By Andy Roberts
The Daily Record

From her office in the dean’s suite on the first floor of the University of Nebraska College of Law, Susan Poser really can’t see that much.

“There is no view to speak of,” she said.

So much for setting a dramatic scene, but there should be no lack of excitement over Poser’s appointment in May as NU’s newest law dean. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in New York City from the age of 4, she grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan. Her mother was a social worker while her father worked for the SEC in Washington and then the American Stock Exchange. A career change led him to the classroom at Brooklyn Law School where he remains an emeritus professor. Both of her parents remain in NYC.

Poser’s post-secondary education began on the East Coast, but it didn’t stop there.

“I graduated from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1985 and then spent a year teaching English in northern Greece and another year teaching English in northern California before going to law school,” she said.  That was at California-Berkeley.

Following law school, she clerked for Chief Judge Dolores K. Sloviter of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, then practiced law in Philadelphia. She was the Zicklin Fellow in Ethics in the Legal Studies Department of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1993, Poser arrived in Lincoln when her husband, Stephen DiMagno, accepted a job at UNL as a chemistry professor.

“I had finished a judicial clerkship in Philadelphia and had practiced for one year,” she said. “I brought with me a 3-week-old baby daughter and an unwritten dissertation.”

Her first several years on the prairie were spent teaching half time at the law college, writing her dissertation, and raising her family, including a second daughter born in 1996. She went on the tenure track in 1999, receiving tenure in 2004, and becoming a full professor two years ago.

Poser admits to experiencing some culture shock upon arriving in the Midwest, but says she has grown to love living in Lincoln.

“I came to the realization that, in a way, New York is a very provincial place to grow up because one doesn’t have the opportunity, and many don’t have the interest, to learn about what this country is really like, where our food and energy come from, and the diversity of knowledge and opinion that is out there,” she said. “I still find it difficult to convince some of my friends and family that this is true.”

Given the nature of academic careers – which she says “can be very stable or very unstable” – she says she really had no idea how long she’d be in Nebraska or what would happen upon her arrival.

The couple’s daughters are in the 12^th and 9^th grades at Lincoln High School and both are in the school’s new International Baccalaureate program. During Poser’s hours away from work, she enjoys spending time with her family and attending the girls’ sports and music activities.

“I play classical piano, so I still take lessons and practice,” she said. “I’ve also been playing a fair amount of tennis lately.”

Poser will not be in the classroom this year – the schedule was set when she was appointed dean – and looks forward to a busy year that will include the recurring seven-year ABA re-accreditation process next spring.

Her boss, UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman, previously served in her new position. “It is nice to have a chancellor who understands the law college and has a natural affinity for it.”

Poser said she finds this to be an interesting time in the field of law, with the economy and technology affecting the profession in many still-to-be-determined ways.

“Many firms are cutting back and are competing with other professionals and in some cases non-lawyers,” she said.  “Firms can sometimes contract work out to people in India at a lower cost than paying an associate, and the technology in many ways creates more demands on lawyers because information is so easy to access.”

The result, she believes, is stress for lawyers, and can affect the whole idea of belonging to a distinct profession. Technology also brings with it the issues of how to adapt traditional duties of ethics and professional conduct to the profession.

Legal careers also are changing, and the idea of joining a firm as a lifelong career move is becoming less common, although it still happens and she feels perhaps more so in Nebraska than some other places.

Still, she understands that the law touches our lives in every area, for a variety of reasons.

“There are countless opportunities for our students to create interesting and rewarding careers, within or outside of traditional practice,” Poser pointed out.

She sees the College of Law’s accomplished faculty as the school’s biggest strength, especially when given its relatively small size.

“We also have a bright, motivated student body and close-knit law college community,” she said. “We have some programs that are becoming nationally known, like the LLM in Space and Telecommunications Law, our clinics, the scholarship of many of our faculty, and our client counseling program.”

There also is the newly completed facility renovation with its state-of-the-art classroom technology. In many ways, finding the resources to keep the momentum going is the biggest need.

During the next year or two, the law college will undergo a curriculum review that she expects will result in some changes to be certain that students continue to graduate from law school prepared for a modern law practice. Poser hopes the current university-wide capital campaign will enable the school to acquire more resources, offer more student scholarships and further strengthen and grow the faculty.

The College of Law has a new assistant dean of admissions, Kirk Kluver, and a new director of communications and alumni relations, Molly Brummond, both of whom Poser credits with bringing energy and innovative ideas to the mix.

“My immediate plans include bringing courses in patent law to the law college, hiring several new faculty members, and generally letting the world know what a fine institution this is,” Poser said. “The University of Nebraska College of Law is, in my opinion, a little bit too much of a well-kept secret.”