Thursday, January
10, 2019
Page 6
PERSONALITY PROFILE:
ALICE
A. SALVO
She’s an Attorney With a
Sense of Humor, a Quest to Be a Leader, and a Devotion to Law
Alice A. Salvo
knew from an early age that she wanted to be a lawyer. She came to that
realization when students in her tenth grade English class in Long Island, New
York were assigned to write an essay on their career aspirations.
In those days in
Patchogue (some 50 miles from Manhattan on Long Island’s southern shore), the
village was divided into the rich section by the lake, the poor section by the
train tracks, and the section for everyone in between. Salvo family was in
between. Her father’s job as a forklift-operator at a lumberyard provided
enough pay for the support of his wife and three children.
Young Alice
noticed that rich kids tended to pick one of two jobs as their career goal:
doctor or lawyer.
“I said to myself,
okay, well I’m smarter than they are because my class standing is higher than
theirs,” Salvo recalls. “If they’re going to be doctors or lawyers, I’m
going to be a doctor or lawyer.
“So I thought for
another minute and I knew that at med school, you have to work on
cadavers—which I was not going to do, because I didn’t even want to dissect a
frog in biology. So I decided I was going to be a lawyer.”
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Above is Alice Ann
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Mother’s Reaction
Salvo remembers
that her mother was less than pleased when she announced her decision to pursue
a career in law. On the day of her epiphany as to what she would do in life,
Salvo rushed home and threw open the door.
“Mom!” she
shouted exuberantly, “I’m going to be a lawyer!”
Her mother burst
into tears.
“You would think
she was crying tears of joy,” Salvo relates. “But no, she was sad.”
Her mother’s
response was to the point:
“No, no, no! I
don’t want you to be a lawyer, I want you to be a hairdresser!”
Years later, when Salvo’s
daughter was a competitive gymnast in school, the youngster would have the
mother of a teammate prepare her hair for the meets, due to what Salvo claims
is her ineptitude in performing the task.
She tells of
commenting to her mother:
“So Ma, I chose
the right profession!”
Father’s Example
Salvo says her
work ethic, which enabled her to outperform her classmates in high school,
stems from her father’s example.
“He was a very
hard worker,” she explains.
Her inherited
devotion to hard work continues to benefit the attorney whose solo practice
boasts thousands of clients and whose extra-curricular pursuits include several
bar association leadership roles.
Despite their differences as to the best career choice
for her, Salvo says she and her mother had much in common.
For instance, Salvo says her mother was a consummate
practical joker. The butt of many of those jokes was one particular relative,
Uncle Ernie, who took in stride his sister’s water glasses with surprise leaks
and sugar bowls with spoons stuck to the bottom, guaranteed to get granules all
over him.
Such pranks invariably occurred outdoors, Salvo notes,
saying that her mother’s affinity for practical jokes was matched only by her
fastidious devotion to keeping a clean house.
At one Sunday dinner, hosted weekly by Salvo’s family,
her mother laid several tables end-to-end to accommodate the characteristically
large Italian family. The final table, as it happened, was half way into the
bathroom. Who was relegated to the seat of honor?
Uncle Ernie.
“I got the work ethic from my father, but I got the
jokes from my mother,” Salvo says, with a smile.
Workplace Levity
Humor is
necessary, she explains, in dealing with clients in probate law. Daily, she
deals with clients whose loved ones have died. Jokes, she says, lighten the
atmosphere.
She will type
something, she relates, and mention to the client: “You don’t pay me for my
typing.” Salvo reports: “I always get a laugh out of that.”
There’s a further
factor putting clients at ease. Salvo’s husband and law office director of
marketing, Mel I. Stein, advises:
“Law offices are
serious places with clients that have to handle life challenging issues. To
minimize the stress, her estate planning clients come to the office and not
only get their legal documents and court related matters properly completed,
they actually get to meet her dog, ‘Buddy the Pug’ of Instagram fame.”
Buddy has been
scampering through the office during workhours for 8½ years.
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Alice Salvo is seen
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Leadership Roles
Salvo says a love
of humor was not the only trait she inherited from her mother, noting:
“I like to
be in charge—probably because my mother was the boss of the family.”
That trait is
reflected in Salvo’s role as a “bar junkie.” Repeatedly, she has taken charge
of groups.
