Grounded by an injury, Army pilot takes flight toward a legal career

Shawn Coffy, a second-year student at The University of Akron School of Law, never thought about being a lawyer until he was almost 30.

As a boy, he watched C-130 military transports fly training missions over the Camp Ravenna Joint Military Training Center near his home in Ravenna, Ohio, dreaming of becoming a pilot.

Shawn Coffy

To realize that dream, Coffy went to Kent State University and earned his Bachelor of Science in Aeronautics. However, he explained, because it is almost impossible to get a pilot job coming out of college unless you have a lot of money to pay for additional flying time, he needed to find another job first.

Through a connection he had made working during summers at a state park, Coffy was hired as a law enforcement officer with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) after completing training at the Ohio Police Academy at Kent State. He hoped that a couple years at ODNR might provide a path to a career in law enforcement aviation. When that plan didn’t seem to be working out, he applied to the U.S. Army Warrant Officer Flight Training Program and was accepted.

Dream job dashed

After boot camp and Warrant Officer Candidate School, Coffy completed the initial 10-month flight training program and then received specialized training to fly the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, the Army’s primary medium-lift utility transport and air assault aircraft.

He loved his job flying the Black Hawk, and his future seemed set. In another few months, his initial three-year active-duty contract would be complete, and he would sign up for another six years.

Then it all came crashing down. Through no fault of his own, Coffy was in a serious accident while on duty that required multiple surgeries and a long recuperation. The Army had gone into cutback mode, he explained, and he was a guy who was not going to be able to do his job for a while. The Army gave him his medical discharge. He was devastated.

The good news was that the government would pay for vocational rehabilitation and employment assistance. The bad news was that any training or degree had to be for something other than law enforcement or aviation.  

After fruitless months spent exploring different master’s programs and other options, Coffy’s vocational counselor asked him if he had ever considered law school.

”Law was actually my last choice at that point,” Coffy said.

Legal connections

Yet, the more he thought about it, he realized that he had interacted with lawyers, prosecutors and judges every day when he was with ODNR. As a state law enforcement officer, he had done volunteer work with the Fraternal Order of Police and the Buckeye State Sheriffs’ Association, gathering evidence and doing legal research for labor arbitration hearings. He usually sat at the table with the lawyer in the hearings.

“As I talked to the judges and lawyers I’d known about going into law, it became a huge interest,” he said. “In a roundabout way, it was almost as if I’d always wanted to be a lawyer. I would be able to continue doing what I always wanted to do—serving people—but I’d be doing it as a lawyer.”

Having spent so much time looking into other options, he found he only had a few months left under the government program’s 180-day timeframe to study for and take the LSAT exam, apply to schools, get accepted and enroll. Akron Law’s Spring Start option—which allows students to begin in the spring rather than fall semester—proved a lifesaver.

Ups and downs

“I was super excited when I got accepted,” Coffy said. “But I’d been removed from academics for a while. When I got my first assignments a few weeks before classes started, I was like, What?! You mean all this is due on Day 1? I haven’t even started yet, and I already have 75-100 pages to read for each class. There are court cases from the 1800s that I don’t even understand the first sentence of. I didn’t know whether I was going to get through it.

“The first semester was a huge roller coaster of ups and downs that flew by. I’d go talk to Alecia (Bencze, assistant director of career services and student advising) every couple of weeks and tell her, ‘I think you guys made a mistake accepting me.’ She kept reassuring that I’d get through it, that almost everyone has doubts starting out in law school.”

He was also reassured by one of his professors, who told him the research shows that while veterans tend to struggle in law school and get through with average grades, their success rate is extremely high as far as passing the bar and getting a good job.

“Hearing that was a huge relief for me,” Coffy said.

Another professor, who had Coffy in class during that first semester, doesn’t remember a self-doubting student.

“I found Shawn to be a very mature, grounded person who was purposeful in his studies and in pursuit of his law degree,” said Professor Dana K. Cole. “He has an intellectual curiosity that you hope for.

“To get to know someone as well as I got to know Shawn in that class was somewhat unusual, because I taught two sections of Criminal Law that semester with 75 students in each section. He stood out because of his personality and how engaged he was, both in class and outside of class, whether he was dropping by my office or we were talking in the hallway. He’s going to be a great lawyer.”

Credit the military training

Looking back, Coffy said, “I’m extremely happy with how my first year turned out. I think the way I was able to focus is the only way I passed. I relate that directly back to the military. When you get shipped out, you don’t look at your entire 12-month deployment all at once. You take it as it comes. A day at a time. One exam at a time.

“I would think about some of the critical missions I flew as a pilot where I had six people in the back whose lives depended on me. You just commit and push through. [By comparison], falling on your face when a professor cold-calls you in class is just not that big a deal.”

Not surprisingly, labor law was Coffy’s initial thought in terms of a legal career because of his law enforcement experience.

“But I am not going to narrow it to that at this point,” he said. “I’ve got more than a year left. Maybe I’ll meet more people and find a completely different career path.”

One intriguing option he learned about is aviation law. The typical aviation lawyer is a pilot who went to law school after retiring, a professor told him.

“They have five to ten years left. At your age, you’d be in a unique position. You could offer a law firm 30 years,” Coffy recalled the professor telling him.

“I still miss flying a helicopter every day,” said Coffy. “In my mind, when I go through classes, I’m still flying the helicopter. I know I’ll never be able to work as a pilot, but maybe as an aviation lawyer, I’ll be able to afford to fly as a hobby.”

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