Stuart Kritzer ‘72
Colorado ‘Super Lawyer’, Martindale-Hubbell, AV-Preeminent Rated for more than 25 years, Motorcycle Enthusiast, Rainmaker
Join us on Thursday October 18 when Stuart Kritzer ’72 engages students in a thought-provoking discussion about today's changed and challenging legal landscape, how it will affect your career path, and how fledgling attorneys can, and must, develop the most important skill for any business: Rainmaking!
Kritzer explains that business development is critical to all organizations: “If you become a rainmaker, you become indispensable because those who generate business will always have a business! Rainmakers are the lifeblood of a law firm, in the epicenter of power, and especially so in this challenging economy: It all begins with the network you can, and must, build today.”
Kritzer should know. This year, he celebrates his 40th year as a Seton Hall Law graduate, marked by a distinguished legal practice in Denver, built on his own beginning in 1973 when he moved from New York City upon graduation from Lehigh and Seton Hall, after growing up in West Orange, New Jersey.
Kritzer’s career success as an attorney was, in some critical ways, shaped by his experience as a teacher, his full-time job while attending Seton Hall Law in the evening in the early 1970s. He taught in an all-male student/all-male faculty special education high school for what the New York City Board of Education euphemistically referred to as “socially maladjusted boys.” He explains, "If the kids didn’t return for the Fall term, we knew we lost them to Rikers Island or Spofford [juvenile detention centers] or violence over the summer.” Each morning, he frisked his students for weapons before allowing them to take their seats.
As grueling and difficult as his job could be, he also knew he and his teaching colleagues were likely the only positive male role models the students had ever had. It was then that he learned to strive for excellence because, as he says, “there are times when failure is simply not an option and this was one of them.” Even now, he still hears from one of his former students, a 54-year old man living in New York City, who recently told Kritzer that he was large reason the student survived, by convincing him he could and should make something of himself and his life. Kritzer calls his teaching experience one of the premier, transforming periods of his life.
While teaching during the day and attending Seton Hall at night, Kritzer spent a summer at the University of Colorado, Boulder and, a year after he graduated from Seton Hall Law, decided to pursue his livelihood in Denver. After a few years with a small but very active criminal defense law firm, he opened his own practice where he now represents clients throughout the United States, specializing in plaintiffs’ personal injury, mass tort and products liability claims. Over time he developed his own techniques for business development and operations that have helped drive his practice for nearly 40 years. He also makes time to speak to law firms, schools, banks, insurance companies and others about the importance of entrepreneurship in every business and profession.
Learn from Stuart Kritzer and expand your career development skills. Visit Symplicity or for more information, please contact David Weinberg, Assistant Dean for Career Services, at david.weinberg@shu.edu or call 973-642-8595.