For someone who wasn't sure if he wanted to be a lawyer when he started law school, attorney Eric Vallone of Vallone Law sure loves his job. And he's good at it too.

With his father, Jim, being the attorney who started the firm, folks might think it was a foregone conclusion that Eric would follow his Dad into law and join him in the practice. But it wasn’t.

“My first thought was to go to medical school,” he says of choosing a career path when he started his undergraduate degree at Canisius College. But he wasn’t feeling the love for the science involved, he says, and changed majors, ending up with a bachelor’s in history.

So “with a history degree that wasn’t really worth much,” he decided to take a couple of years off to decide what was next. That next turned out to be entering law school at the University of Buffalo.

“I figured even if I didn't become a lawyer, I would end up with a lot of skills that were really valuable.”

While he wasn’t sure the path his law career would take when he graduated, it didn’t necessarily include joining his father’s practice. But a week after passing the state bar exam, his father called. Jim had just been appointed a judge in Cheektowaga’s Justice Court and needed Eric’s help in handling cases while he served.

At the time, Eric says the firm was in general practice, handling family and matrimonial law, criminal defense, traffic violations, real estate and just about everything else. “Whoever ended up calling me and needed help, I tried to help them.”

Since real estate law was what he most enjoyed and was a growing segment of the firm’s business, he decided to focus on it.

Over the years he’s advised thousands of buyers and sellers, investors and others in residential and commercial real estate transactions and worked with private and institutional lenders.

In addition to real estate, he works with clients on estate planning, planning for nursing homes and elder law issues. He also represents executors, administrators and beneficiaries during the probate process.

“I think one of my skills is making complicated things relatively simple or at least as simple as they can be,” he says.

While many real estate transactions lend themselves to being simple, others, like a transaction he is currently working on, can get complicated quickly.

That transaction, in which a client is purchasing a commercial property, was moving smoothly until research discovered the seller had a mortgage on the property that the buyer didn’t know about. Worse yet, the seller had not been paying the mortgage and the property ended up in foreclosure. 

“It could have ended up in a disaster for the buyer,” Eric says, but he was able to contact the lender involved and work things out. It now looks like the purchase will be saved for the buyer.

Eric is one of two partners at Vallone Law, the other being his sister, Gina Vallone-Bacon, whose primary practice areas are matrimonial and family law, although each helps the other out when needed. They lost their father in January.

While Eric says he learned a lot from his Dad, he also learned some key lessons in better ways to do things—at least for himself.

“We had different personalities,” he says, explaining he thinks things through before reacting to a situation whereas his Dad tended to react and then think things through.

“If you're acting like something is an emergency it will become an emergency,” he says. “If you take a step back and look at things, maybe a solution will present itself that might not be obvious at first.”

In addition to his day job, Eric is also a board member of GROW Buffalo, the nonprofit he started during the pandemic with a mission to help small business owners. He also serves on the executive committee of the Good Government Club of Western New York and the Erie County Bar Association’s Real Property Committee. 

He and his wife, Amanda, are parents to two sons, Aiden, 8, and Xander, 5, whose primary form of entertainment, Eric says, seems to be beating each other up. As for his wife, his favorite thing about her “is how she’s always pushing me to be a better version of myself.”

And while he loves his profession and is very good at it, he says there’s something he wants to be even better at—being a good and loving husband and father.