PHOTO COURTESY OF JOSEPH MUHA AND WMU-COOLEY LAW SCHOOL
by Cynthia Price
Legal News
Some go through law school right out of college in an educational arc that results in graduation three years later with a Juris Doctor. Others come to the law later in life, and sometimes encounter bumps along the road to graduation.
Joseph Muha falls into the second category.
The 2015 Distinguished Student Award winner made it to Western Michigan University-Cooley Law School graduation after a path that included a more-than-full-time job in the pharmacy field and a brush with personal tragedy.
Muha received his bachelor’s degree in Pharmacy at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and, 16 years later, his Master’s in Business Administration from Arkansas’s Webster University, where he had a 4.0 GPA and received the Distinguished Graduate Award.
His career as a pharmacist led almost immediately to management positions. After being promoted by a Maryland firm to a job supervising 14 pharmacy managers at the district level, Muha moved into a successful career with Wal-Mart.
Both of his initial positions there had little to do with his pharmacist degree. He was first an Operations Coordinator, working on a number of special projects, and then regional manager of Tire and Lube Express, utilizing his supervisory and personnel development skills.
His next three years at Wal-Mart turned his focus back to the pharmaceutical field. He served as a Pharmacy Loss Prevention Coordinator, resulting in a great degree of success that included quadrupling loss detection. He was named Specialty Group loss Prevention Coordinator of the Year in 2005, and published an article in Loss Prevention magazine on drug diversion in 2006.
He also developed relationships with governmental agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Agency.
After stepping back from pharmacy work again as a buyer of video games and computer software for Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club, Muha switched to Meijer. There he became a buyer of generic prescription drugs with responsibility for profit and loss of 80% of all prescription drugs.
Then, he decided he wanted to go to law school.
Drawn to WMU-Cooley because of its flexibility in terms of nights and weekend classes — he was still working 50 to 60 hours a week — Muha was encouraged to attend by Professor Steve Dulan, who was profiled in an article about a gun rights panel in the Dec. 9, 2015, Grand Rapids Legal News.
“He’s the reason I went to Cooley,” Muha says. “I cannot say enough wonderful things about Steve Dulan. He helped me get my scholarship, gave me encouragement outside of class, right up until now.”
But at the end of Muha’s first year, he ran into a major and potentially devastating roadblock. His wife and the mother of his now-ten-year-old daughter was diagnosed with a life-threatening cancer and had to have extensive treatment.
“I remember going to Dean Miller at the end of my first year, telling him I needed some time off ... and he was the most amazing person to me and my family,” Muha says, his voice choked with emotion. “He made sure when I was able to get back into class that Cooley was there for me. I’ll never forget that. You don’t meet people like that every day.
“I want to find a way to give back in some way, to repay Cooley for everything they’ve done for me and my family. I don’t know what form that might take, maybe teaching as an adjunct. I’m not sure, but it was just incredibly amazing.”
During the same period he was on hiatus from WMU-Cooley, his daughter had to undergo surgery for a perforated ulcer. “That was really a rough patch. But there’s no one like Nelson Miller, and I’ve never been involved with anything more supportive than Cooley. Of course, my daughter was amazing too.”
And his wife? “She beat it back. It’s been three years, and she’s doing way better than we could ever have hoped for.”
At the same time, it is possible her cancer may return, but knowing all he knows about pharmaceuticals, Muha has hope there may be advances to rid her of the disease for good.
Though he is open to other avenues, Muha would like to see that knowledge turned into a career as an Intellectual Property lawyer in the drug and pharmaceutical field. To that end, he is pursuing his Master of Legal Letters in Intellectual Property.
Once again, Muha praises Cooley. “I did take quite a few IP classes in the J.D. Program, and I was able to take nine credits that count towards the LLM, which works really well,”
he says.
One of his regrets, however, is that he was not able to do an internship in the IP field. He made an agreement with an IP lawyer, but there was not enough work to keep him busy.
Muha would prefer to obtain a position at a larger firm, in part because he will be moving from a lucrative field where he has a lot of experience to one he is just beginning, and he fears that starting his own firm would make that worse. Even though he made the switch back to being a straightforward pharmacist at a Meijer store so he could devote time to studying for the bar, that is still true.
“Pharmaceutical buyers and pharmacists are paid really well. Newly minted lawyers not so much,” he comments with a laugh.
And, he notes, his many established relationships with pharma companies would help him bring in clients to benefit both his own practice and the firm’s client base.
He hopes to turn his expertise in the overall landscape of pharmaceuticals to specializing in the newly expanded area of IP law around “biosimilars,” drugs that are structured like existing patented drugs but have molecular differences, though they cannot be sold until the existing patents expire. Since different countries regulate biosimilars, also called follow-on biologics, differently, there is plenty of work for attorneys.
“This is a really exciting time,” Muha says. “There’s a multi-billion dollar market, and these drugs cure horrible diseases. The C suite people at drug companies are all investing heavily,” he says, noting that it was the Affordable Care Act that opened up pathways for such drugs.
“Hatch Waxman created the generic drug market, this will create similar opportunities,” he comments.
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