Her past positions
include stints as president of the San Fernando Valley Bar Association in
2004-05, chair of the State Bar Commission on Judicial Nominees Evaluations
2010-11, and 2014 chairperson of the Breakfast Club, which made endorsements of
candidates for what was then the State Bar Board of Governors (now the Board of
Trustees).
Salvo served last
year as chair of the Los Angeles County Bar Association delegation to the
Conference of California Bar Associations, successor to the State Bar
Conference of Delegates.
She was
named last Oct. 13 to the Board of Trustees of the National Italian American
Bar Association, and served in 2014 on the California Supreme Court’s Applicant
Evaluation and Nomination Committee which recruited and screened applicants for
State Bar Court judgeships.
Currently, Salvo
is president of the Italian American Lawyers Association (“IALA”) in Los
Angeles. Her term will end Jan. 19 when Gregory M. Salvato will be sworn in as
her successor at the installation Ball at the City Club.
IALA board member
and 2014 MetNews Person of the Year L. Ernestine Fields says that “being kind
and thoughtful and generous is a way of life for Alice Salvo.”
Lydia Liberio, the
IALA’s immediate past president, observes that Salvo has “mentored many” and
has “indirectly influenced everyone with whom she has come in contact, building
community ties across legal associations and improving public perceptions of
ethical, positive lawyering.”
During her
presidency of IALA—which has “up” years and “down” years—Salvo has staged
programs attracting attendance that has been uncharacteristically high. Her
first event, the installation of her and other officers, was held at an
atypical venue for the group, the Magic Castle, a private club of professional
magicians to which she had access based on her husband’s membership.
Stein was a
professional magician and, at the cocktail receptions at IALA monthly meetings,
will, if entreated to do so, amaze small groups with close-up magic.
“The presidency is
winding down,” Salvo says wistfully. “I’m going to miss it a lot.
“Every
organization I join I want to be president of.”
Teaching Law
Between her bar
activities and her active practice, the attorney has not had time lately for
another love of hers: teaching.
The Southwestern School of Law alumnus taught wills
and trusts at her alma mater from 2013-17. That allowed her to reconnect with
an old acquaintance, Professor Herbert Krimmel. He taught the wills and
trusts class in which Salvo was a student in 1979, and he sat in on her first
semester as an adjunct professor to critique her.
“He influenced me, so when he was sitting in the back
I had to complement him,” she says.
Salvo received her law degree from Southwestern in
1980. Her time at Southwestern proved a major influence on her choice to
practice in Los Angeles.
The lawyer—who says, “I don’t really like the
snow”—remembers returning to New York during Southwestern’s winter vacation
when the temperature was 20 degrees below zero there. Her reaction was:
“I’m not coming back here.”
She had her choice
of states in which to practice. She passed not only the California bar exam (in
1982), but also those in New York and Florida. Her connection with Florida was
that she received an LLM in estate planning from the University of Miami in
1981.
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In this 2004
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Law Practice
Salvo—a State
Bar-certified specialist in estate planning, trust and probate law—credits
Stein, to a large extent, for the success of her Woodland Hills law practice.
He initially
helped her when she put out her shingle 25 years ago, the lawyer points out,
saying that Stein “had a business”—a printing company—“and knew how to run a
business.”
She remarks:
“I opened up the
door and within a month I had 50 clients.”
Now, he works for
the firm full-time, handling search engine optimization, marketing and
promotion. He was instrumental in the staging of her elder law seminars and
wills and trusts MCLE classes, Salvo says, noting that those efforts have wound
down in light of her other obligations.
The arrangement
between the spouses hasn’t cause any tension during the 10 years they have
worked together, she says, commenting:
“We’re both on the
same page, and he’s very proud of me. Sometimes it’s embarrassing because you
hear him on the phone bragging about me.”
Stein says:
“Working for her
is great. Free lunch for all at the firm every Friday. Excellent opportunity to
continuously implement the latest in digital technology making every year
better than the previous.”
The two met in 1992 through a dating service—“Great
Expectations”—which, Salvo notes, “was pre-computer.”
It was “video dating,” she says. Participants would go
to a center, make a video, and return there, and view videos made by others.
Salvo was asked if she wanted a date with Stein. She
recounts, with a grin:
“I said yes!”
The two were
married the following year, and have two children, 23 and 24.
—S.P.E.
Copyright 2019,
Metropolitan News Company