SUNY Buffalo Law Links - February 2015

Jennifer Pacella '08 shares practical tips for career success

Jennifer.

Associate Director for Career Services Marc Davies with guest speaker Jennifer Pacella ’08.

"You make your own luck," Ernest Hemingway once said to his son by way of life advice.

The career path that Jennifer Pacella ’08 has taken is that good advice in action. She recently shared that philosophy, along with some practical tips for making a professional goal happen, with SUNY Buffalo Law students looking ahead to life after graduation.        

Pacella, a Buffalo native who is now a law professor at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, was back in town to teach a January-term bridge course on her area of specialization, the federal laws that protect corporate and public-service whistleblowers and corporate compliance. In a career conversation with students called “Getting Where You Want to Go,” she laid out the series of professional positions that helped her to reach her goal of teaching law, and pushed them to get cracking on their networking, which she began as a first-year law student. A lot of the students who came to the presentation, she says, were first-years themselves, and now she’s getting emails from some of them who took the idea to heart.

It was a turnabout, but a good one, to be back in O’Brian Hall as teacher and not student. “It was very exciting, and it was really fun,” Pacella says. “I could relate to what the students are feeling and thinking.” That includes the 14 who took her bridge-term course, called “The Law of GRC (Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance) and Whistleblowing.” “These topics, especially in the area of compliance, are really hot right now in terms of job opportunities for lawyers.” Pacella says. “They were great students, very engaged and very interested in the subject matter.”

During her own years at SUNY Buffalo Law School, Pacella was a Note and Comment Editor of the Buffalo Law Review, and she says that despite the initial steep learning curve of law school – especially in that foundational 1L year – she found the atmosphere conducive to success. “Everyone says it’s like learning another language, and that’s true,” she says. “A lot of people are really pretty terrified in that first semester. But the people and the professors were all so supportive. It’s not a cutthroat environment.” And don’t think that three years covers it all: “That process never stops. I’m still learning today.”

Pacella has had three legal positions since graduation. Following a summer associate position with the international law firm, Shearman & Sterling LLP, she received a permanent job offer from the New York City-based firm and spent four years there. (Her summer position was split between the firm’s offices in New York and Rome, taking advantage of Pacella’s fluency in Italian.) She worked in the firm’s Capital Markets group, focusing on securities transactions such as IPOs and SEC disclosures, then in Shearman’s Finance group, working on large-scale lending transactions and secured lending deals. “I got to work with partners in various offices and with large teams of attorneys,” she says. “In the deals we did, we often worked with foreign offices, so there were a lot of conference calls with Europe or Asia. The clients were often large companies with offices worldwide.” While there, she also did significant pro bono work relating to immigration law.

Her personal goal, she says, was to get substantial practice experience that she could bring to the classroom when she began to teach. After four years at Shearman, she moved to another carefully chosen step on her path, a federal clerkship – in her case clerking for a year for the Honorable Julio M. Fuentes ’75, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. “There were all different kinds of subject matter: criminal law, constitutional law, business law, environmental, anything you can imagine,” she says. “I tended to be interested in working on cases that were related to business law. The other clerks and I rotated. It was a lot of heavy legal research and writing, preparing bench memoranda for the Judge, and discussing the cases in depth prior to oral arguments. And there was continuous one-on-one with the Judge, which is such a pleasure with Judge Fuentes.  It was really an honor and an unforgettable legal experience.”

She also made it a point to do some legal writing for publication, working on those papers evenings and weekends – another attractive qualifier for the very limited pool of positions as a law professor.

Now all that networking, strategizing, and hard work has paid off in Pacella’s tenure-track position teaching law at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, The City University of New York, in New York City. She is in her second year there as a faculty member of a large law department teaching students the importance of law in the business world. “We want them to understand the important interplay between the two,” she says. And some students, she says, even get the bug themselves, coming to her when a course is over to say they’ve decided to go to law school.

Pacella continues to write and publish, especially in the area of whistleblowing law, including retaliation protections for whistleblowers and the bounty programs that exist to reward revelations of wrongdoing. She also presents on this topic to legal conferences nationwide.

Pacella and her husband – Lorenzo Ferrari, a pharmacist – live in Manhattan. They met in Italy, and when they travel, that’s where they look first. “We enjoy going back there whenever possible,” she says. “Italy in general is close to my heart.”