Josef D. Cooper, '64: 1938-2018
Josef Dean Cooper
After graduating from Oberlin College, where he met his first wife, Carol Donley, the mother of his oldest two children, Joe attended the University of Chicago Law School and received his J.D. in 1964. Phil Neal, then the Dean of the Law School, offered him a job as a staff attorney for the Coordinating Committee for Multiple Litigation of the United States Courts, provided he agree to shave off his beard. Although he lost his beard, he gained valuable experience in an area of law that he would pursue the rest of his life.
As staff attorney for the Committee, Joe worked alongside a group of federal judges designated by the Chief Justice to study the relatively new problem of multiple antitrust and consumer protection cases against the same defendants being filed in different district courts around the country. During this time, Joe participated in drafting the federal legislation that provided for all such cases to be brought together before a single judge for pre-trial proceedings, as well as the first edition of the Manual for Complex Litigation. In 1966, the Committee assigned him to serve as a Special Assistant to the Honorable Martin Pence of the District of Hawaii, who was presiding over the first pre-trial proceedings conducted under the newly enacted statute. Joe and Martin Pence formed a deep bond that lasted until the judge's death. Joe was a founder and an Advisory Committee member of the Judge Martin Pence Fellowship Fund, established at the judge's alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, to identify under-served students from Hawaii and provide them with access to the law school.
After several years in private practice in Chicago, Joe moved to San Francisco in 1973 to form an antitrust and class action practice with Francis O. Scarpulla. Although that firm dissolved in 1979, Joe and Fran enjoyed a life-long friendship. In 1991, Joe formed his current firm, Cooper & Kirkham, with his second wife, Tracy. Joe was listed in The Best Lawyers in America for more than 30 years. He is the past chairman of the Private Litigation Committee of the A.B.A.'s Antitrust Section, and as such, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on proposed antitrust legislation. He represented scores of individuals, governmental entities and corporations in class action lawsuits against defendants such as Microsoft, De Beers, LG and Samsung that returned billions of dollars in recovery to consumers and businesses throughout the United States and Canada. His clients have included Safeway, Inc., the Oakland Tribune, and the states of Nevada, Arizona and Oregon (Public Employees Pension Fund), among others.
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