Firm invests in future lawyers

A Buffalo-based law firm that has long sponsored diversity scholarships at the Law School is adding to that support by funding a new series of merit scholarships.

The firm, Phillips Lytle LLP, says that its new commitment of $90,000 is intended to help the school attract and retain the highest-quality students, who presumably also are courted by other law schools with significant endowment-based scholarships. The commitment is for two scholarships for members of the incoming Class of 2015 and two more each for the Classes of 2016 and 2017. The firm will fund the scholarships for all three years of legal training for all recipients.

“We’ve always been a very community- oriented organization that is willing to support causes important to the community,” says David J. McNamara, the firm’s managing partner. “We are impressed by Dean Mutua’s efforts to elevate the stature of the Law School and its reputation by attracting top students and faculty, and we are committed to supporting those efforts through the new Phillips Lytle Scholars program and our many other activities at the Law School.”

The scholarships are funded for three years, McNamara says, not only to attract great students who will become Phillips Lytle Scholars but to discourage them from being lured with scholarships to transfer to other law schools once they’ve started at SUNY Buffalo.

The gift, he says, is an investment not only in the Law School itself but in the larger legal community. “If the Law School is successful in attracting the very top candidates for the school, that will inure to our benefit down the road in many ways,” McNamara says.

“We have many SUNY Buffalo Law alumni in our firm now. The reputation of the school and the quality of its student body is very important to them, and it’s very important to the community. Anything we can do to enable the dean to further his cause of enhancing the reputation and quality of the school down the road, we would like to do.”

Since the mid-1990s, Phillips Lytle has funded scholarships at the Law School designed to make the student population more diverse. The scholarships help put a law school education within reach for students from racial and ethnic groups that traditionally have been underrepresented in the legal community.

All of this support, McNamara says, is in service to Western New York. “We need to assess the importance of the quality of the Law School not only to the legal community but to the community at large,” he says. “It does the community little good to have a law school if that law school doesn’t have a reputation for being an excellent law school, and that’s what we’re trying to further.”