Kosta Ligris’s entrepreneurial vision started earlier than most. Ligris, JD ’01, an MBA-wielding lawyer and serial entrepreneur, got his first glimpse of the business world as a child working at his immigrant father’s dry-cleaning shop in Brookline.
Ligris’s dad, who had been a tailor in Athens, Greece, reinvented himself stateside, and Kosta and his younger brother, Nik, JD ’11, used to spend Saturdays at the shop. “As soon as we were old enough to see over the counter, we both worked in the family business,” Kosta jokes. “I suspect it was a violation of child labor laws.”
That time behind the counter would prove pivotal in shaping Ligris’s entrepreneurial spirit. Today, Ligris is on a mission to make complex legal and financial transactions easier, safer, and more accessible as the co-founder of Stavvy, an online platform designed to simplify mortgage lending, which won Tech in Motion’s Timmy Award for the 2021 Best Tech Startup in Boston. Ligris launched Stavvy (named for his father, Stavros) after successfully overseeing more than $50 billion in commercial and residential real estate transactions as an attorney with his own firm.
Ligris is a whirlwind of energy with a palpable passion for entrepreneurship, innovation, and the law. Beyond Stavvy, he mentors, advises, and invests in fintech startups as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. He’s an engaged civic and fundraising leader who sits on numerous boards, including the Suffolk University Board of Trustees. He’s a member of the Suffolk Law Dean’s Cabinet, and serves on various hospital boards, including Beth Israel Lahey. He’s also a Renaissance man—an amateur photographer, art lover, foodie, movie buff, politics junkie, and die-hard Boston sports fan. At the center of it all is a deep-seated belief in humanity, a relentless curiosity, and what seems like an unquenchable desire to connect, collaborate, engage, and empower.
Not long after he became dean in 2015, Suffolk University Law School Dean Andrew Perlman met with a colleague who told him that Ligris was someone he should get to know. The two sat down over breakfast and quickly bonded over a shared passion for innovation and challenging the status quo.
“Kosta is restless, in the sense of having a boundless energy and not wanting to do things the way they’ve always been done,” Perlman says. “He is constantly reimagining and re-envisioning.”
Ligris inherited his drive from his parents, who emigrated from Greece to the US in the late 1970s and raised him and Nik in Jamaica Plain and Newton while running their own business. Ligris says his father inspired him to take risks and find his own path through life.
“I think he always had a passion for creating your own opportunities, and being in control of your destiny,” says Ligris, who endowed a scholarship to benefit Law School students in his father’s memory.
Ligris played a big part in his father’s destiny too.
Because his English was better than his father’s, Kosta was taking an active role in the family’s business affairs by the time he was 14, helping translate complicated banking and financial transactions for his parents. He saw firsthand the struggles immigrants face trying to navigate industries that didn’t accommodate outsiders. And when he wasn’t alphabetizing accounts payable or setting up the cleaner’s credit card accounts, he was picking up “soft skills” from his father: building relationships, networking, and creating opportunities to help others.
He now credits that early exposure to his family’s business challenges with his decision to go to law school. “I think there was sort of an innate passion there to help others,” he says.
After completing an undergraduate degree in human physiology and chemistry at Boston University—he was the first in his family to go to college—Ligris enrolled at Suffolk University Law School, ready to put that passion into practice. “Being first generation, and growing up with English as a second language, can make you feel like an underdog and like others have a leg up on you,” he says. “Going to graduate school and earning a professional degree not only gives you a sense of accomplishment, but also the confidence to pursue your dreams.”
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Photograph by Adam DeTour
FEATURES
| Fall 2022
By Janelle Nanos
‘Responsible innovation means making sure that whatever we build not only helps underserved communities but also doesn’t create new obstacles in the process.’
—Kosta Ligris, JD ’01
Ligris reveled in both Suffolk Law’s location in the “heartbeat of downtown,” and the real-life experiences of its faculty. He cites the program’s dynamism as being particularly well-suited to first-generation law students.
“One of the great things about Suffolk is that it gave me the flexibility and opportunity to continue working part time, so that I could help mitigate some of the costs of my education,” he says.
Ligris had planned to tap into his undergraduate STEM training to become a patent lawyer for biotech firms once he passed the bar, but by graduation, the dot-com bubble had burst and opportunities at those firms had evaporated.
“I had to quickly reinvent myself and figure out what was next,” he says, adding that Suffolk had trained him well to do just that.
In the early 2000s, Ligris landed at a shared office building in Brookline—“it was a primitive WeWork”—where he practiced alongside other attorneys who sent him their overflow business, handling everything from collection work to criminal cases. He eventually took a particular interest in transactional real estate and parlayed that into his law firm, the eponymous Ligris, and ACES Title Agency, which together have accounted for over $50 billion in commercial and residential real estate transactions up and down the East Coast over the last decade.
But Ligris wasn’t done learning. He decided to bolster his business skills with an MBA from MIT. And it was there, he says, that he realized that some of the same troubles his father faced as an immigrant business owner could be solved through technology.
In 2019, he and his MIT classmate Josh Feinblum co-founded Stavvy. Its all-in-one secure platform simplifies workflows for real estate transactions that have been difficult to execute digitally, like mortgages and foreclosures. Stavvy tools include remote online notarization, secure digital communications, electronic document recording, e-signatures, and more. The goal, he says, is to enable smaller banks and financial institutions, many of which serve small business owners like his father, to compete with the bigger financial behemoths. He’s particularly proud of Stavvy’s ability to provide bilingual translators to assist its users.
“One of the things I talk about a lot is responsible innovation,” he says, “which is making sure that whatever it is that we’re building is not only helping underserved, underbanked, or underrepresented communities but also not creating new obstacles in the process.”
Ligris has brought that same approach to supporting innovation at Suffolk Law as a member of the Dean’s Cabinet. “We are so grateful for his contributions, not just his philanthropy but also his eagerness to help us reimagine what we could do with the same spirit he has brought to innovating in every place he’s been,” Perlman says.
Adds Suffolk President Marisa Kelly, “Kosta brings his natural curiosity and unique insight to his work as an engaged member of the Board of Trustees. He is always asking the right questions to help the University advance its mission."
If it’s been a tough time to run a new business, first with the pandemic and now ongoing financial uncertainty, Ligris says he’s still comfortable being uncomfortable as he prepares for what’s ahead. His time at Suffolk reinforced the hardworking instinct he developed as a child as well as his adaptability.
“I’m Suffolk-ready,” he says.