SIXTY PLUS, INC., ELDERLAW

50 Sixty Plus, Inc., Elderlaw Clinic A 50-YEAR TRADITION OF SERVICE TO THE COMMUNITY

“We just want our clothes back,” the woman said sadly as she and her granddaughter entered Fred Baker’s Sixty Plus, Inc., Elderlaw Clinic office and sat down.

With question marks clanging in his head over that statement, Baker sat down to listen as the woman shared a horrifying story that made it crystal clear just how much legal services for older adults were needed in the area – and soon.

It was 1979, and Baker had just launched what would become the Sixty Plus, Inc., Elderlaw Clinic with the assistance of a small grant from the State Bar’s Young Lawyers Section to cover the cost of malpractice insurance. Because Baker was on the faculty at Cooley, he was able to enlist law students to volunteer, and Chief Justice Mary Coleman provided a letter to instruct any court personnel that they were eligible to practice law under the court rule governing student practice, even though the clinic was not then part of the law school’s curriculum. Eventually, after the ABA Young Lawyers Division conferred its Single Project Award on the clinic, it was selected to become the flagship of the many clinical programs Cooley Law School has established as part of its 50-year tradition of service to the community.

But back to 1979, Baker needed to determine what his new clients meant when they said they wanted their clothes. The story started with three women. The elderly woman who came to the clinic with her 6-year-old granddaughter explained that, while her late daughter was terminally ill with cancer she had fallen in with a man who promised he would provide a home for life for her mother and daughter if she would just sign over her house to him. He claimed that because she’d been on

food stamps, the government would take her house when she died. Her daughter believed that her friend would take care of things after she was gone until her daughter was grown.

He took care of things alright – for himself. Immediately upon the daughter’s death, the man kicked the grandmother and the granddaughter out of “his” house, refusing to even let them take their clothes.

Baker had been a lawyer since 1975, but having spent the first few years of his career teaching at Wayne Law School and clerking for the late Court of Appeals Chief Judge Robert J. Danhof, he was a stranger to the courtroom. “I had never tried a case,” he recalled. “My first jury trial was with Sixty Plus.” Baker scrambled to make deadlines and get an estate open. In the pre-internet era, he obtained critical documentation by telegram. Once he had everything he needed to persuade the court to enjoin the sale of the house, it still took two years to get the case to trial, which took a week. Victory, he recalled was sweet – at one point, he chuckled, the jury asked, “Can we award more than the plaintiffs asked for?”

Baker wasn’t flying solo fighting for the women’s house, however. He had the able assistance of lawyers-intraining, students from Cooley, including Roger Lane, a former AP reporter who, at the age of 67, became Cooley’s oldest graduate at the time, and Dennis Mikko, the last student intern to work on the case.

Sixty Plus was established to serve a dual mission, which continues to this day: (1) Provide much-needed legal assistance to an under-served population and (2) Provide hands-on, live-client education to qualified law students. When fellow faculty member Bill Weiner came to Baker with the idea of resurrecting the idea of a legal clinic for older residents, Baker was already teaching a heavy class load year-around, but he was intrigued and willingly took on the task.

The first mission was to recruit law students for the clinic. “I put up a notice for volunteers in the cafeteria,” Baker recalled, “and 89 people signed up!” Baker waded through all the applicants and chose 12 to comprise the first class of Sixty Plus interns. He was all set.

Or so he thought.

That’s when Tom Wimsatt (Bushnell Class, 1980) showed up on his doorstep. “He was a biologist who went to law school,” Baker said. “He was whip smart and told me, ‘I am going to be in this clinic!’” Wimsatt made his case and Baker brought him on, earning that first class the enduring nickname, “Baker’s Dozen.” When Sixty Plus first started, they operated out of what had been a janitor’s closet at the former St. Lawrence Hospital. They eventually got bigger quarters, but the real breakthroughs came when Sixty Plus was incorporated in May 1981 and recognized by the American Bar Association with the Young Lawyers Division’s Single Project Award in 1982. The award made a big splash, Baker recalled, and soon after that Sixty Plus found itself officially folded into the Cooley family.

Early volunteers with Sixty Plus labored on their own time for the experience. As the value of clinical education became clear, however, students were soon able to earn credit for the experience as well.

Because the clinic received Title III funding and had to report its caseload annually, Baker recalled that by several years ago over 50,000 “unduplicated clients” (counting the services performed rather than just the individual clients) “have been served over the years – several of them more than once. In addition, hundreds of students have gone through the program – many going on to specialize in elder law.”

