The romance casebook

What better time than Valentine’s Day to celebrate that happy consequence of the law school journey? Let’s meet two long-married couples who once found themselves a little distracted in O’Brian Hall.

The statute of limitations is long past, so it can now be revealed that Karen Nicolson first got the attention of Tom Smith with: free food.

They were in the same class year but in different sections, so it wasn’t until their second year that they connected. Karen was working as a cashier at a Capen Hall cafeteria, and when Tom came through her line, lunch was on the house that day. “That was sort of on purpose,” she says.

They progressed to hanging out with a bunch of law students at Molly’s Pub in South Buffalo, then a group date to see B.B. King at Artpark, and then started seeing each other more regularly. Tom was still at his family’s home in Cheektowaga, but became a regular at the Winspear Avenue house that Karen shared with a bunch of housemates. “Once he started staying over, he was there all the time,” Karen says. Tom: “The other people probably weren’t too happy about that.”

They had a small apartment near UB’s South Campus in their third year, which made their bar prep tricky. “I had to leave to study every day, because Tom didn’t study as much as I did,” Karen says. “We didn’t see a lot of each other that summer.”

They passed the bar, got engaged, bought a townhouse, and were married in 1991. And they stayed in Buffalo, where Karen is CEO and executive director of the Center for Elder Law & Justice, and Tom is the confidential law clerk to Erie County Family Court Judge Sharon M. LoVallo ’94. Their daughter Haley Smith ’23 is a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Bureau of Buffalo.

“We owe a debt to the cafeteria,” Tom says. “We never would have met otherwise. She probably would have gone back to Long Island and I never would have seen her.”

More seriously, they say UB Law became a place where they found a shared sense of purpose and direction. “Being in law school and going through the experience of taking the bar exam together, it’s a bonding experience to some extent,” Karen says. “For us, being lawyers meant doing something with our law degrees that we felt was important. Being lawyers is a big part of who we both are, and having the same values and going through that experience together, it ends up shaping how you view the world.”

Adds Tom: “That’s the strongest bond that we have, those shared values, and we can always fall back on that.”

Jen and Christian were friends long before they started dating. It was only in law school, though, that they found their perfect match.

They met as UB undergraduates and were active in student government—they even ran on a ticket for president and vice president of the Student Association, and won. After graduation, Jen enrolled in the law school’s JD/MBA program; Christian took a gap year in Toronto, but “Jen talked me into coming back,” he says. “I knew he was going to be coming back eventually,” she says.

And in law school they reconnected and started dating at the start of Christian’s second year. “She learned all my flaws and weighed whether or not they were worth it,” he says.

Eventually they came to realize that, as Jen puts it, “our paths were going in the same direction.” They spent the last semester of law school abroad in Tokyo through Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, learning international law and “living in tiny housing for foreigners.” Then, after graduation, they moved on to jobs in New York City.

They married in 2010 and in 2017 moved to San Diego, Calif., where Jen is a shareholder with Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney LLP (and a member of UB Law’s Dean’s Advisory Council), and Christian is managing attorney at The Barnes Firm. They have a 12-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter.