Three Albany Law School Alumni City & State Magazine’s Albany 40 Under 40 List

Three Albany Law School alumni have been named to City & State magazine’s Albany 40 Under 40 list. 

John Ahearn III ’16, partner at Couch White, Michael Paulsen ’12, Counsel at Manatt, and Patrick Wildes ’16, Director of the Government Law Center were selected among the magazine’s top picks for rising stars in government and politics. 

“City & State’s Albany 40 Under 40 puts a spotlight on a cohort of young professionals who are shaking things up in the overlapping arenas of government, business, nonprofits, health care, labor, higher education and economic development,” the magazine wrote. 

John Ahearn III
Partner, Couch White

John Ahearn III’s first job as an attorney was for a firm in Orange County which represented the town of Goshen, where Legoland New York wanted to build its theme park, and intense community interest in the permitting process surprised him.

“Hundreds of people who were largely opposed came out,” he told the magazine. “They couldn’t hold the meetings at the town hall, so they moved it to the auditorium at the county’s emergency center.”

In 2021, Ahearn joined Couch White, where he has helped commercial developers and industrial businesses obtain air, mining and wetlands permits. He recently assisted an Albany developer in resolving litigation to get a stalled $13 million apartment project moving. He also worked on more than 300 renewable energy projects comprising 1 gigawatt of power.

This year, he’s tracking the governor’s efforts to reform New York’s State Environmental Quality Review Act, known as SEQRA.

“SEQRA is being used as a weapon to oppose developments that people don’t like and that’s not really the purpose of it,” he says.

Ahearn graduated from the College of Saint Rose in 2012 and specialized in environmental law at Albany Law School.

Now, he regularly represents businesses and industrial clients in areas such as solid waste, aggregates, wetlands, and mining before administrative agencies, including New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and local municipalities regarding permitting and enforcement matters.

But it was his experience remodeling buildings when he was growing up that set the foundation for this path, he told City & State. 

“Hard work and long hours taught you that you had to put in the effort if you wanted to get the reward,” he says. “It was also always better to do it right the first time.”

Michael Paulsen
Counsel, Manatt

Paulsen is a government relations professional with a focus on health care. He provides legal, regulatory and legislative counsel to health insurers, not-for-profit corporations and health care providers, including nursing homes, continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs), clinics, home care providers and assisted living facilities.

When Paulsen an undergraduate at Siena College (now University), he interned with the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities in New York. After graduating in 2009, he gravitated toward the intricacies of health care and insurance law at Albany Law School. He graduated magna cum laude from Albany Law School, where he was also a senior editor of the Albany Law Review and a Dean Sponsler Honors Teaching Fellow.

“I became pretty fascinated by the overall policies behind it, how it impacts not just the care you receive from the doctor but the economy, your out-of-pocket costs, and expenses for living,” he says.

Paulsen started his career at Hinman Straub in 2012, serving as a health care attorney focusing on New York-related policy for nearly a decade before moving to Manatt in 2021. 

He has helped Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center ensure its treatment innovations are covered by insurance and supported its collaboration with Jamaica Hospital Medical Center to bring cancer care to Queens. More recently, he helped Hudson Headwaters Health Network navigate the impact of the Trump administration’s Big Beautiful Bill Act on health care systems and uninsured people.

This year, Paulsen is aiming to reduce the timeline insurers have to respond to prior authorization requests for treatment, especially for oncology care.

“A few days’ delay seems minor in the grand scheme of things, but for someone diagnosed with cancer it can have a demonstrable impact on their outcomes,” he says.

Patrick Wildes
Director, Government Law Center, Albany Law School

Patrick Wildes’ AmeriCorps service spurred him to go to law school to try to fix health inequities on a wider scale.

He was placed at a community-based health center in Middletown, Connecticut, where he was struck by the enormous disparities between its neighborhoods.

“Being on the ground connecting people to coverage and services and seeing how that actually works at a grassroots level impacts the decisions you make and the policies you pursue,” he told City & State. 

Wildes enrolled in Albany Law School in 2013 and completed an Excelsior Service Fellowship that placed him at the state Justice Center for the Protection of People with Special Needs.

In March 2020, he left for the Executive Chamber to serve as a Freedom of Information Law attorney, pitching in elsewhere once the COVID-19 pandemic hit. He was promoted the following year to assistant secretary to the governor, managing Gov. Kathy Hochul’s mental hygiene portfolio and assisting a $1 billion investment in the state’s mental health system.

Last year, Wildes returned to Albany Law School as director of its Government Law Center, where he oversees student professional development, research and programming. He helped maintain the school’s top ranking in the nation as a destination for government law and has since doubled the amount of student programming on campus.

“My focus is on trying to infuse the perspectives of marginalized and disenfranchised populations in our programming,” he says. “Students don’t get exposure to people like that historically and we’re trying to change the way we approach legal education.”