More than 25 years in practice and today head of the Family Law Department at the Jericho-based firm Meister Seelig & Fein, Samuel J. Ferrara has long been one of Long Island’s leading matrimonial lawyers.

Ferrara - poised, tough and charismatic - brings a true sense of duty to his clients and to the law, peers say. He’s well known and well liked in the state’s divorce bar, and he’s already a leader ay Meister Seelig, which he joined in mid-2023. “I’ve been very fortunate,” says Ferrara, “to have mentors, to be in the right place at the right time.”

Peers say there’s more to it than that: Ferrara is tenacious and aggressive, a confident trial attorney, who has an almost solemn reverence for his work. “Divorce attorneys get knocked around a bit, but I think what we do is honorable.”

Growing up outside Rochester, and attending college in Boston, Ferrara has an upstate plain-spokenness about him, which has served him well in the contentious world he practices in today. Ambitious but unpretentious, “no two ways about it, I was a working class-kid,” Ferrara worked his way through college by managing restaurants and selling t-shirts to businesses.

That sense of initiative hasn’t left him: “I’m pretty good on my feet. My idea of a lawyer was a trial lawyer, and that’s the basis for my work today.” Ferrara received valuable experience working with matrimonial law leader Stephen Schlissel, while at a Mineola firm, his first job out of Hofstra Law School. (“He was an amazing mentor and teacher.”)

Today Ferrara is the key family-law litigator in Long Island courtrooms.

When he isn’t working - or teaching night classes at one of three law schools - Ferrara focuses on his family, including his wife and two teenage children, at their West Islip, New York, home.