Dustin Foster, the current executive director of Sixty Plus, was one of those students who found their calling through Sixty Plus.

“For me, this is where I found my legal identity,” Foster said. “I like helping people who may not otherwise receive that service. I also like the aspect of working with students. It’s nice to have a part in their development from student to attorney.”

Baker had high praise for Foster. “Dustin is doing a great job,” Baker said. “He’s very focused.”

Sixty Plus, over time, has honed that focus on the much-needed service of wills and estate planning. In the past, it has also offered such services as divorce, landlord/ tenant issues, public benefits issues, protective proceedings, and more, for people age 60 and older in Ingham, Eaton and Clinton counties in mid-Michigan. These days, the legal specialty is more focused, but the population served is much wider and Foster said they can take on clients throughout the state. “As long as they can get to campus,” he said, the clinic can serve them.

Baker was the original executive director of Sixty Plus, and Foster is the 13th, forming their own “Baker’s Dozen” of sorts. In between, Cooley faculty serving as executive directors were Frank Brussow (acting); the late Dorean Koenig; Kent Hull, the clinic’s first full-time paid director; Nora Pasman Green, credited with propelling the fledgling clinic into a robust, professional organization; Ann Miller Wood; James Peden; Marjorie Russell; Norman Fell; Lawrence Morgan (acting); Kimberly O’Leary; and Gary Bauer. Sixty Plus and its Estate Planning Clinic are the most enduring programs, but several other clinics have carried out WMU-Cooley’s 50-year tradition of providing service to the community. Other continuing clinics at the law school include the Cooley Innocence Project, the Tampa Debt Relief Clinic, and the Washtenaw County Defender Clinic, a blended clinic.

Clinics in history have included the Access to Justice Clinic, Family Law Assistance Project, the Kent County Public Defender Clinic (a blended clinic), and the Immigrant Rights and Civil Advocacy Clinic.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Terry Cavanaugh recalled that many faculty members worked to continue the Sixty Plus tradition. In addition to those already mentioned, other professors taught in the clinic, including Cavanaugh himself, Marla Mitchell-Cichon, Patricia Mock, Cindy Faulkner, and the late Judy Frank. Josh Ard, whose knowledge of the Sixty Plus Clinic was encyclopedic, was a notable staff attorney in the clinic, becoming known for his mentoring style that taught students to think on their feet and come up with the answers to important questions on their own. Others have served on the board. Baker, with his lifelong commitment to service, serves as secretary of the Sixty Plus board to this day.

At the time of the trial, the granddaughter was eight. Fast forward about 15 years and I am shopping at a Kroger store. A young woman with a baby keeps looking at me by the dairy and then comes up to me and says, “Excuse me, are you, Mr. Baker?” “Yes,” I replied, unsure who she might be. She said, “I am Jessie Smith’s granddaughter, and my mother was Betty Haynes. You got our house back for us and I grew up there. Jessie died, and I got married and had this baby. My husband left me and I don’t know where he is. That house is all I have in the world. Thank you.”

Jack Rooney

IN MEMORY MAY 1, 1932-NOVEMBER 8, 2022

JOHN “JACK” PHILIP ROONEY

Distinguished Professor Emeritus B.A. University Of Illinois, 1953 J.D. Harvard University, 1958 Professor Jack Rooney’s love of knowledge was evident long before joining the Cooley faculty in January of 1975. He appeared on the popular radio game show, The Quiz Kids, which was broadcast nationally from his hometown of Chicago. After graduating first in his class from Loyola Academy, he enrolled at Xavier and later transferred to the University of Illinois where he majored in Math and minored in Philosophy, studying semiotics under Prof. Max Fisch.

After Illinois, Prof. Rooney fulfilled his ROTC military service commitment, using his knowledge of computer programming and analytical skills on behalf of the Army Security Agency where he was assigned to the nascent National Security Agency. Upon his discharge as a First Lieutenant, the Korean-era GI Bill allowed him to attend Harvard Law School. There he was a member of the Chancery Club and met people like Carl Levin, Ralph Nader, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Cutler in Chicago in June of 1958. The next fall, he joined the migration from his native Midwest to California, winding up in the San Francisco Bay Area. There he worked for a firm representing municipal and county governments until July 1, 1963, when he “hung out a shingle” as a solo practitioner focusing primarily on real estate transactions and related litigation. He served on the Estate Planning Council of San Francisco. Having found his calling teaching Estate and Gift Tax as an adjunct at San Francisco Law School, he decided to attend the annual hiring conference for law professors and accepted an offer to teach at Cooley.

