Dennis Phillips

Phillips, Dennis
GLENS FALLS - Dennis J. Phillips, a senior partner at the law firm of McPhillips, Fitzgerald & Cullum LLP, died on February 7, at his home in Glens Falls. He was 79.
The cause was complications from congestive heart failure.
A lifetime advocate for and litigator of Adirondack property rights, he also specialized in forestry law, tax law, corporate law, and trusts and estates. He was a founding member of the Adirondack Fairness Coalition in 1990. He made headlines in 2016 when he likened a canoeist's trespassing on private property in Brandreth Park to Hitler's invasion of Poland.
He would go on to win the case in the New York State Court of Appeals.
Born in Lowville, New York, on August 2, 1945, he was the son of Elizabeth Phillips (Masterson), a librarian, and George Phillips, an agricultural machine parts salesman. He grew up with two older brothers, Peter and Joe; and three younger sisters, Ellen, Maria and Margaret.
He spent his childhood hunting and fishing the forests and streams of the Tug Hill Plateau and western Adirondacks with his childhood best friends, Jim Schoff and Bill Schoff. In high school, he excelled in football, basketball and track, and worked part-time to support his single mother as a surveyor, a shoe shiner, and a chicken coop cleaner.
After graduating from Lowville Academy in 1963, he attended Albany State for two years before transferring to St. Lawrence University, where he lettered in varsity football and track, graduating in 1967 with a B.A. in History. He then worked for the Lewis County Probation Department for a year before attending law school at Fordham University in Manhattan, receiving his J.D. in 1972, followed by an LL.M. in Tax Law from NYU in 1973. While in law school, he supported himself by working at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, first as a history teacher and then as assistant headmaster to Dr. Donald Barr, father of future US Attorney General William Barr. At the Dalton School, he also met a young music teacher named Patricia Smith, whom he married after four years of secret courtship at the aptly-named Cleverdale Church on Lake George, N.Y., in 1974.
He and Pat moved to Glens Falls that year, where he learned the legal profession under his longtime friend and mentor Bernard McPhillips at the same firm where he would practice law for almost 50 years. A member of the New York State Bar Association, he also served as the president of the Lake George Opera Festival and was a member of the Empire State Forest Products Association. He was also on the board of the Hyde Collection, the Charles R. Wood Foundation, and the Adirondack Experience - The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake.