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Rich Cohn first picked up a guitar when he was 10, and he will tell you that playing music most of his life has fundamentally influenced how he thinks as an attorney.
“Music helps you have your mind organized on things. It has a built-in logic to it,” he says. “To me, the way I look at a document or the way I draft a lease has the same kind of organizational process as music.”
Cohn is a founding shareholder of Earp Cohn P.C., a regional law firm with offices in Cherry Hill, New Jersey and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that he formed with partner Tom Earp and two other attorneys in 1991 after deciding a “big firm” culture didn’t suit his sensibilities.
His practice centers around complex commercial real estate transactions, a field of law he discovered he had a penchant for his first year at American University’s Washington College of Law.
“I was one of the few people I knew who really understood the rule against perpetuities,” he says.
Cohn tells the story of sitting in a theater in 1981 watching the movie “Body Heat,” which stars William Hurt as a less-than-proficient Florida attorney who becomes involved with a wealthy man’s wife, played by a seductive Kathleen Turner, who is scheming to murder her husband. A critical plot point involves the Hurt character misinterpreting the rule against perpetuities, which allows Turner to inherit her husband’s fortune.
“I knew he was going to screw up the rule against perpetuities,” says Cohn, laughing. “I said, ‘I see what she’s doing. She’s setting him up.’”
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