Mark K. Suzumoto ’82

Sometimes serendipity makes all the difference – but sometimes it needs a little help. So it was for Mark K. Suzumoto ’82, who burned the midnight oil and then some to get into SUNY Buffalo Law School.

A native Californian, he was living in Rochester and engaged to his future wife, Sonia, a native of the Finger Lakes city of Canandaigua. They had met in the Midwest as volunteers with Volunteers in Service to America, and she had returned to Rochester to teach. Suzumoto, who had been recruiting SUNY Buffalo Law students to work on VISTA projects, had already been accepted at another law school when Alan S. Carrel ’67,now vice dean, took him to lunch and made a pitch for SUNY Buffalo Law.

It sounded good, but there was a hitch: It was May, and the application deadline was two months past. If you really want to be considered, Carrel said, your application has to be done first thing tomorrow morning.

So Suzumoto picked up an application, drove back to his VISTA/Peace Corps office in Rochester, typed until 1 a.m. on an IBM Selectric typewriter, drove back to Buffalo with the completed application, and was back at his desk in time for work at 9 a.m.

He got in – and that long night became the seed for a long and supportive relationship between Suzumoto and his law school alma mater. A longtime donor, recent co-chair of the Annual Fund campaign, a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council since 2004 and one of the hardest-working lawyers you’ll ever meet, Suzumoto has further cemented his ties to SUNY Buffalo Law with an unrestricted $100,000 gift.

“There’s no time like now,” he says of that decision. “The school needs to be able to have scholarships that help to bring in talented students, and it’s just the right thing to do. I hope that my classmates and other alums will help out as well. I still have such respect for the Law School.”

His own experience at the school, Suzumoto says, was leavened with both academically enriching pursuits and a healthy dose of fun. He served on the Buffalo Moot Court Board, and went with his team to the regionals of the National Trial Competition, in Syracuse. He worked on a short-lived consumer mediation board, in which students helped consumers with such matters as negotiating warranty coverage for products. But he also played intramural softball; his coed team had some success against men’s teams, he says, partly because “we had a couple of women ringers who had played in high school.” Then there was the law student-produced play.

Now, as a business lawyer and civil litigator, he draws on the lessons of SUNY Buffalo Law in his practice, which focuses on consumer product counseling and regulatory compliance, including business and litigation advice on intellectual property, products liability and trade regulation issues. His new firm, formed just a couple of years ago, is Van Etten Suzumoto & Sipprelle, with offices in Westlake Village, Calif., and Los Angeles.

“I am exceptionally proud of my association with UB and would recommend the school to any student who believes that he or she has the capacity to grow,”Suzumoto has said.

Mark and Sonia Suzumoto have three sons – all of them Eagle Scouts, and one a UB undergraduate.