A huge map of Miami covers Tom Santoro's conference table. In the
lower third of the map is a small black dot.
Santoro, Cornell's deputy university counsel,
points to the black dot as his face creases into a grin. With an unmistakable gleam in his
eye he says, "That's my new house."
Pointing not too far away he adds, "That's the main campus of the university."
After 15-plus years, hundreds of cases and thousands of matters, Santoro is leaving Cornell, where he is chief litigator as well as deputy university counsel, to become the first general counsel at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami on Jan. 27. And while he regrets leaving the close friends and colleagues he has made here, if not the dreary, gray December days, he is clearly eager to get on with the new challenges that await him in Florida.
"It just struck me as a great challenge in a place with a dynamic future in a part of the country that is very 21st-century in its population and its direction. It's a very exciting offer and I just couldn't turn it down," Santoro says.
Cornell University Counsel and Secretary of the Corporation James J. Mingle says Santoro's fine work has been appreciated by the university.
"Tom Santoro is an extremely able and accomplished attorney who will be sorely missed by colleagues and clients alike. He has skillfully and successfully represented Cornell University in countless cases during his 15 years of service here. We wish Tom the best of luck when he assumes his new position as general counsel of Florida International University next month," Mingle said this week.
But as Santoro talks about his years at Cornell, the words start rolling faster and faster and it's clear he's still energized by the job he's leaving.
Asked if he has any "least favorite" cases, or any cases he regrets, Santoro responds:
"Not really. One of the things that's so fascinating about this job is that it's so interesting. Some of the people in the world just sort of drag themselves out of bed in the morning because they don't like what they do, but that has never been a problem for me. It is so challenging and so interesting and so different that it's really hard to say that there's anything about it that I didn't like."
Santoro came to Cornell in May 1981 as a result of a phone call from Walter Relihan, then university counsel and Santoro's former boss when they both worked in the legal offices of the State University of New York (SUNY). Both had left SUNY for private practice, but when Relihan joined Cornell he asked Santoro to help him with something they had discussed while at SUNY: a shift toward handling more of the university's legal work and litigation in-house rather than under contract with outside law firms.
When he and Relihan started in that direction, Santoro says, they were on the cutting edge. Now, he says, in-house, full-service university legal offices have become a real trend, due to economies of scale that can be achieved and the edge gained by specialized knowledge of the client.
Since that time, both the size of the university legal staff has grown, from six lawyers to nine, and the caseload has multiplied "significantly," Santoro says. He's handled everything from slips and falls to antitrust suits to patent infringments to will contests to zoning cases to major campus protests, like the anti-apartheid demonstrations in the mid-'80s.
He doesn't expect any less intensity in the workload at FIU. He's going to a university with four campuses and 30,000 students, currently in the midst of an $85 million building program and a major fund-raising campaign.
Further, as FIU's first general counsel, Santoro will take on the task of hiring his own legal team and setting up the office. Until now FIU, which is part of the Florida state university system, has been represented by a private law firm and by the state attorney general's office. Similar to work he did early in his career.
Which is partly why Santoro describes his legal career as "serendipitous." He started out in the South Bronx as a criminal defense lawyer for the Legal Aid Society, then continued that work with a private foundation. From there he went to the state attorney general's office as an assistant attorney general, where one of his clients was SUNY. That's how he meet Relihan and took the path that eventually led to Cornell.
And what changes has he seen in the practice of university law over the past 15 years? "Well, I suppose there's a lot more of it," Santoro says. "I think this time has seen the growth of university counsel offices all over the country. And I think that trend continues. The twofold trend is towards more in-house attorneys and more legal work in-house.
"I think the legal function is reflective of other aspects of university life. Additional government regulation, expansion of legal rights and remedies by Congress and the courts, changes for the good and for the bad in funding, all of those things I think have led to a greater need for in-house counsel and more legal issues for universities," he says.
Looking around his office, cluttered with heavy, opened law books and case files papering every surface, he says he's still in the process of disengaging from cases and hasn't had time to think about cleaning house. But one thing he'll be sure to take with him is a small, framed, black-and-white counted cross-stitch hanging on the wall. It's his office motto, he says, stitched by a former aide who heard it so often she decided to produce it for posterity: "Law is fun."