Published in 2024 Colorado Super Lawyers magazine
By Jessica Glynn on February 29, 2024
When Patricia Cooper first became involved with the group Adoptees in Search, it had nothing to do with her family law practice or her prior position as Chair of the Family Law Section of the Colorado Bar Association.
It was personal.
She’d been trying to find her own biological mother, and she just wanted to talk to other adoptees about what it was like to navigate the infuriating secrecy.
“It became a personal obsession,” she says of her quest to find her birth mom. “It’s very hard to explain to people what it feels like to be an adoptee and to not have that fundamental piece of information about yourself. It feels like a hole in your being that, no matter how positive and wonderful your life has been, is still there, and the only thing that can fill that void is knowledge.
“I felt strongly about the fact that I couldn’t access my records in Indiana,” Cooper says. “Actually, I felt pretty angry.”
Sitting in the downtown Denver conference room of Cooper Ramp Cage Bucar Lewis, she laughs a little as she says this. Cooper, who goes by Trish, is unassuming in jeans and a high-neck leopard print blouse, red-framed glasses on top her head. Even though she’s known for her trial skills, honed as a Manhattan prosecutor and applied over the last 22 years in sometimes-contentious, high net worth divorces in Colorado, she’s not the kind of lawyer anyone would describe as angry.
“She has a way about her and her voice that is very calming,” says Erica Kemmerley of Sherr Puttmann Akins Lamb, who had gotten Cooper on the phone at 8 the previous night to reassure a client. “My client was really struggling yesterday, and Trish’s words of wisdom and her calmness helped bring the client back to the table to move forward in that case. She has an amazing comforting style that’s coming from a place of knowledge.”
It didn’t take Adoptees in Search’s president, Rich Uhrlaub, long to realize what an asset Cooper could be to the group’s advocacy work. The organization had been lobbying since its inception in 1975 for access to adoption records, and by 2013, when SB-14-051 was introduced, he’d fine-tuned his strategy to focus on addressing a broad range of stakeholders’ concerns and legal questions.
“Trish was part of that strategy,” he says. “She testified in support of the bill. I still remember it like it was yesterday. At the time she was the president of the Family Law Bar, and just saying those words you could see them all perk up, that this isn’t a disgruntled activist. Her presence alone made a big difference that really lent credibility to our issue.”
Passed in 2014, the law expands access to records like birth certificates, affecting an estimated 180,000 records. It set a precedent for other states, 33 of which have incremental laws, and 15 of which have unrestricted access for adoptees, says Urlaub, whose organization is now called Adoption Search Resource Connection. “We’ve hit a tipping point,” he says, “but the battle rages on.”
“Colorado was on the forefront of a movement,” Cooper says. “It’s something I’m most proud of because I was able to take my understanding of the law and my personal insight into what it felt like to be in that position. Hopefully that was helpful in some way.”
As a Colorado law, it did not affect her own records back in Indiana, where she eventually hired a confidential intermediary to find her birth mother—who it turned out had also wanted to find her, but could not access the information.
Cooper still feels strongly she shouldn’t have had to go that route. “It’s your truth. It’s your existence,” she says. “My parents are wonderful human beings, but that wound could not be healed until I had that information.”
Cooper grew up in rural southern Indiana. Her parents adopted her as an infant after their third child died young of cystic fibrosis; they didn’t want to risk passing the gene to another baby. Her mom was a homemaker, and her dad was a “car man” for the railroad, often living out of a truck camper wherever the work was that week. “My dad worked harder than anybody I know,” she says.
After high school, Cooper attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. It was her first time on the East Coast, and she was the first person in her family to attend college. Some of her new friends had lawyers in their families and she was interested in hearing about their careers, so she decided to spend time as a paralegal to see if she might like the law.
Covington & Burling (now Covington) in D.C. had a paralegal hiring pipeline with a minimum two-year commitment for recent college graduates, some of whom would get the opportunity to staff a neighborhood legal services program. “I worked there directly with clients who had been denied disability, helping them put together appropriate evidence to appeal those decisions,” she says. “That experience was a turning point.”
After graduating from the University of Virginia School of Law, Cooper began her career at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office as an Assistant District Attorney.
“It was an amazing place to learn how to be a trial attorney, where you were fully supported the whole time,” she says. “They would bring in newly minted law school graduates from many different law schools. There was tremendous diversity—socioeconomically, ethnically, racially—and you’re all eager, excited new lawyers who want to do good in the world.”
