Skip to content

Reda Taleb’s Life’s Work: Turning Pain into Purpose — and Giving It Back to Dearborn

Reda Taleb’s Life’s Work: Turning Pain into Purpose — and Giving It Back to Dearborn

When Reda Taleb (McLean Class, 2015) talks about “giving back,” she isn’t just reciting a slogan — she’s living by example. The daughter of immigrants from Bint Jbeil, Lebanon, Taleb’s parents, along with her six older siblings, laid roots in Dearborn’s south end, an area known for its pollution-emitting factory smoke stacks and community of Arab Americans seeking the “American Dream.”

Read More
  • Cooley Graduate Janelle Benjamin is Helping Employers “Make it Easy to be Equitable”
    Cooley Graduate Janelle Benjamin is Helping Employers “Make it Easy to be Equitable”

    Cooley Graduate Janelle Benjamin is Helping Employers “Make it Easy to be Equitable”

    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.

  • Katie Stanley: When you help a client, you aren’t just helping them, you're helping others.
    Katie Stanley: When you help a client, you aren’t just helping them, you're helping others.

    Katie Stanley: When you help a client, you aren’t just helping them, you're helping others.

    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: Unassuming Trailblazer
    Robin Sutara: Unassuming Trailblazer

    Robin Sutara: Unassuming Trailblazer

    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.

  • Yveline Dalmacy: Charting Her Own Path of Service
    Yveline Dalmacy: Charting Her Own Path of Service

    Yveline Dalmacy: Charting Her Own Path of Service

    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.

  • Hon. Kwamé Rowe: Don’t let others tell you that you can’t do something
    Hon. Kwamé Rowe: Don’t let others tell you that you can’t do something

    Hon. Kwamé Rowe: Don’t let others tell you that you can’t do something

    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.

  • Jon Kohler: Brokering and Conserving Natural Lands
    Jon Kohler: Brokering and Conserving Natural Lands

    Jon Kohler: Brokering and Conserving Natural Lands

    When you read articles featuring Jon Kohler (Adams Class, 1997) about his success as a land broker, you read about the deals that include large swaths of land in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina. You also read about the value of the land and how the deals were brokered. What you don’t read about in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and others is Kohler’s passion for conservation and the need to rehabilitate and maintain many of the lands his company brokers in their most natural states.

  • Kimberly Lewis and Susan Lee: Unapologetically Unafraid
    Kimberly Lewis and Susan Lee: Unapologetically Unafraid

    Kimberly Lewis and Susan Lee: Unapologetically Unafraid

    Orientation for most students can be slightly overwhelming, but for Kimberly Lewis it was the launch of an exciting new future. A natural extrovert, she had already scoped out her classmates and locked in on one student. Someone she intuitively knew was interesting and smart.

  • Cooley Law School Grad Olu Ben-Shidah: Stay Focused and Fight for your Clients
    Cooley Law School Grad Olu Ben-Shidah: Stay Focused and Fight for your Clients

    Cooley Law School Grad Olu Ben-Shidah: Stay Focused and Fight for your Clients

    “Calm” is not a word that typically springs to mind when thinking about the practice of law – particularly criminal law. From stressed attorneys to frantic defendants, looming deadlines, over-crowded trial calendars, and high-stakes courtroom drama, “calm” just isn’t an adjective that typically gets put into play in the legal arena.

  • Cooley Law School Graduate Jon Kohler: Leading Plantation Broker in USA
    Cooley Law School Graduate Jon Kohler: Leading Plantation Broker in USA

    Cooley Law School Graduate Jon Kohler: Leading Plantation Broker in USA

    Cooley Law School graduate Jon Kohler (Adams Class, 1997), is the founder of Jon Kohler & Associates, the #1 plantation brokerage in the United States. Kohler attributes the work ethic and education he gained at Cooley Law School with his continued success. Read below Mr. Kohler’s interview with writer Adam York in this Dec. 6, 2016 blog.