$10 million gift: Joe Plumeri gives Law School’s entrepreneurs a lawyer

New York Law School announced that Joe Plumeri, the insurance and banking executive who has spent six decades turning improbable openings into empires, has committed $10 million to expand The Plumeri Center for Small Business Empowerment, the school’s hub for free legal help to entrepreneurs, small business owners, veterans, and neighborhood merchants.

The gift makes Plumeri, an NYLS trustee and honorary degree recipient, one of the school’s largest donors in its 135-year history, bringing his total giving to more than $15.5 million since 2015.

The commitment carries a mission statement rather than a naming plaque: Achieving the American Dream Through Entrepreneurship. That phrase is not institutional boilerplate in his case. Plumeri was born in 1943 in a row house in North Trenton, the son of a working-class Italian American family, and his philanthropy has always argued that the ladder he climbed should stay bolted to the wall for everyone else.

The money will do concrete things. It expands the Center’s clinical capacity, meaning more students are admitted each year into transactional law clinics and more sophisticated deals are handled for clients who otherwise cannot afford counsel. It underwrites the Tribeca Community and Economic Development Plan, deepening NYLS’s partnership with the Tribeca Alliance and advancing One Tribeca, a law school-led effort to explore a Business Improvement District in the neighborhood the school has occupied for generations.

It launches a Name, Image, and Likeness Clinic for student athletes, collectives, and emerging ventures navigating endorsement contracts, branding, compliance, intellectual property, and tax exposure, an area where the legal infrastructure has lagged badly behind the money. It creates an Entrepreneur-in-Residence program, embedding a seasoned founder inside the Center to mentor students and clients and to open networks of investors and business leaders.

And it funds new partnerships with nonprofits, government agencies, universities, and private-sector players, plus public programming and thought leadership on the policies that make entrepreneurship possible.

The Center already has a track record to build on. In the 18 months since Plumeri’s 2024 gift reoriented existing clinics around small business empowerment, its affiliated programs—the Nonprofit and Small Business Clinic, the PTO Patent Law Clinic, the PTO Trademark Clinic and the Veterans Justice Clinic—handled 80 legal matters and delivered more than 10,000 hours of supervised legal assistance through the work of more than 30 law students. It also stood up a first-of-its-kind Gig Economy Project, building legal research resources and convening policymakers, regulators, advocates, and business leaders around New York’s fast-growing contingent workforce and the small businesses that depend on it.

“Entrepreneurs embody the drive, resilience, and optimism that power the American Dream,” Plumeri said in the announcement. “I have been so impressed by the work of The Plumeri Center already in giving small business owners access to the knowledge, counsel, business advice, and relationships that can help them turn hard work into lasting opportunity.”

Anthony W. Crowell, dean and president of New York Law School, framed the gift as both civic and biographical. “Joe Plumeri’s inspiring life and career embody the American Dream, coming from a working-class immigrant family in Trenton, reaching extraordinary heights in business, and dedicating himself to philanthropy that makes sure others are able to achieve their dreams as well,” Crowell said, adding that the commitment would extend the school’s role as “an anchor institution” for Tribeca and Lower Manhattan and establish “a best-in-class model for how law schools can support their local communities.”

Plumeri’s relationship with the school is unusual and, in its way, the whole point. In 1968, while enrolled as a student at New York Law School, he walked into the Wall Street offices of Carter, Berlind & Weill and asked for a job.

The firm would eventually become Citigroup. He never practiced law; he became one of American finance’s great closers instead, spending 32 years at Citigroup and its predecessors, serving as president and managing partner of Shearson Lehman Brothers, chairman and CEO of Travelers Primerica Financial Services, vice chairman of the Travelers Group, and CEO of Citibank North America, where he led the integration of the consumer businesses of Citicorp and Travelers. In October 2000 he took over Willis Group Holdings, then owned by KKR, as its first non-British chief executive and its first leader never groomed in insurance, and returned the company to public markets in 2001.

He ran it for roughly 13 years, was twice named to Treasury & Risk’s list of the 100 most influential people in finance, and later became vice chairman of First Data’s board. The school he attended but did not graduate from awarded him an honorary degree in 2015; he sits on its board.

The giving history is long and pointedly personal.

At the College of William & Mary, his undergraduate alma mater, he funded the baseball stadium named for his father, Samuel J. Plumeri Sr., committed $2 million in 2008 to create the Plumeri Awards for Faculty Excellence, endowed business and athletic scholarships, renovated the residence now known as Plumeri House, and ran a pro-am golf tournament that raised well over $2 million for Olympic sports; the college gave him an honorary doctorate in 2011, and his commencement address that year, “Go Play in Traffic,” was cited by The New York Times and NPR among the best of the year.

He was lead donor and honorary chairman of the Make-A-Wish New Jersey capital campaign, whose $3 million gift—the first seven-figure gift in the organization’s history—built the 20,000-square-foot Samuel and Josephine Plumeri Wishing Place, named for his parents, which opened in 2011.

The hardest chapter shaped the rest. His son Christian developed anorexia at 13, at a time when eating disorders in boys were barely acknowledged, and the illness gave way to alcohol and drugs.

Christian died in November 2008 at 39. Plumeri gave $1 million to the College of Saint Rose in Albany for the Christian Plumeri Sports Complex, served on the board of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, and endowed the Plumeri Fellowship at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods for writers working at the intersection of food and health.

He wrote about the loss in his 2015 bestseller, “The Power of Being Yourself,” and directed his author proceeds to CASA Columbia and Make-A-Wish. He is also co-owner of two New Jersey minor league baseball clubs, the Trenton Thunder and the Jersey Shore BlueClaws, and has served on the boards of Mount Sinai Medical Center, the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, and the Jackie Robinson Foundation.

That context is worth holding onto here. This is not a gift to a marquee endowment or a building with his name carved above the door. It is $10 million routed into storefront leases, trademark filings, endorsement contracts, and business improvement districts—the unglamorous paperwork that decides whether a small enterprise survives its second year.

Plumeri got his start because someone let a law student in the door and gave him a chance.

The center now bearing his name is built to keep doing the same thing, one client at a time.