“In the Business of Raising Hopes”

11/22/2024

Professor Michael Gerber joins Kathleen and Bradley Hoffman, parents of the late Michael Simmons ’20, at an investiture ceremony where the longtime teacher and mentor was inducted as the new Michael Simmons and Michael Gerber Professor.

Professor Michael Gerber on How He Became a Beloved Mentor

Since Professor Michael Gerber joined Brooklyn Law School in 1980, he has held a variety of titles. He teaches bankruptcy law and contracts but started out as a legal writing professor. He has also been Associate Dean for Development and spent two years as Interim Dean. As an Associate Dean, he helped to obtain the land use and other regulatory approvals for the construction of the 1994 addition to the main building at 250 Joralemon Street and for the construction of Feil Hall. He also helped raise several million dollars to support the 1994 addition as he worked on the financing of both projects.

But his informal title, mentor, is the one most treasured among his students, past and present, who say Gerber has helped them personally and professionally. The stacks of kind notes from alumni and students (and sometimes their moms) that he has accumulated over the past several decades attest to his soaring success.

“The most stressful and consequential events of my professional life so far—getting a 1L internship, 2L summer job, and selecting a note topic—would have been purely disastrous without you!” wrote one former student. “Here is a small gift to repay you for the Fresh Direct orders and for your Machiavellian machinations in brokering the clerkship with Judge Glenn," wrote another. An alum who thanked Gerber for lending a kind ear over lunch quipped, “Unfortunately for you, I’ve been going through a difficult time, and you got to hear all about it.”

Yet Gerber, who was just invested as the new Michael Simmons and Michael Gerber Professor, in honor of his mentorship of the late Michael Simmons ’20, says providing kindly guidance is simply part of his chosen profession.

“I’ve always thought it’s the role of the faculty to help students realize their career potential and there are various ways to do it. One way is to help them with their job search by reviewing their application materials, and doing interview prep,” Gerber said. He also acknowledges providing “a little networking boost to help them realize their potential and their aspirations,” when he is able.

“We’re in the business of raising aspirations, so we also have to support those aspirations,” Gerber said. “Students come here because they want to be lawyers or advance their professional careers in other ways. Doing everything to help them achieve that is critical to the mission of the school.”

Because it involves Gerber, though, that critical mission has spun off in unexpected directions. It is part of Brooklyn Law School lore that Gerber once gave a student the socks off his own feet to wear for a job interview.

“There was a student in the 1980s who came into my office on the way to an interview wearing beige silk socks and I told him, ‘You can’t wear those,’” Gerber said. The student insisted that they were expensive Italian silk socks, which they were. “They looked like something he would wear to go clubbing in Milan. They were exactly right for that, but not for a job interview. I told him ‘We’re switching socks.’”

The student relented, received the job offer, and an emergency attire tradition was born.

“I keep extra socks in my office for students who need them,” Gerber said. “I also have a Louis Vuitton tie, blue, which must be worn with a white shirt. We call it the Magic Tie. When students wear it on interviews, they usually get hired.’”

A Fun-Focused Family in Missouri

Gerber grew up in University City, Mo., near St. Louis, one of four children in a family of colorful characters who valued helping others and maintaining a sense of humor. “It was a laugh a minute. One sister, three brothers, lots of dogs,” Gerber said. His brother Steve Gerber was a comic-book writer and the creator of the satiric Marvel Comics character Howard the Duck, among others.

It’s not hard to see the early influence of his parents on the professor, who is known for his wit and for helping students in high-stakes situations. His father, Leonard, performed stand-up comedy in Chicago and then joined the Cavalry before enlisting in the Army Air Corps (now the U.S. Air Force) after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was an officer in World War II and, after his plane was shot down, spent 18 months in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany until being liberated in 1945, on May 1, which is, coincidentally, the day Gerber was born years later. “He taught me how to tell a story,” Gerber said.

His mother, Bernice, wanted to attend college to become a journalist, but she would have needed a scholarship, as her father, who owned several retail women’s-wear stores, lost his business during the Depression. A college dean who could have helped his mother achieve her dream failed to do so—a lesson her son did not forget.

“When she told the dean about her career goal, the dean said, ‘That’s no career for a woman,’” Gerber recalled. “My mother was a very smart woman whose aspirations were dampened.”

