Blacks' gift endows prestigious professorship

Thomas E. Black '79 has covered a lot of miles to get to where he is today. He and his wife Bridget have lived in Buffalo, Hartford, Fort Worth, Washington, D.C., and Irvine, Calif., as he built a legal and business career.

Now that they have spent 15 years in the Dallas area, where Black is managing partner of the hugely successful mortgage servicing firm Black, Mann & Graham, the odometer doesn't spin quite so fast. But in a sense, the couple - he grew up in South Buffalo and West Seneca, she in the Town of Tonawanda - have never left Western New York behind.

That is nowhere more apparent than in their support for SUNY Buffalo Law School, culminating this year in a $1 million gift to establish a named professorship.

"These are positive times," says Black, who as chair of the Dean's Advisory Council is intimately familiar with the workings of the Law School. "I'm a firm believer that Dean Mutua is going to accomplish his goal of making us a top 50 law school, and I believe it's going to happen in the next five years. The dean has the right formula to get us back there. That formula is going to require some increased tuition, some increased funding from the state, and it's going to require that some people reach into their pockets and write some checks. I certainly couldn't ask people to do that without doing it myself. I could have made a not-so-meaningful gift, but the Law School is meaningful to me, and I needed to step up."

For his part, Dean Mutua says alumni investment on this scale is crucial to faculty development, a major component of law school rankings. "This gift signals to our junior faculty and to others in the legal academy that UB is a school on the rise, a place where academic excellence is rewarded with the highest recognition," the dean says. "I am sure that it is a significant step that opens the door for similar gifts that will be instrumental in helping us recruit and retain excellent faculty."

It's funny how things work out. Black, whose undergraduate education was at the University of Notre Dame, was wait-listed when he applied to SUNY Buffalo Law School, and says he had actually enrolled at Catholic University Law School in Washington, D.C., when he got the call that he had a place at SUNY Buffalo Law. "I found out about two days before classes started that I was going to Buffalo," he remembers." I couldn't have been happier when they admitted me. I got a great education that allowed me to be competitive with lawyers from Harvard, Stanford and wherever else. "As the son of a third-generation steelworker, he also appreciated the school's affordability.

Thus began a long and winding road. At 23, Black was elected to the West Seneca School Board, even serving as its president, while still at SUNY Buffalo Law School. Then, like many new lawyers, he found his life's work by happenstance, working for venerable names in Western New York banking like Buffalo Savings Bank, Goldome and Empire Realty Credit Corp.

Mostly he worked in banking law, including working directly on the transition from Buffalo Savings Bank to Goldome, before moving into mortgage lending. "I tripped into where I was," he reflects. "But because of my law background, I was able to get into a position to learn management and customer service skills and learn how to deal with business issues. It was a good combination. It has allowed me to apply those same principles to the practice of law."

There followed a series of positions with mortgage companies nationwide. "Mortgage banking is a very cyclical business," Black says. "In good cycles, you move, and in bad cycles, you move. My wife's hope chest was on wheels. "Finally, after a stretch of nights and weekends spent studying, he took the Texas Bar Exam, and in 1995 opened his firm in Flower Mound, Texas.

"When I had the opportunity to stop running a mortgage company and start my own practice, I had some real advantages," he says. "All my competitors were lawyers, and I was a customer service consultant."

The first day they were in business, he says, the firm's operations manager asked, "What's our cutoff time?"

"What cutoff time?"

"When we won't take any more files for the day."

That wasn't going to fly. "We were able to say that even if documents came to us after 5 p.m., they would get done that night," Black says. "To this day we run two shifts so we can do that. From the very start we were able to say that if clients weren't using our law firm, they were at a competitive disadvantage."

Now Black, Mann & Graham is the largest document preparation law firm in Texas, where preparing a mortgage loan document requires an attorney. The firm represents major mortgage companies and banks, preparing their mortgage loan documentation and counseling them on regulatory compliance issues.

Tom and Bridget Black have two children: Ryan, a Notre Dame graduate who is now a second-year student at SUNY Buffalo Law School, and Erin, a senior theater major at St. Mary's College, Notre Dame's sister school.

Bridget, an alumna of Buffalo State College, has a SUNY Buffalo Law School connection as well. Her late uncle John T. Frizzell '55 was a graduate. "People whom I've met through Tom's graduating class seem to be all-around good people," she says, "so we've supported the Law School gladly. We are still close to people in Buffalo, and even though we're not there anymore, we wanted to say 'thank you' and encourage other people to enable these students to pursue their dreams. Especially now in these economic times, it's more and more important to support institutions that have been important to us. We're just happy we're able to give back."

Tom Black, a 2008 recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award for his performance in business, sees alumni giving as a way to stay invested in the school that made their careers possible. "Dean Mutua has a crystal-clear vision of where this law school needs to go," he says, "and he has done a great job of communicating that vision to a lot of alumni, including me. When the dean talks about areas of need, one is scholarship opportunities to attract top students. But in addition to that, in order to make it a top 50 law school, we're going to have to attract the top talent in the teaching profession. Endowed chairs and professorships allow us to bring in people who might not otherwise consider SUNY Buffalo Law School. Guys like me, who have been given a great education and a very affordable education, need to step up to the plate and support that."