PHOTO: Elianel Clinton

Then something extraordinary happened: At a cocktail party in 2009, at age 57, he told a fellow guest that he’d happily go to law school if he could skip the LSAT. The guest turned out to be a dean at New York Law School, who sought an American Bar Association (ABA) waiver for Cohen to do just that. “I loved it,” he says of the experience. “It made me 20 years younger. I had a major advantage because I already knew how the world worked. Also, my stakes were lower—if I didn’t pass the bar, I could go back to my old career.”

But pass he did, after which he worked for a top trial lawyer, then started his own boutique litigation firm, Pollock Cohen LLP (with former New York assistant attorney general Adam Pollock), which specializes in whistleblower, class action, and public impact law. Some of the firm’s biggest suits include one on behalf of a quarter-million New York City municipal retirees fighting a Medicare Advantage plan; another representing a medical center’s pursuit of state funding for serving disproportionately poor patients; and a splashy case representing voiceover actors—including Scarlett Johansson—who claim tech company Lovo cloned and sold their voices without permission or compensation.

Having upshifted his work life at an age when many are downshifting, Cohen says the change has been “energizing. I was getting more obnoxious and set in my ways, and this shook up everything because I had to be more conscious of my behavior, my time, what I wanted to do.” 

Every day, he adds, “I wake up not knowing what the next challenge is going to be. I know I’ll screw some things up—but I’m having fun doing it.”