UNDER ADVISEMENT

Law Review Dinner highlights

successful mentoring initiative

and honors Robert Conklin '68

There is no teacher like experience, it has been said. But an experienced mentor in the legal profession – that comes awfully close.

UB Law School’s successful mentoring program, partnering practitioners with law students eager to learn the practicalities of the profession, was the focus of the 16th annual Buffalo Law Review Dinner, held April 21 at the posh Buffalo Club. The Class of 2005 was the first to benefit from this mentoring, an outgrowth of the school’s Dean’s Advisory Council. And editors of the Law Review honored Robert B. Conklin ’68, who first proposed the idea and has been instrumental in its success.

It was a most productive year for the Buffalo Law Review, said outgoing editor in chief John L. Rudy. His class, he noted, was the first to produce eight issues of the review – four annually. Among other accomplishments, he recognized a streamlined publication process and a restructured Web site. And Vol. 52, No. 3, of the journal also made history as the first issue entirely devoted to essays – an accomplishment Rudy celebrated by presenting a framed cover to Professor David Westbrook, who helped guide the project. Planned this spring is a symposium issue on the challenges facing hospitals and the delivery of health care services.

Conklin, president of the Buffalo law firm Hodgson Russ, served on the Law Review himself in 1967-68. He proposed the mentoring program as a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council. Dean Nils Olsen has said, “Mentors offer advice and assistance to law students as they embark on their legal careers. Without Bob Conklin’s support, this program would not have been launched.”

In his remarks, Conklin reflected that “my part in starting the mentoring program was simply copying an idea from someone else in the Medical School. There is a core group of alumni and faculty who have made it work. But in its third year, it is flourishing, and to the extent to which I have been involved, I am very proud.”

Before an audience that included his family and many of his colleagues from Hodgson Russ, Conklin then reflected on some of the people who have been his mentors over a long and distinguished career:

• Max Slopy, who was on the Law Review editorial board in 1967-68 and “patiently dealt with me and pushed me. ... I was sort of a late bloomer, so it was wonderful to be given that opportunity.”

• Legendary trial lawyer Herald Price Fahringer. Conklin said he never forgot arriving early to his student job at Lipsitz, Green and seeing Fahringer practicing before a mirror the summation of a case he would deliver that afternoon – a stirring example of hard work and preparation.

• Bob Fleming Sr., a professor of corporate law who “gave me one of my lowest grades in law school” but tipped him to a clerkship with U.S. District Judge John T. Curtin.

• Judge Curtin, “an extraordinary human being who gave me a chance to see what lawyering was all about from the other side of the bench.”

• The lawyers, past and present, with whom he has worked at Hodgson Russ, including the senior Hugh Russ(“he taught me that litigation is a team sport”); Grover James who went tooth and nail with his own brother when they were opposing counsel on a case; Bill Larson ("he gave me a winning case in my first six months at the firm. This gave me the confidence to do what I wanted to do"); Steve Kelly, who developed multiple sclerosis but "showed me the courage of a lawyer who loved to practice law and did so until the end"; and his present colleagues at the firm from which he will soon retire.