Photos by John Meiu
Among those who attended the Incubator project get-together in Ferndale last week: John Nussbaumer, dean of Cooley Law School in Auburn Hills; George Googasian, past president of the Oakland County Bar Association; Megan Drewyor, Wayne State University Law School; Kyle Peczynski, WSU Law School; Ingrid Ulander, Michigan State University College of Law; Jennifer Serwach, MSU College of Law; Oakland County Circuit Judge Wendy Potts; Gene Schnelz, retired Oakland County Circuit judge; Judy Cunningham, OCBA president; Edward Gold, past president of the OCBA; Ilana Ben-Ze’ev, dean of Students at WSU Law School; and Kevin Majewski, MSU College of Law.
‘Incubator’ program for law students hatched by the OCBA
by Tom Kirvan
Legal News
Less than a month after the presidential election, students from law schools across Michigan were invited to an inaugural event November 29.
While it didn’t pretend to match the glitz and glamor of the real inauguration, the “Incubator” program hosted in Ferndale by the Oakland County Bar Association did offer its own kind of glow for those in attendance, according to organizers.
“My expectations were exceeded in terms of attendance, the dynamics of the event, and the outpouring of support, help, and instant rapport between sponsoring attorneys and the students,” said Judy Cunningham, president of the OCBA. “The Incubator program fits neatly into our OCBA strategic plan where we envision our bar association as a safe harbor for Oakland County attorneys, right from the time they are in law school.”
The program, according to Cunningham, is designed to partner second year students from each of the five law schools in the state with distinguished Oakland County attorneys, who have agreed to pay their student membership in the OCBA as well as to act as a resource guide.
“We are targeting second year law students from Oakland County or those who intend to practice in Oakland County,” Cunningham said. “We want to show them the many programs that we offer and to encourage them to become involved in the bar.”
The get-together preceded the Novemberfest networking social sponsored by the New Lawyers Committee of the OCBA. The back-to-back events generated plenty of “buzz,” according to Lisa Stadig Elliot, executive director of the OCBA.
“Our law students were overwhelmingly positive about the experience, the opportunity to meet their sponsor — or another one if theirs wasn’t able to attend, and how welcome they were made to feel,” Stadig Elliot said.
As an example, Cunningham noted that Joe Papelian, a past president of the Oakland County Bar Foundation and deputy general counsel for litigation at Delphi, “helped a student that he is not even sponsoring” as an OCBA member.
“She was interested in immigration law, and Joe spoke with her — his student couldn’t make it to the event — and he put her in contact with an attorney he knows who’s been practicing immigration law for 25 years,” Cunningham related. “So we had results from our event that we’d hope for but really didn’t know how it would turn out. I was very pleased.”
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