In his nearly 40 years as an active part of the Cooley community, Prof. Rooney primarily taught Property and to a lesser extent Jurisprudence, befitting his love of history and philosophy. Given Cooley’s unique schedule, he once calculated that he’d taught Property more frequently and to more students than any other law professor in the country. In his last decade of active teaching, Prof. Rooney returned to his undergraduate passion and offered an elective seminar on Law and Semiotics. Professor Rooney contributed to the legal community by initiating the Client Counseling program at Cooley. He also composed his own casebook, Selected Cases (Property) aka Rooney on Property. And he served on the Michigan Land Title Standards Committee for approximately 15 years.

Professor Rooney’s research is best known for tackling the intersection of law and semiotics with a special focus on the Polish legal theorist Jerry Wroóblewski and the American legal philosopher Elijah Jordan. He enjoyed both speaking and publishing, fondly remembered traveling to conferences on jurisprudence, legal semiotics, and artificial intelligence and the law in in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Morocco, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.

In addition to his teaching and research, Prof. Rooney enjoyed socializing with students and fellow faculty alike. He served as an early faculty advisor to several groups including the Black Law Student Association. Apparently this affection was reciprocated since Prof. Rooney had the honor of having a racehorse named after him by a group of students and another student painted his portrait. He was also the inaugural winner of the Stanley E. Beattie Teaching Award.

In contemplating such an article as this being written one day, he asked that his preference for Interweave over the hated IRAC, which he deemed a waste of time and an impediment to good legal reasoning, be noted one last time.

Even after he taught his last class, Prof. Rooney’s commitment to Cooley continued. He oversaw externships, mentored junior faculty, and remained available to students, alumni, his fellow professors, and the larger legal community. Making new connections between ideas, between people and ideas, and between people with shared interests remained a great joy to him, one he relished sharing with the Cooley community to which he devoted so much of his life.

THE NEXT 50 YEARS50My Vision for Cooley Law School

One constant in legal education is change. The last several years have shown this axiom to be more formidable than ever. However, never one to sit back and roll with changes or hide from challenge, Cooley continues to innovate and be at the forefront of defining what a modern legal education should look like in the law and in society.

As we enter the school’s next 50 years, we are seizing the opportunity to create a better legal environment for all, not just a select few.

In our first 50 years we demonstrated incredible resilience as we successfully navigated many incredible changes. Putting our students first, we remained at the forefront of providing access to the legal profession and made sure a Cooley lawyer graduated prepared to practice.

When I arrived as president and dean in 2019, the Board of Directors and I agreed on a vision to make Cooley a leader in providing a modern legal education. From day one, in partnership with our faculty and staff, we set to work to make that happen. Despite the challenges of the last three years, we remain committed to that vision and are implementing strategies to achieve it. Our new Strategic Plan doubles down on our access mission, memorializing our pledge to using empirically proven teaching and learning techniques and deepening our commitment to promote social justice.

Our mission and values statements flesh out our plans to ensure Cooley will be a leader in preparing lawyers for our everchanging profession, country, and world.

Our faculty is currently completing a full curriculum review. Striving for continuous improvement, we will examine every detail of our current curriculum, keeping what is working well and creating new courses and offerings that will best ensure our students build the skills and knowledge they need to be successful in school, on the bar exam, and in practice. As we engage in this important work, we will consider the best practices in legal education – but we will also consider our unique student population to situate our curriculum to best serve them. We will continue to innovate. We will build a curriculum that recognizes where our students are and gets them to where they need to be to be successful lawyers and leaders.

The end result of this effort will be a curriculum designed to fulfill the aspirations of our Strategic Plan. The process will be thorough and may likely include surveys of our graduates, many of whom are employers.

Based in part on my many conversations with alumni, we intend to ensure legal writing is taught in the first semester, and that more writing is infused throughout the program.

Practice ready means being able to write well, so this will be a priority moving forward. Lawyers write.

