Recent Cooley Law School graduate Morgan Prybys is turning a longtime dream of becoming a lawyer into a career focused on helping others. Prybys, who began her professional journey working in security before becoming a paralegal, was recently recognized with the Cooley Alumni Association Distinguished Student Award at the law school’s Honors Convocation. The award recognized her academic journey, involvement and commitment to supporting those around her. During her time at Cooley, Prybys was involved with several student organizations and served as a teaching assistant. She also gained hands-on experience through Cooley’s SixtyPlus ElderLaw Clinic, building on her interest in estate planning and elder law. Her legal interests also include compliance, an area in which she earned a Certificate of Merit. Her journey from doubting whether law school was possible to earning her J.D. and receiving recognition for her accomplishments reflects the persistence and growth that shaped her legal education. Read more about Morgan Prybys and her journey in the Legal News.
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I have previously blogged about ways to boost an article’s readership. Since then I have learned of a really simple additional way. We all know that to increase readability, use short words and short sentences. It turns out that using a short title for your article can increase the likelihood that it will be read. And cited by others.
THE PAST The "Looking Back: 1930s" article in the January 2022 Michigan Bar Journal concludes by briefly noting "a failed constitutional amendment which would have moved Michigan away from an elected judiciary." The ballot measure would have instituted non-partisan appointment of Michigan’s Supreme Court justices. Since that 1938 defeat, the State Bar has initiated or supported petition drives to put the question of non-partisan judicial selection back on the ballot three more times.
Mina Woodard’s original career goal was to become a math teacher, but she switched to criminal justice studies after transferring from the University of Louisiana to Michigan State University in her second year. “I wanted to have a career where I felt like I could help people,” she says. “I enjoyed learning about how the legal system works and the reasons behind why people commit crimes. Studying criminal justice was the beginning of my interest in law.” The seeds of her future career were sown when she took a law class at MSU and found it fascinating. After giving birth to her daughter Skye during her junior year of college, Woodard didn’t give much thought to continuing education—but after graduation, struggled to find a career that interested her. Three years as a Client Service Specialist at Jackson National Life in Lansing was a valuable experience, but she recognized it wasn’t what she was meant to do long-term.
Cooley Law School 2005 graduate Janelle Benjamin is the founder and CEO of the company All Things Equitable. Benjamin, located in Toronto, Ontario, works with organizations and companies all over the world. Her consulting work focuses on diversity and inclusion in the workplace. She helps employees from historically marginalized groups feel safer at work, and she helps employers figure out how to create diverse and safe workplaces that are fair and equitable. She does her work by speaking, interviewing, conducting focus groups, surveys, and training sessions. Benjamin started the company in 2020, pulling together more than 15 years of skills acquired through her work on the staff of high level policy makers in Human Rights and Fairness government commissions. She earned her J.D. with a focus on International Law, ADR, and Litigation. She believes she is the only firm in Toronto that focuses on all historically marginalized groups – there are consultants on racial equity, or accessibility equity, or LGBTQI equity, for example. She helps companies create fairness for all its employees by examining such issues as implicit bias and micro-aggressions, but also explicit bias and dismantling sexist, racist, ableist and other practices that are a barrier to fairness. She credits some of her own experiences of discrimination and micro-aggressions in the workplace with helping her recognize and validate the experiences shared by marginalized employees. She credits her policy experience with helping her problem-solve with employers. After the events of the summer of 2020, including the shooting of George Floyd, Ms. Benjamin realized she wanted to do more. She also realized her own race and gender posed challenges to being promoted within corporate culture. With the support of many people with whom she had worked, who advised her that she had the perfect skill set to take action to improve employment settings, she launched her own business and has been busy ever since.
You might say that Katie Stanley started law school at age 13. She was, of course, too young to actually enroll in law classes, but that’s when she began reading the legal textbooks for her dad, Mike Stanley, who’d enrolled at Cooley as a blind student. Katie was soon hooked on the material, setting the stage for a career in the law as a means for helping people.
Robin Sutara (Witherell Class, 2010) has always been a trailblazer. Perhaps an unassuming trailblazer, but she has definitely carved out a career and life path that has taken her to extraordinary places and heights. Sutara, who twice graduated from Cooley, garnering her JD in 2010 and then returning for her Masters of Law in Intellectual Property and graduating in 2013, was named as Microsoft UK’s first Chief Data Officer in January 2021. She is responsible for collaborating with Microsoft’s customers throughout the UK, learning about how they leverage data and artificial intelligence, and working closely with them to create new solutions for a variety of functions and across multiple industries, including retail, banking and healthcare. Sutara has been with Microsoft for more than two decades, serving in a number of leadership positions on the way to her current role with the company. Sutara’s previous roles included consumer support engineer, technical account manager, business operations manager and chief of staff, where she was responsible for all operations and business management functions for the corporate vice president for the Azure Data engineering organization. Azure is a cloud computing service operated by Microsoft for applications management via Microsoft-managed data centers.
What does being a lawyer mean to Yveline Dalmacy? Well, it doesn’t mean driving the fanciest car or living in the biggest house. To her it means touching and empowering as many lives as you can in your lifetime. That’s the legacy she wants to leave. As a proud Haitian who immigrated to New York when she was 14 years old, she met many challenges but still managed to help others along the way.
On Thursday, July 22, 2021, Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced the appointment of Kwamé L. Rowe to the 6th Circuit Court of Oakland County, in southeast Michigan. Rowe served as a special assistant prosecuting attorney with the Trafficking Unit for Oakland County, working on felony cases involving human trafficking, complex narcotics, and homicide.
If you are an American lawyer in the 21st century, you need to understand how to work with clients, judges, and other professionals from diverse backgrounds. The ABA has focused on guiding lawyers to learn these tools.
