This upcoming semester may be Ross Cooper’s first as a full-time management professor at the Kogod School of Business, but he’s no stranger to the community. His wife and father-in-law are Kogod alumni, and he’s taught courses as an adjunct professor since 2018 while maintaining his role at Beacon Building Products. In that time, he’s made meaningful connections with colleagues and students; last semester, in fact he received a Best Professor Award—an honor selected by Kogod students to recognize faculty that have helped them in their academic careers. The award is a testament to the lasting relationships that Cooper has formed with his students.
“We’ve developed a neat connection between Beacon and Kogod, and we’ve hired many students over the years,” he explained. “I still play golf with a former star student of mine who’s currently in his third year as a junior marketing executive at Beacon—someday, he could be our VP of marketing.”
Cooper has fostered the relationship between Kogod and Beacon for years by leading an internship program that places Kogod students throughout the company. Previous interns have worked in marketing, human resources, and business law and have taken full advantage of the opportunity to develop their skills and interests in a supportive and hands-on setting.
Beacon is a Fortune 500 company that specializes in distributing construction materials, and Cooper is wrapping up his current role as their special advisor for business strategy. Though he has worked for them full-time since 2006, their relationship goes back even further to 1995; at the time, Cooper was a lawyer that Beacon brought on to represent their trade association. When Beacon went public ten years later, Cooper became their in-house counsel, handling the legal side of everything from mergers and acquisitions to SEC reporting and corporate governance.
“Over those sixteen years, we completed nearly fifty acquisitions worth around four and a half billion dollars,” he recalled. “I really had an opportunity over those years to develop a broad base in business law.”
Beyond furthering his understanding of mergers and acquisitions, spending nearly thirty years with Beacon also allowed Cooper to see how the intricacies of business law changed with the landscape. As the Internet became more relevant to his work, the scope of information that could be gathered for legal cases ballooned—as did the cost of gathering that information.
“You can have a relatively small case, but if it involves a tremendous amount of data, just searching through it all to find what might be relevant to the case can be a very time-consuming and expensive process,” he explained.