spend their first year here with us, they do great and they want to go back home. The main thing we do for those students is offer some very generous merit scholarships. If they're in the top-25 percent of their class they’re going to get a scholarship from us. After they finish 15 credit hours we look at the whole class and the top-25 percent, if they don’t already have a scholarship they get one. We guarantee that as long as the student stays with us as long as they don't go on academic probation, which very few do.
How do the school's course offerings dovetail with trends in the new economy, such high-tech, Internet, life science and green tech business?
Do you know what LLMs are? They're actually the advanced degrees for law. They're like a masters of law. So the JD is the basic degree. LLM is the advanced degree. We have an LLM program that deals with intellectual property. That is all of the high-tech, whether it's computer software or biotech. All of those industries, they need patents or they need copyright protection or trademark protection. When we came down here we thought that this is such a hot business area we decided to develop an LLM for intellectual property.
We're actually in the beginning stages of a program with Oakland University's business incubator. The theory is when the next Bill Gates comes along but he doesn’t know how to get started, we'll provide the corporate formation help, the tax help and the intellectual property help. Our roll in that is to one day provide the legal advice that those start-up businesses need.
The law school has built an impressive new campus that emphasizes its green credentials. Does the law school intend to go further with this ethos than just the facilities, and if so how?
We're starting to talk with Oakland University about a joint-degree program. It would be a JD law degree and a masters of environmental science. So our students would be admitted to both OU's master program and our JD program, and at the end of that study they would come out with that degree.
We also are drawing in environmental groups. We offer our facilities for law-committed groups that want to meet. About a month ago on a Saturday we had the State Bar of Michigan Environmental Law Section in this room with a video-conferencing cart that connected the members of their group in Lansing and Grand Rapids.
We have two faculty members who are working in the land conservancy. They just succeeded in securing a conservation easement, which reserves the land in perpetuity, like the Ann Arbor Green Belt. So our faculty as a pro-bono community service just secured a 130-acre land conservancy in north Oakland County. We didn’t think about this until recently, but we think this campus will eventually become the environmental hub of the three campuses. We're also thinking about a concentrate in environmental law. We're trying to look for academic curriculum developments that will draw students who are interested in the environment.
We think between the academic curriculum and the green building and the green environment, it's going to be a draw for students, not only locally but nationally.
Some environmentalists say that the positives of green building are negated when the construction takes places outside of a population center because more people have to drive there and it encourages sprawl. Do you think such claims dampen the green credentials for Cooley's new campus?
We didn't create the sprawl. For good or for ill the sprawl happened. We didn't build this building. That's what got us thinking about the green building. In the LEED certification process, they have a scoreboard and you score points for different things. Basically our architects said that by reusing this building instead of demolishing it, that's recycling. We scored a lot of points just for that. It's not like we're building out in really north Oakland County. We're right at I-75 and M-59 in the middle of things. And by reusing an existing building we didn’t increase the sprawl. In fact he rehabilitated a piece of property to make it useful.
What direction do you see legal practice in Michigan heading in the 21st Century? Do you see it heading more toward the traditional avenues, such as civil practice, or in more emerging areas, such as patent law?
I think it’s all of the above. There is always going to be a need for basic legal services, both at the individual level and the business level. What I think we'll see happen is the legal industry will follow the rest of industry. So if Michigan becomes a bio-fuel, alternative energy kind of focus I think you'll see the legal industry follow it. For instance, what do you need to do to develop a wind turbine farm? The law tends to the follow, at least at the corporate level, the industry. If the industry succeeds you'll see the law head in that area.
Same thing with the bio-tech stuff. I'm not an expert on the Ann Arbor legal market, but my guess is there is a concentration of lawyers that know how to do law related to bio-technology just because that's where it is right now. But I think the bread and butter for most lawyers is smaller corporate law, start-up businesses, small businesses, family law, criminal law. I don’t see massive changes but I do see the law community following whatever the industry does.
Jon Zemke is a Detroit-based freelance writer and the News Editor of Concentrate and metromode.
Photos:
John Nussbaumer - Auburn Hills
Classroom photo - courtesy Cooley Law School
Construction continues at Cooley Law School's new campus - Auburn Hills
Photograph by Marvin Shaouni
Marvin Shaouni is the managing photographer for metromode & Model D.