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Mentors in the Practice: Who was a mentor to you in the practice of law and what did you learn from them?

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My first year of law school I liked all my professors, but my sort of leading mentor was a professor who’s still there – and I graduated in 1969 – named Sherman Cohn, a professor who had been at the Department of Justice, was a whiz kid there, joined – we joke about it because he joined the faculty maybe when he was three or four years older than I was when I was student – you know, this young professor. He was just brilliant at explaining his course, which was Civil Procedure, what are the ramifications. I still go back in my mind, mentally: if he explained something like the intervention process, what did he explain, what were the practical nuances of it, things like this.

So Sherm was a real mentor. The judge was a real mentor, Judge Browning, in terms of steering me in the right direction – not so much mentor but examples. I would see a justice render a brilliant decision, something like that, and that would be something that I would want to follow in that path in terms of doing it. And then, of course, as I continued my career, Sam Ervin and Sam Dash. I used to jokingly refer to them as the “good Sams.” So I was fortunate to go along a path where people were able to mentor you in terms of what’s going.

My partner and of counsel, Randy Schoenberg, he’s a kind of mentor in a way, although I’m a mentor to him ’cause I’m older. But he’s a mentor to me in the sense that he has this resiliency and this confidence and this desire. I mean to be able to do what we did – and I’m not bragging; I’m just stating an objective fact – and get the Supreme Court to recognize the rights, at least procedurally, of a Holocaust survivor, was a real, real victory. And I think it was a victory for justice and for Randy’s constant, I think, belief in what we were doing.

Los Angeles, CA business attorney Donald S. Burris goes over the mentors he’s encountered throughout his career and what he remembers from them.

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