The intake area to which Cooper and the other rookies were assigned spanned a long hallway with tiny, windowless offices on each side, where 10 to 15 ADAs were crammed two to an office, all talking to police officers at the same time—using new video communication technology. A more senior ADA would supervise, answering questions about whether or not to charge or what else needed investigation. When the video would glitch, which was often, they put their heads down to call on landlines, straining to hear while they hunched over their notepads—which was how Cooper missed Brad Pitt on the day he peeked into her office on a tour to research a role.
“That office was one of my fondest early law practice memories,” she says. “There was an incredible collegiality and camaraderie among all the lawyers there. Anybody who has been through that office, we all still have that bond of knowing what it was like to work there.”
That includes her husband, criminal defense attorney Andres Guevara, whom Cooper met as a fellow first year ADA, the back of his desk chair bumping up against hers in their tiny office.
“I know I’m incredibly biased, but I wish you could have seen what I saw to convey the absolute respect I have for her not only as a person but as a lawyer,” Guevara says. “She’s the most prepared attorney I’ve ever seen.”
In an early case, a defendant that Cooper had charged with misdemeanor harassment pleaded guilty and was released by the judge pending commencement of a 30-day jail sentence. The man then shot and killed his grandmother and a responding officer before barricading himself in his home and taking his own life, which led to a review of everything that had been done in the prior case. “Thankfully, I had been particularly detailed in my case notes and case follow-up, and as I recall, had managed to get a reasonable plea deal despite a highly uncooperative victim and the likelihood of eventual dismissal if I could not secure the plea,” Cooper says. “That was not something that I ever wanted to experience as a brand-new attorney, but I definitely learned some valuable lessons from it.”
“Imagine being totally new to the practice of law and having them review her work and realize everything was right,” Guevara says. “If I had someone review my files when I was still learning I don’t think anyone would look at me and say this is perfect. But that detail orientation is how she’s always done her work.”
Within a couple of years, Cooper was handling felonies, jury trials and grand jury presentations.
One of her first trials, which she second-chaired, involved a home invasion robbery in which a family was held hostage for several hours. The 14-year-old daughter gave compelling testimony. “I was really blown away by her courage,” Cooper says. “She had to face one of the defendants and was able to testify so articulately and with an incredible memory for the detail of the events, despite that obvious trauma that she suffered. Helping victims like that find some path forward, to get some measure of justice for what they had been through—it felt very fulfilling for the family to see the system working.”
Cooper suffered setbacks too, such as a grand jury’s decision not to indict the alleged perpetrator of an assault outside a club in which a woman was slashed by a broken beer bottle.
“It was a learning experience for me where maybe justice is not being served, but the system is doing what it is designed to do,” she says. “There is a group of citizens there who’ve been empaneled on a grand jury, and you’ve put the best case you can forward, and at the end of the day, they decide whether that goes forward as a felony or not. It’s hard. It’s a tough pill to swallow when you believe the victim, and you feel this defendant is getting away with having committed this felony, but it’s a lesson that’s important for all lawyers to learn.”
Those skills still serve her now. “We were taught to view cases and evidence in a critical way,” she says. “There were cases we declined to prosecute if we thought the charge was not properly supported by the evidence.”
It was also fascinating to hear which details had resonated with jurors. That ability to consider multiple perspectives has proved valuable in family law.
“Nothing is black and white in families, in marriages,” Cooper says. “One of the best things we can do for our clients is maintain an objective eye because we can’t give good advice if we are not able to recognize that there are often two sides to everything. At the end of the day, what we should be looking to do is help people move on with their lives in the least damaging way possible for them, and especially for their children. I think being a criminal prosecutor and always looking at every facet of the case really helped in that transition to family law.”
That switch began with a rare vacation to the west after Cooper and Guevara were married in 1998. “We started thinking it might be really nice to go from intense urban city-living to a place where we hoped to find better work-life balance and ease of living, especially since we wanted to have children,” she says.
When they moved to Colorado, Cooper still didn’t have a job; she’d learned that it would be difficult to be hired as a lateral because most DA’s offices in Colorado assigned their new hires to misdemeanors, so it could be years before she was trying felonies again. She decided to take a leap of faith and look for something new. She landed at the Colorado Attorney General’s Office handling disciplinary matters in the Business and Licensing Section.