A fondness for words runs in the family. Gerber earned a degree in English and journalism from New York University (NYU) and worked briefly in publishing before attending NYU Law School. In his first year of law school, he married Carol Colman, a nonfiction author, who has written 36 books, including several bestsellers. Her most recent release is Girl Decoded: A Scientist's Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology, which she co-authored with the book’s subject, Rana el Kaliouby. He and Colman, often guests at the weddings of his mentees over the years, celebrate their own 50th anniversary this year, on Nov. 29. Their son, Josh Gerber ’13, is married with three children.

The Mentor’s Mentors

Gerber has benefited from multiple mentors, who became part of his ongoing circle. The first was his high school English teacher, Mary Angelides, now in her 80s. “She taught me how to write,” Gerber said. Another was Hon. Roy Babitt, the chief bankruptcy judge of the Southern District of New York, for whom Gerber interned when he was an NYU Law School student. “I interned for him, and we remained friends for the rest of his life,” said Gerber, who was asked to deliver the eulogy at Judge Babitt’s funeral in October 2019.

Gerber says that many of his mentors have Brooklyn Law School connections. He served for decades as an Associate Dean to both Dean David G. Trager and Dean Joan G. Wexler, whose influence, he said, was enormous. Three of his other mentors were, coincidentally, Brooklyn Law School alumni whom he met while working as an associate attorney at the firm then known as Proskauer Rose Goetz & Mendelsohn from 1977 to 1980.

One was George G. Gallantz ’35, the firm’s litigation department chair who taught him “that ‘mentor’ is two-thirds of ‘tormentor,’” recalls Gerber. After becoming a professor at Brooklyn Law School, Gerber helped encourage Gallantz and Robert M. Kaufman ’57, another Proskauer partner and former President of the New York City Bar Association, to join the school’s Board of Trustees. A third Brooklyn Law graduate mentor was a more senior Proskauer associate, Bruce E. Fader ’74, who would later become a Proskauer partner. How Gerber became a bankruptcy expert is, by his telling, kind of a funny story. While at Proskauer as a first-year associate, he was asked to attend an organizational meeting of creditors in a major retail bankruptcy case on behalf of a bank that the firm was representing as local counsel. Because he had interned for a bankruptcy judge, he was presumed to have a good amount of expertise in the area, which he says was not quite true. In a room filled with hundreds of attorneys and their clients, “I asked the one question that I knew to ask,” Gerber recalled. Apparently, it was a very good question. “After that, 25 other bankers wanted to know if I could represent them.”

Although Gerber worked on an occasional bankruptcy matter, he was primarily a litigator, working on antitrust, securities, and intellectual property cases.

Most of Gerber’s professional life has been on the faculty of Brooklyn Law School, and with Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn he has also taught bankruptcy law at Columbia Law School for more than a decade. He loves teaching and writing, and the challenge of managing a complicated organization, and he found a career that allowed him to do all three, Gerber says.

Gerber joined the Law School as a writing instructor. When Dean I. Leo Glasser asked him if he wanted to add a doctrinal course to his teaching menu during the second semester, Gerber noticed that no one was teaching the Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization course that appeared in the course catalog. After Dean Glasser gave Gerber the go-ahead, Gerber realized that there was no law school casebook on the subject, and he would have to write one. So, he did. The book, Business Reorganizations, is now used in law schools throughout the United States. He is also a contributing author of Collier on Bankruptcy, the leading treatise on bankruptcy law. Gerber is the director of the Law School’s Business Boot Camp, and he helps Professor Ted Janger lead the Barry L. Zaretsky Roundtable Discussion. In January, Gerber is being inducted as a fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy, the latest chapter in a career focus that he never expected.

“Bankruptcy found me,” Gerber said. And each year that he teaches bankruptcy law, it seems to find his students too, often to their own surprise, as was the case with Michael Simmons ’20, who fully intended to become an entertainment attorney before he met Gerber and interned for two bankruptcy judges and clerked for two others.

“At the end of every semester, at the end of every course, I tell students to be open to serendipity,” Gerber said. “Whether they’re open to it or not, they’re always subject to it. And often, but not always, it’s a positive force. Life is full of surprises and most of them are pretty good.”