In less than two years, Oakland County law students went from learning to write complicated contracts while practically tripping over undeclared college freshmen and stethescopes to practicing litigation in sophisticated courtrooms.
“We used to be all in one building at OU,” said Thomas M. Cooley Law School student Carly Wolf.
“So we’re used to having a handful of classrooms being crammed in with a million other people and now you can wander for a day and there’s tons of room.”
What started as a 28-student-satellite campus in Oakland University’s O’Dowd Hall in 2002 is now a Cooley Law Auburn Hills campus with 670 enrolled students.
Associate Dean of the Auburn Hills campus John Nussbaumer estimates the campus could potentially accommodate up to 1,200 students with the addition.
“When we were on OU’s campus in O’Dowd Hall we were really squeezed for space, and so was the nursing school, and we were all kind of shoe-horned into it. So this has given us the room to grow” Nussbaumer said.
Cooley Law School will celebrate the green, futuristic 65,000-square-foot addition at 10:30 a.m., Thursday, May 28. The project doubled the size of its Auburn Hills campus, which is located at 2630 Featherstone, and supplements Cooley’s Lansing and Grand Rapids campuses.
The ceremony concludes Cooley’s $36 million investment. It involved purchasing the property in June 2007, rehabilitating the existing building and the addition. The money came mostly from educational bonds, keeping tuition rate increases below 5 percent over the last several years. The addition includes courtrooms, classrooms, legal clinics and offices for expanded advanced degree programs in corporate law and finance, intellectual property and taxation.
Law students who once shared a hall with undergraduate students are pleased with the addition and the advanced technology, which is about five years ahead of the courts, according to Nussbaumer.
The building has complete wireless Internet access, two computer labs, four state-of-the-art, high-definition video conferencing classrooms that connect all three Cooley campuses, and many classrooms equipped with high-quality, digital-sound recording systems, enabling students to download podcasts of their classes from the Web site. The courtrooms are equipped with computers at the judge’s bench, witness stand, lawyer’s stand and jury box so everybody can see exhibits.
“The lawyers and the judge and the witness can all draw on the screen,” Nussbaumer said. “Like if you had a photo of an accident scene and you have a police officer testifying you can draw on the screen and it would show up over there (on the other monitors).”
“We tried to build for the future,” Nussbaumer said of the technology in the school’s courtrooms. “We’re trying to train our students not for today necessarily … The lawyers who aren’t able to (use the equipment) … there will come a time not too far down the road when that’s a handicap.”
Carlos Vicent just graduated from Cooley and is studying for the bar exam. He got to experience practicing in both a Detroit District Court and the new practice courtrooms.
“It definitely helps with the learning curve,” Vicent said. “We really hope that a lot of the district courts catch up because it’s very convenient some of the ways you can integrate technologies into your presentation.” He likes the technology available in the school’s courtrooms combined with the comfort of the classroom setting.
Wolf agrees that the familiar setting of the campus courtrooms helps.
“I think the best benefit is it’s part of our school building that we’re used to, because I’m the kind of the person who’s terrified when I start anything new so I’m sure the first time I walk into a courtroom for a reason I’m going to be ready to just keel over and die,” Wolf said.
The technology in the classrooms and courtrooms isn’t the only aspect of the addition that is progressive. The building itself was constructed with the future in mind.
Nussbaumer said construction cost about $600,000 more than normal to meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design requirements, which are expected to start saving the school money in about seven years.
“It’s planned to be a 40-year building so the last 30 years or so we’ll be saving quite a bit,” Nussbaumer said.
A lot of the green elements are hidden, Nussbaumer said. For example the carpeting is made out of old tires, the drywall is made out of recycled materials, and unless you’re looking out from the upper levels, you wouldn’t see the sedum roof that covers the new classrooms.
“It does two things: it helps insulate both winter and summer and it slows down the rainwater runoff,” Nussbaumer said. The rest of the building is sheltered by a white, reflective roof, which does much of the same thing. Other elements are more obvious, like motion-activated lighting and recycling stations throughout the building.
Cooley is still looking toward the future in terms of the school’s and the economy’s growth. The Auburn Hills campus draws about 30 percent of its students from out of state, and about 80 percent of its graduates take the Michigan Bar Exam, which Nussbaumer said he assumes that means most of them are staying in the state.
“What we’re creating and contributing (to Oakland County) is the core of business and transactional lawyers for when the economy does bounce back,” Nussbaumer said.
A 10,000-square-foot addition to the existing library is also in preliminary stages.