But she missed having direct contact with clients. She was looking for something that might meld that experience with her psychology background when she saw that the family law firm Gutterman Carlton & Heckenbach needed an associate.
Hired there in 2001, she quickly realized she had found her niche.
“One of the most fulfilling things that you can do in the practice of law is help somebody in one of the worst possible times of their life see that they can get through it—that things will be better for them on the other side of the process,” she says.
Denver District Court Judge Marie Moses was an associate with Cooper at Heckenbach Carlton. They briefly started their own practice in 2004 with Denise Cook, and Cooper spent 10 years with the Law Office of Stephen J. Harhal before re-joining Moses at Lass Moses Ramp & Cooper in 2018.
“We worked together three times. I wish there was a fourth,” says Moses, who was appointed to the bench in 2021. “She’s a complete pro when it comes to family law. She knows all the cases and all the issues, but she also just has an incredible ability to understand a situation. When it comes to family dynamics, she understands why people feel the way they do, why they’re doing what they’re doing.”
Moses saw those skills come into play in a case in which Cooper’s client was a victim of domestic violence that was difficult to prove. “There was some stalking behavior, some coercive control, some harassment, but it was all really subtle and designed to have plausible deniability, and Trish was able to figure out what was happening, document it and present it to the court in a way that made a judge—who was not particularly well educated in domestic violence and didn’t have a real nuanced understanding of domestic violence—understand what was going on and why it was so problematic.”
Moses adds: “She has outstanding trial skills and knows the rules of evidence inside and out, and I think a lot of that is because of her background as a prosecutor. When you’re a baby lawyer and in court all the time, these things become second nature.”
When Erica Kemmerley recently took on a contentious, high-asset divorce, Cooper was her first choice for co-counsel.
“I like working with her because of her significant trial experience,” she says. “I can’t even imagine what that case would have been like if I had not brought her on. She’s extremely intelligent and really has a mind for diving in and coming up with new ideas and arguments.”
Cooper’s wealth of knowledge also has a way of putting clients at ease. Dr. Elizabeth Crespi is a pediatric dentist who hired Cooper to navigate her complicated divorce, with issues in New York as well as Colorado, at a time when she worried for the future of her 8-month-old son and the business she’d built.
The case settled right before trial, for much more than Crespi was originally offered.
“She was absolutely stellar in court, and she gave me amazing advice,” Crespi says. “Everything she recommended panned out. She was very supportive in a situation where you feel so powerless and out of control. When there was a real opportunity for settlement prior, you don’t know: ‘Should I take it? Should I not?’ And she gave really sound advice where I felt confident, which helped me move forward and stay the course. She’s a strong, powerful female that I thought was a godsend.”
Jenny Wang had already gone through five attorneys when she hired Cooper to handle a custody dispute.
“I was going through domestic violence, and she was exactly what I needed as far as someone caring and nurturing to help me through a lot of fear,” Wang says. “She’s just very warm. She really genuinely cares for you as a person. I’ve had experiences with other attorneys where the interest level isn’t there. I can’t describe it, but you can tell if it’s genuine. That’s what I needed for my situation at that point in time to be successful on the stand.”
Cases ensuring a fair outcome for someone who has been victimized are some of her most gratifying—those and the familial adoptions Cooper’s facilitated when a stepparent or grandparent gets to make their parenting role official. “I will sometimes run into clients two or three years later, and it’s always great to see them doing well and to know that I played some small part in helping them get there, especially to know that the kids are doing well.”
Being a divorce lawyer has given Cooper perspective on her own family, not only in appreciating her husband, but also in lending herself grace as a parent of their two adult children, who are pursuing degrees and careers as artists in Rhode Island and Los Angeles.
“We’re all very hard on ourselves as parents,” she says. “I know I had a lot of guilt as a working parent about whether I was doing this right or that right. Having the opportunity to work with a lot of families and see all the different dynamics, I realize none of us are perfect, and that parenting can be very hard. Our kids are living in an era where it’s hard to be a kid, so it’s hard to be a parent because all we want is for our kids to be happy, and we beat ourselves up if we think our kids aren’t happy 100 percent of time. But this work shows me that’s normal. There’s no perfect parent. There’s no one right way to parent, and there are lots of kids who are incredibly resilient who can get through a lot.”
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