I also anticipate permitting students to exercise more autonomy in selecting elective courses. This is important to keeping students motivated in their studies as they approach graduation. Of course, preparing students for the bar is also a central tenet in our curricular review. I am encouraging our faculty to consider a stratified menu of bar review courses for our students’ final semesters. Depending on their knowledge base and demonstrated capacity, students may be required to take one or more bar review courses. Complimenting this, is our new collaboration agreement with BARBRI – a preeminent commercial bar review company. This collaboration will provide valuable data analytics that will help us assess a student’s readiness to sit for the bar exam. We will use this and other data to identify students who need extra help to prepare for the ultimate final exam. The agreement also provides all students entering since fall of 2022 with a full post-graduation BARBRI bar review course included in their tuition, and all previous graduates have access to a deeply discounted course.

Beyond these elements, I have asked the faculty to think expansively on what our new curriculum should look like. Everything is on the table as we reimagine our new curriculum and prepare for the school’s next 50 years.

As we celebrate the school’s 50th anniversary and all that has led us to this moment, I am thankful every day for the leadership of our amazing 21,000+ graduates from across the nation and around the world. They are the foundation of our success and have demonstrated through their diligent work and leadership in every area of the law that Cooley graduates are prepared to be positive agents for change in our profession and in the communities they serve. You make us proud of our school and invigorate our work.

Like you, I am very proud of our first 50 years as Cooley Law School, but thrilled as we continue to transform Cooley Law School for its next 50 years.

50-Years. One Mission.

PREPARING LAWYERS & LEADERS.

For 50 years, Cooley Law School has been committed to a singular mission – preparing the very best lawyers and leaders. Our 21,000-plus alumni includes a governor, senators, representatives, justices, judges, attorneys general, district attorneys, prosecutors, public defenders, and partners in leading law firms around the country. In addition, our graduates transcend the legal community to apply their knowledge and expertise in leading businesses, corporations, communities, and non-profit agencies around the world. Our alumni and friends help make all this possible. Your gifts support increased scholarships, expanded skills training and practice readiness experiences, enhanced academic support programs, and much more. To commemorate the law school’s 50th anniversary, we’ve set an ambitious goal of raising $500,000 in support of student scholarships, student bar preparation, and curriculum and instruction enhancements.

We invite you to help us achieve that goal and join in affirming our continued commitment to producing the very best lawyers and leaders by making a gift to the 50th anniversary annual fund campaign. Make your gift by visiting cooley.edu/giving, scanning the QR code below, or by returning the enclosed reply envelope. Those who make a gift of $50 or more will receive a commemorative WMUCooley 50th anniversary coffee mug.

Reaching 50

BILL ARNOLD, DIRECTOR OF ADVANCEMENT AND ALUMNI RELATIONS

For individuals, turning 50 can be an occasion filled with mixed emotions. There is the happiness associated with many fond memories, the joy of celebrating with friends old and new, as well as the contemplation of knowing one is now most definitely middle-aged. For an organization, like WMUCooley Law School, reaching 50 years is a rare occasion and something worth celebrating!

Consider this, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 36 percent of all businesses make it to their 10th birthday, just over one-third. Only 21 percent make it to their 20th anniversary.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that only about 12 percent – just 12 percent – of companies are more than 26 years old.

So, you see, this year is a very special moment in the life of WMU-Cooley Law School.

One of the keys to longevity among businesses that make it beyond their 20th anniversary is a clear understanding of their mission and vision and an unwavering commitment of those who believe in that mission. For Cooley Law School, that started with just two people, former Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas E. Brennan and his wife Pauline (Polly) Brennan.

Our law school began in June 1972 inside a rented space on the second floor of a building in downtown Lansing, Michigan. It was outfitted with a table, a few chairs, and a telephone. Fueled by a belief that access to a legal education should not be limited to just those from privileged backgrounds or for those who had the means and ability to put their lives on hold in order to attend, they set to work.

They believed that any individual who had the desire, the commitment, and the fortitude to earn the degree and met the standards of the profession, deserved the opportunity to pursue their dreams. Of course Judge Brennan and Polly didn’t do it alone. Among their friends and peers, they found a dedicated group of individuals, some who were attorneys and some who were not, that shared their vision. Together they turned the improbable into a reality.

Through their shared commitment, in just a matter of a few months, they enrolled the first class of 76 students on January 12, 1973.

Fifty years later, we celebrate their vision and their determination. We all share the belief in the importance of broad access to a legal education. As we carry that torch forward, we must light the way for those who dream of ensuring equal justice under the law.

I invite you to join in celebrating the 50th anniversary of WMU-Cooley Law School at one or more of the events occurring this year. In addition, please consider making a gift to the 50th anniversary annual giving campaign. Together, we can ensure that broad access to a legal education continues to be a reality for every generation yet to come.