Barbara Klippert '75

The resume of Barbara Klippert, a member of the Law School’s Class of 1975, lists a Seven Sisters college where she did some of her undergraduate work and a well-known Manhattan university where she earned a masters of tax law degree. But neither of those institutions, she says, holds the same kind of emotional attachment for her that SUNY Buffalo Law School does.

She says her continuing involvement with the school – she has served on the Dean’s Advisory Council since 2004 and teaches a class in the school’s New York City Program in Finance and Law – has grown that sense of attachment.“ The more involved I’ve become,” she says, “the more connected I feel to what’s going on in the school.”

That involvement has extended to generous financial support, recently including a gift of $145,000 – part multiyear donation, part bequest – to be used in large part to support scholarship aid for deserving students and the New York City Program.

Klippert practices ERISA law in the New York office of the Boston-based law firm Bingham McCutchen LLP.

“It would have been virtually impossible for me to go to law school if I wasn’t able to go to SUNY Buffalo with the tuition it had,” she says. “In addition, I got an incredible education there. I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do after law school, and then I discovered tax in Lou Del Cotto’s class. It was so engaging to me that I decided to become a tax lawyer. I really owe the success I’ve achieved in life to my ability to go to UB and the education I received. It is very important to me to give back to the Law School and to try to help students who are in the same position that I was.”

Klippert’s class was one of the first to use the newly constructed O’Brian Hall, moving from the Law School’s previous location in downtown Buffalo.“ It was not what we expected, but it was what happened,” she says of that move to what was then the only building on the new Amherst campus. But, she says, it was a small class, and “the people were very close.” She also served as case and comment editor of the Buffalo Law Review.

And in another accident of timing, Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act – what would become Klippert’s area of specialization – in the fall of 1974, just months before her Law School graduation. Similar to tax law, she says, ERISA is “like doing a puzzle. You have to be comfortable with codes and very abstract analysis, because there are no answers. You have to be able to live in gray.”

As she thought about making a significant gift to the Law School, Klippert says, she was able to structure the gift to make it feasible financially. “You try to give as much as you feel comfortable giving on a current basis,” she says. “It would be a normal thing for me to think in terms of a bequest, which doesn’t immediately come out of my pocket. But you also need to be willing to commit certain funds on an ongoing basis, even though in some years it may be more of a stretch than others. It’s much more helpful to the Law School to have that money now.”

Her work with the Dean’s Advisory Council, she says, has shown her that she’s not alone in her enthusiasm for the Law School’s prospects. “These are people who are very committed to the Law School, continuing its legacy, increasing its reputation and making things good for its students and graduates,” she says. “They feel pretty passionately about the school. I am pleased to be part of that.”