Does the name Inez Milholland mean anything to you? Only a few people now know who she is and what she did. One of them is Seattle attorney Jeff Coopersmith.
In fact, in Coopersmith’s house, outside the bedroom where his two young daughters sleep, is a poster of Inez Milholland. She sits atop a huge white horse, dressed in white robes, proudly carrying a white banner that says, “Vote for Women.” The poster celebrates the Suffrage Parade that she led in Washington, D.C. in March 1913, one day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration.
The poster, one of the few in existence, hangs on that wall in Coopersmith’s house for good reason, he says. “I want my daughters to learn from the example Inez set. Only I don’t want them to fall into obscurity. I want them to understand the importance of knowing and telling people’s stories, stories that too often don’t get told.”
Coopersmith’s commitment to getting out the “real story” helps explain why he created a law firm with a niche practice unfamiliar to most lawyers: He represents patients, physicians and hospitals in their dealings with health insurers. Compared to health insurers, Coopersmith’s clients have a difficult time getting their stories told.
What’s the source of Coopersmith’s commitment? He grew up in the nation’s capital in the late ’60s. Demonstrations protesting the Vietnam War were raging and Coopersmith was unwilling to be an idle spectator: He wore a sandwich board almost as big as he was. On one side: “What do we want? Peace.” On the other: “When do we want it? Now.”
Coopersmith also witnessed the riots in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. “I still remember the acrid smoke,” he recalls. “Even at a young age I saw how desperate people were and how some people didn’t have the same rights that others did. There was a sense of possibility and promise. People believed that mass demonstrations could change society. Later I realized demonstrations aren’t enough. It also takes hard work and the ability to deal with people who disagree with your viewpoint.”
This realization, and a desire to generate change, evolved over time into the decision to become a lawyer.
But before law school there’s college, and Coopersmith went to one of the best: Princeton. The experience was exhilarating and illuminating, he says. “Here I was, a kid whose parents never went to college, sharing dorms and classrooms with the heirs to some of America’s oldest dynasties, such as the DuPonts and Fords. At first I was intimidated. And, of course, having that head start helps a lot. Far too much. But in this country ability and work ethic still matter, too.”
Coopersmith graduated from Princeton in 1982 with a degree in politics and humanistic studies. Asked for an explanation, Coopersmith admits he designed the dual major “to apply whatever ingenuity I had to avoid the sciences.”
Soon after graduation, Coopersmith went to work for a newly elected Congressman, Gary Ackerman, from Queens, New York. Ackerman came from an unconventional background for a member of Congress: the son of a taxi driver, he was a school teacher who grew up in a housing project.
In Rep. Ackerman’s office, Coopersmith worked on a range of domestic issues, but it was healthcare that transcended them all. “Nothing is more personal than healthcare,” he says. “I will never forget the overcrowded corridors of New York hospitals teeming with people waiting to get the care they needed.”
After three years working for Rep. Ackerman, whom he still sees on trips back to D.C., Coopersmith left to become a union organizer. He organized the first health care workers in Texas outside Houston.
As a union organizer, Coopersmith realized that it was imperative to know what one’s rights were. So off he went to the University of Wisconsin Law School. He found law school less stimulating than college. “The best part was the year that I spent in lieu of law school, when I worked for Judge Charles Richey,” a Nixon appointee on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Coopersmith admired Judge Richey for many reasons, including how he encouraged vigorous debate about how an opinion should be decided or worded. The debate would occasionally be resolved by having the judge point to his commission signed by the president granting him a lifetime appointment to the bench. “Son,” he’d say to Coopersmith, “when you get yourself one of these, we’ll decide it your way.”
In 1991, Coopersmith arrived in Seattle to work as a deputy prosecutor in the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. He only knew four people in Seattle then, but he loved the outdoors and sensed the city embraced newcomers.
Just five years later, Coopersmith ran for Congress and came within a few percentage points of winning. As Coopersmith puts it, “122,000 people wanted to send me far away, but 140,000 people preferred that I stay right here.” The campaign reinforced his commitment to work on healthcare. “Everywhere I went,” he says, “people were clamoring for help.”
Coopersmith went to work for the Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner, where he soon became chief counsel and director of enforcement. In that role, Coopersmith created the first systematic enforcement of the state’s insurance laws and negotiated a number of landmark agreements. One he’s particularly proud of involved an agreement — the first in the nation — compelling insurers to pay emergency room claims on a standard favorable to patients and doctors.
Jeff Gingold, who heads the health law practice at Lane Powell, represents insurance companies and often negotiated with Coopersmith. In one especially challenging matter, Gingold represented an international carrier that, through acquisitions, had inherited claims by Holocaust survivors and families of Holocaust victims.
“Jeff and I worked hard to find an approach that worked in everybody’s favor, creating a model that was later followed by New York and Florida,” Gingold recalls. Based on his many interactions with Coopersmith, says Gingold, “I have tremendous respect for his integrity.”
In the many cases he brought as chief counsel, Coopersmith noticed that the insurance companies were always ably represented, but that the patients who received the care, and the hospitals and physicians who provided the care, seldom had representation. So in 2001, he launched Coopersmith Health Law Group. The team has grown to include former regulators, insurance company executives, and hospital managers and attorneys.
They have generated or recovered millions of dollars for hospitals and doctors, and they successfully represented the Washington State Medical Association, helping it and its allies defeat Premera’s attempt to convert to a for-profit corporation. This was the largest health care case in state history and one that could have threatened doctors’ ability to see the uninsured and underinsured, had it been decided differently.
Coopersmith gets particular satisfaction from helping patients. He and his team have obtained care or coverage for patients with advanced forms of ovarian cancer, multiple myeloma and breast cancer, to cite just a few examples.
As important as results are, the approach is equally important to Coopersmith. “The simple thing would be to vilify insurers,” he says. “We work with them to produce solutions for our clients. We always have great respect for our counterparts’ knowledge and skill.”
Coopersmith’s commitment to helping people extends beyond clients. Consider what Nate Miles, director of state government and corporate affairs at Eli Lilly, says about his longtime friend’s involvement with the Northwest African American Museum. “When the museum needed leaders, Jeff joined the board and guided it as co-chair,” Miles says. “If not for Jeff, the museum would have had a much tougher time getting opened and staying opened.” Something else Miles admires about Coopersmith: “He doesn’t tout his accomplishments. ”
In addition to legal and community work, Coopersmith has a domestic life. It’s centered on his wife Lisa Erlanger, a family practice physician, and their daughters, ages 1 and 4. The couple first met briefly at a nonprofit’s fundraiser that Coopersmith was chairing. Soon after the event, a major donor kept trying to sit Coopersmith down for a brief conversation.
“I was afraid the donor was going to renege on a promised gift, so I kept avoiding him,” says Coopersmith. “Finally, he cornered me in an elevator and said, ‘If I don’t talk to you now, I’m going to be in big trouble with my wife.’ Now I was certain he was going to renege on the gift. Instead, all he wanted to know was whether I was interested in seeing Lisa again.”
Asked what made him decide to marry her, Coopersmith quips, “Most people probably think you should ask Lisa why she decided to marry me.”
The Inez Milholland poster isn’t Coopersmith’s only remnant of American history. He is an avid collector, with fugitive slave narratives, Civil War recruitment broadsides, and contemporaneous accounts of everything from labor strikes to barn-raisings.
His explanation: “I guess it goes back to my childhood, when I decided I wanted to make sure the full story is told. I’m always looking for pieces of history that help keep alive important stories, like the one about Inez and the Suffrage movement.”
Which aptly sums up what Coopersmith still strives to do today.
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