A lifelong learner at the head of the class
“It’s kind of a homecoming,” George P. Brown Jr. ’17 says of his return to UB School of Law as an instructor in the Legal Analysis, Writing and Research (LAWR) program.
Brown grew up in nearby Niagara County, and chose UB for his undergraduate work, majoring in political science and psychology, before entering UB Law. Law school, he says, was an eye-opening time of transformation for him—one that he intends to share with the 25 second-year law students in his class. (Law students take three semesters of foundational LAWR courses; Brown is teaching the third semester.)
His place at the front of the classroom brings him full circle. As a kid, he remembers checking a book out of the public library about law and sports. That planted a seed of interest that grew throughout high school, and he entered UB knowing that law school was his next step.
Studying psychology, Brown says, laid the groundwork for his interest in narrative and the ways people put forth and understand arguments—crucial insights in effective lawyering. That interest grew when he took a law school class with Professor John Henry Schlegel on storytelling techniques as they relate to law. “We were reading Jane Austen and watching movies,” he says, “looking at how you can build the storytelling angle into your legal writing.”
He learned that storytelling can be an effective tool in all types of legal writing. “While many may understand the practical applications of storytelling in briefs and memorandums before a court,” he says, “it is just as important to implement storytelling skills in transactional drafting. Thinking of the business relationship in this manner allows you to imagine the different risks and outcomes this contract could create and allows you to protect your client before the business relationship begins.”
As a law student, Brown was a beneficiary of an early iteration of the LAWR program, emerging from the sequence fundamentally reshaped as a legal scholar. “It’s a stereotype that you learn a whole new way of thinking and learning, but for me it really was relearning how to reason and write,” Brown says. “I definitely felt I was relearning how to think critically about cases, and to take what I was thinking about and reading and incorporate that into my writing.”
After graduation, Brown went from summer associate to full time attorney at Harris Beach PLLC, where he spent nearly two years in the firm’s commercial real estate practice, before leaving to become corporate counsel for a national self-storage firm headquartered in Williamsville. There he managed a broad portfolio of real estate matters before moving to the company’s acquisitions department—at a time when demand for self-storage was booming as people quarantined by Covid kept busy clearing out their attics.
The company entered a merger and its corporate offices moved to Utah. Brown knew he wanted to stay close to home, so he rejoined Harris Beach, doing mostly transactional work. But when the opportunity arose to join the UB Law faculty, he jumped at the chance to make the move to O’Brian Hall.
“I’ve always been a lifelong learner,” he says, “and I had always been interested in academia. On Law Review (where he served as a publications editor), I had an opportunity to read a lot of scholarship, and I was very interested in that. This is a place where scholarship is encouraged, and I love being in that environment.”
In his LAWR course, Brown says, he’ll focus on the kinds of assignments that first-year associates would take on in their first legal position. “Professional emails, professional letters, researching for partners, drafting a client-facing article that would be used by a law firm,” he lists. “It’s a very practical twist on legal writing.”
He’ll also be able to speak from experience about how to succeed in law school, especially for someone like him who was both a first-generation college student and first-generation law school student in his family. And as he settles into the classroom, he’s looking to put into practice the wisdom of his practice group leader. “He told me, you don’t have to know everything, but you need to know how to find out,” Brown says. “Even if you’ve been practicing for 20 years, your client will eventually ask you something you don’t know. In practice, you’re always learning. And I hope I can model that for my students as well.”