Hi everyone, I’m Michael H. Cohen, founding attorney of the Cohen Healthcare Law Group. We help healthcare industry clients navigate healthcare and FDA legal issues so you can launch, or scale and grow, your health and wellness product or service.

At a surface level this is a story of professional development whose roots go deep into my childhood, the fact that I’m I healthcare lawyer.

When I grew up my mom was a doctor, and a Medical school professor specializing in endocrinology. She would come home with stories about medical cases that she had solved, diagnosis she’s made, and patients she had helped. She was also recipient of numerous NIH grants, publishing ground-breaking scientific articles and books on diabetes research, and she had book titles such as “The Polyol Pathway.”

I remember when I was a kid, I would repeat some of the long words I heard at the dinner table, such as “hydroxylysine.” That’s a really great one for a kid to use to impress his parent’s guests.

One time I accompanied my mom on rounds at the hospital. One of the procedures that I was watching – it may have been a blood draw – it made me kind of faint. The nurses had to come and brought me orange juice to bring back my blood pressure. So, it looked like I might not make it into medicine.

Meanwhile, My Dad was in finance and business. When I was a teen, he left a big corporate job for a start-up that was aimed on providing products that would help Americans to get through what we used to call the energy crisis. Later he left Michigan for Wall Street to reinvent himself as a risk arbitrageur.

When I was a kid, I studied Talmud so when it came time to graduate study, law seemed like a logical choice. We were always taught in my family to value social justice and government seemed like a potentially fruitful path for me. I didn’t end up running for congress.

What I do today really reflects the sum of my influences. But there is something equally Deep that has drawn me too.

So, what does our law firm do?

We provide legal strategies and solutions to businesses that accelerate Health and wellness.

Our mission statement since the twentieth century says, we focus on Health and wellness “for the alleviation of suffering, the regeneration of spirit, and the endless unfolding of the human heart.”

Our work cuts a really broader swath than advising on some super narrow niche of healthcare and FDA law. We’re fairly synergistic.

For me, broadly stated and simply, I minister through legal advice, whether it’s through me or the firm.

The Why here goes back to August 1997. I happened to be on summer staff at a meditation center in New York, and I was a passenger in a vehicle, when a drunk driver in an oncoming car swerved into us and smashed us into the ditch.

The next thing I knew was being hoisted into an ambulance on a stretcher.

Three days before that accident, I had a vision in meditation. I saw my meditation teacher tearing her garment. It’s this Jewish tradition of mourning that happens when a loved one dies. And I heard these words: “that which has been known as Michael H Cohen….” (rip)

And i was asked a profound question by the divine, a distinctly cosmic voice that I heard resonating everywhere.

“What is the purpose of your existence.”

Instinctively (in meditation) my mind answered: “service to God, service to the planet.”

And these words guided me for so many years that I put them in a placard and put it above my desk. My personal mantra – the reason that my life was spared was to come back and be of service.

So, I emerged from the accident with some minor soft tissue injuries. I came back in one piece; I came back to the meditation. I saw myself traveling through a tunnel of light and connecting with various beings. There were scrolls showing me blueprints of my life and old connections are being severed, other connections are being mended, others restored and made. So, this was all basically what was in my mind when I was trying to figure out what to do.

I‘ve managed to somehow integrate the near-death experience into my professional and personal life.

Hasn’t really been easy, and the process still goes on. At times I’ve been torn between the precision and structure that’s required for legal and analytical thinking, and then there’s on the other hand, the archetype of the compassionate healer in. So, putting these two together has been my own puzzle.

I would say that one fruit, not the only fruit of this practice, has been the firm. The people get drawn to the firm, the way we talk to each other, the way that we reflect, how we style our advice, and I see it all as elevating consciousness by walking a path of service through professional practice.

It’s been a pleasure sharing with you a little tidbit. It’s also in my book, the recent one is called Your Company’s Excellent Healthcare Legal Adventure.

So, we look forward to hearing from you, we look forward to talking to you, and we look forward to connecting with you soon.