UB Law love stories

There was no setting up amid the bumps, sets and spikes when Leonard Singer ’83 and Judith (Hastings) Singer ’84 first laid eyes on each other while they were playing in an intramural law school volleyball league. “I was really bad—that’s why Judy didn’t want to see me initially,” Len says. (She remembers it differently.) 

It was only when Judy went to a big party one night at the rental house Len shared with seven other law students that the spark took hold. They discovered they had a lot in common, including that they both grew up in the Albany area. As it turns out, one of the roommates was the brother of Judy’s best friend from high school. “That was a surprise when I got there,” she says. 

After Len graduated in 1983, he was stationed in Kansas City, Mo., with the U.S. Army JAG Corps. They maintained the relationship long distance for a year, and after graduation she moved to Kansas City and practiced with the U.S. Department of Labor. Their first child was born there, and after they moved back to New York’s Capital Region, they had two more. Now their family has grown to include two grandchildren, one in Virginia and one in Seattle.

He is a partner with Couch White in Albany, doing siting and permitting work for major energy projects; she’s now retired from a boutique practice doing mostly trusts and estates.  

“I always thought he was handsome,” Allison (Puglisi) Tam ’97 says of the fellow student who would become her husband, Thomas Tam ’97. But it took a bold move on her part to move them out of the friend zone. 

The couple met early on, and lived on the same floor of the Triad, an off-campus residence that Allison says was the unofficial dorm for law students. But there’s a lot going on in that first year, and they were strictly friends—until a fateful party one night in January. “I approached him and basically told him I liked him,” she says. “I think he was very shy—he wasn’t expecting that.”  

“I’m not an impulsive person,” Tom says, “and when it happened, I think I was in shock. It took me a week or two to get my bearings.”

But the next month, he stopped her in O’Brian Hall and presented her with a Valentine’s Day present: a CD of the soundtrack to a movie she loved, Immortal Beloved, a love story centered on Beethoven. And he invited her to a homemade dinner. 

“That was our first date,” Allison recounts. “We had steak, and he had even bought special pots and pans; everything was beautiful. He’s been cooking for me ever since.” They were married in 2001.

Allison is a partner in the New York City firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, representing clients in the insurance industry. Tom, who worked for AT&T for many years, has retired from practice and has been an at-home dad for their two sons, one a sophomore in college, the other a high school junior. 

For Michael Hecker ’09 and Dayna (Vitullo) Hecker ’10, it was the romance of the high seas that set their love story in motion—specifically a Student Bar Association welcome cruise on the Miss Buffalo II not long after Dayna started at UB Law.

“I was the naive 1L who didn’t know any better,” Dayna remembers. “He was there with some of his buddies, and I was with my girlfriends; one of them was my best friend from high school. We just ended up talking and we really hit it off. After that night I asked a bunch of 2L girls I knew what they thought about Mike, and everyone had the nicest things to say about him. I thought he was worth dating to see if he was anything special.” 

She had sworn off dating in law school—“I really wanted just to focus on the work,” she says—but that vow lasted just a few weeks. They were a couple for the rest of their school years, and long distance after he moved to New York City for his first legal position while she finished law school. He subsequently moved back to Western New York and began working at Hodgson Russ—where Mike (the current UB Law Alumni Association president) is now a partner—and he made the move, secretly planning to propose to Dayna.

They were married on New Year’s Eve 2011, in a space with professional resonance: the Hyatt Regency in Rochester, where the 4th Department swearing-in ceremony often takes place. “So our wedding reception was in the same room where I was sworn into the bar,” he says.  

Others who were on that fateful cruise ended up marrying each other as well, and they all still keep in touch. A bonus: the Heckers’ kids (now 9 and 5) can hang out and play sports with the children of their UB Law friends. “We see a lot of our friends from law school,” says Dayna, who works in corporate risk management with M&T Bank, “and that’s been really a great way to stay in touch.”

Thirteen has been a lucky number in all sorts of ways for Hon. Phillip Dabney, Jr. ’02 and Crystal Rodriguez-Dabney ’06, who met not in law school but as UB Law alumni working in Buffalo’s public sphere. 

It was a Friday the 13th—Sept. 13, 2013—when fate brought them together on the 13th floor of City Hall, where Crystal was working in Mayor Byron Brown’s administration as executive director of the Commission on Citizens’ Rights and Community Relations. Phil was running for a judgeship on Buffalo City Court (where he now serves), and he was meeting a fellow UB Law alumnus, Richard Morrisroe ’11, to ask him to work on the campaign. Morrisroe had business with Crystal, so they arranged to meet in Crystal’s office at City Hall, unbeknownst to Crystal. 

But Morrisroe was late for the meeting, and Phil dallied in Crystal’s office and took notice, he says, of “the young lady sitting behind the desk. She allowed me to sit down and wait … looking all important and everything.”

“He was talking to me like I was Richard’s secretary,” Crystal says. “I had to introduce myself and tell him it was actually my office he had walked into.” 

Their first date soon followed, beginning an alliance that has continued ever since. “At that time, I had been litigating for 16 or 17 years,” Judge Dabney says, “and she was in the public arena and a thriving entrepreneur. We simply supported each other.” 

Crystal, who now serves as senior vice president and chief diversity officer at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, had taken the bar exam unsuccessfully. “Phil encouraged me to take it again,” she says, “and I did, and taking his advice on how to study, I passed.”  

They tied the knot on Sept. 13, 2020, in a ceremony co-officiated by Mayor Brown and Phil’s cousin Pastor Kyle Mann.  Only fitting that Rich Morrisroe was best man. 

“Attorneys marrying is a feat in and of itself,” Judge Dabney says. “We’re both right all the time, and whoever has the best argument wins.”