Maureen Cohon's client was adamant: He wanted the person he loved to jointly own the property they shared, to be named in his will and to be protected by a partnership agreement.

The Thinkers
This monthly series will highlight people from Western Pennsylvania who are on the forefront of new ideas in their fields.

---

Tony Tye, Post-Gazette Name: Maureen B. Cohon Age: 58 Position: Chair, Nontraditional Couples and Families Practice Group, Buchanan Ingersoll PC. Education: Associate degree, Cleveland State University, 1967; bachelor's degree in sociology, University of Baltimore, 1979; law degree, University of Baltimore, 1982. Previous positions: Private practice, New Haven, Conn., 1993-98; partner, Wartzman, Omansky, Blibaum & Simons, P.A., Towson, Md., 1981-92. Professional memberships: American, Pennsylvania and Allegheny County bar associations; Mediation Council of Western Pennsylvania; Association for Conflict Resolution. The Series Click here to view other installments in this continuing series.

They were all common legal requests, with one significant twist -- the couple was gay, and they had gone to Mrs. Cohon for a reason.

Maureen Cohon heads Buchanan Ingersoll PC's Nontraditional Couples and Families practice group, which specializes in doing legal work for gay and lesbian couples, as well as unmarried heterosexual partners.

Cities with large concentrations of gay and lesbian couples have had customized legal practices for years, but the Buchanan Ingersoll group is a relative newcomer to the field.

Many of the tasks that Mrs. Cohon and her fellow attorneys carry out, such as titling property or writing wills, are routine. But they take on great importance for couples who can't acquire the automatic rights that come with marriage.

Only three states, Vermont, Connecticut and Massachusetts, permit civil unions or marriages of gays and lesbians. Forty-three states, including Pennsylvania, ban gay marriage, and several approved constitutional amendments to that effect in 2004.

Gary J. Gates, a Johnstown native and author of "The Gay and Lesbian Atlas," said specialty law practices like Buchanan Ingersoll's are "critically important while many of the rights for gays and lesbians are still being established around the nation. In the absence of marriage, the only route to get many of the protections is various kinds of legal agreements."

The clientele comprises a significant subgroup in the population. The U.S. Census counted 594,391 same-sex couples nationwide in 2000, including 3,693 in the six-county Pittsburgh region.

Mrs. Cohon, the wife of Carnegie Mellon University President Jared Cohon, said her firm's nontraditional couples practice began quietly when a friend in a gay relationship asked her about guardianship for a child and drafting a will.

After eight months of talking to people in the gay and lesbian community to make sure there was a demand for such services, Buchanan Ingersoll launched the practice in 2002.

There were just four clients that first year. Two years later, there were about 40, "and it just goes up every year," Mrs. Cohon said.

While Pennsylvania is not known as a legally progressive state for gays and lesbians, there is one area where it's very liberal -- adoption.

Only 10 states and the District of Columbia have statewide laws permitting both partners in gay and lesbian relationships to adopt a child, according to the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a gay rights organization.

Pennsylvania joined that group in 2002 when the state Supreme Court ruled that "there is no language in the Adoption Act precluding two unmarried same-sex partners (or unmarried heterosexual partners) from adopting a child who has no legal parents."

After that unanimous decision, there was a surge of same-sex-couple adoptions in Pittsburgh and other parts of the state. The number has tailed off since, but Mrs. Cohon suggested that "if couples want to adopt they do it sooner rather than later," because some state legislators are pushing to limit adoptions to married couples.

Another key issue for gay and lesbian couples, Mrs. Cohon said, are health proxies -- legal agreements that give one partner the power to make health decisions if the other one becomes critically ill.

Many hospitals won't allow an unmarried partner to visit, let alone make important decisions, without such a proxy, she said. Gays and lesbians around the nation have sometimes been unable to see longtime partners before they died, barred by relatives who never accepted their relationships.

Wills are important for similar reasons.

They can insure that a partner will inherit property or become guardian of a child if there wasn't a joint adoption. Mrs. Cohon also advises couples to draft separate legal agreements giving each other the power to make funeral and burial arrangements.

By far the most complicated legal issue facing gay and lesbian couples is a domestic partnership agreement.

Mrs. Cohon describes these as "very similar to prenuptial agreements -- except there are no nuptials" -- a line that often gets a knowing laugh from gay and lesbian audiences at seminars she conducts.

The agreements can be as intricate as couples want them to be, she said.

"They can deal with the issue of contributions to living expenses and who will take care of what. Is there going to be a joint credit card, and who's going to use the card and for what? There may be property that a partner came into the relationship with that he would like to keep separate; there might be antiques or heirlooms; or there might be a family business that is supposed to go to a sister or a brother or a child."

Just as in prenuptial agreements, which often are drafted for affluent couples, there also is the difficult issue of specifying what happens if the relationship ends.

"It's very hard for couples to deal with this because it's like saying they don't believe they'll stay together. Nobody wants to think that their relationship will terminate," she said.

But if that were to happen, she tells gay and lesbian couples, the worst thing would be to fight over property or children in court.

A domestic partnership agreement, which can cost between $1,500 and $4,000 to draft, is designed to avoid that. As Mrs. Cohon tells her clients, "you need to determine what you're going to do while you're still happy."

Sometimes, she said, the agreements can be a way for one partner to show how much she cares for the other one.

"I had one client who came to me and said, 'I want you to draw up an agreement that if we break up, everything is to be split 50-50, and I don't want to hear any arguments against that.

'Before I met her,' the client said of her partner, 'I wasn't able to concentrate on my job the way I should have, but since I've become her partner, she is doing everything for me so that I can work for this large company. I can travel when I need to -- without her, I would not have any of these assets and I want her to have half.'"

Maureen Cohon knows something about long-term relationships -- she and Jared have been married 38 years.

She had a drawn-out journey toward the legal profession. She and her husband married when both were sophomores at Cleveland State University, and she then worked as a legal secretary and attended classes part-time, taking 12 more years to earn her undergraduate degree in sociology. When she went to law school at the University of Baltimore, it was the first time she had attended classes full-time.

While she is circumspect on her personal views of gay and lesbian rights, Mrs. Cohon acknowledged that she had many conversations with her husband before Carnegie Mellon agreed to provide same-sex health benefits to its employees in 2000, but said her current law practice "wasn't even a twinkle in my eye when we talked about those issues."

She said that she can't predict what legal rights gay and lesbian couples will enjoy in the future, but does think younger generations are more open-minded on the issue.

For her 35-year-old daughter and her daughter's friends, she said, gay and lesbian relationships "are so accepted it isn't even an issue. The younger generation doesn't seem to differentiate between blacks and whites and gays and heterosexuals. They seem to be a very accepting generation."

---

Correction/Clarification: (Published March 2, 2006) Connecticut permits civil unions for gay and lesbian couples. This article on gay and lesbian legal issues as orginially published in Feb. 27, 2006 editions failed to include the state among those that have gay marriages or civil unions.