But not as tight a spot as some of its graduates, who are paying off student loans the size of mortgages and working as paralegals. "We're all devastated, and we feel like our lives are ruined," says Gail Cheatwood, a former nurse who graduated from the law school in May 2000 and now works at the Polk County Public Defender's Office interviewing clients and doing legal research. "This degree is basically worthless in terms of being able to practice law."
Cheatwood and more than 100 other graduates from the school's 2000 class are in a precarious position because admission to the Florida Bar requires applicants to have law degrees from schools that are accredited within 12 months of their graduation. In June 2000 and February 2001 the Florida Supreme Court granted petitions allowing two groups of Barry graduates to sit for the Bar exam, but their scores cannot be released unless the school gains accreditation by this month.
Though an American Bar Association committee recommended in January that Barry receive accreditation, the ABA's legal education council, which has final say, rejected that recommendation. Among other issues, the council cited the school's admission of three students with low scores on the law school aptitude test and found the school's own testing not rigorous enough. "I will have to start from scratch, and I'm 47," Cheatwood says.
'We want our money back'
Meanwhile, Cheatwood and four other graduates have filed two lawsuits accusing the school of misrepresentation and breach of contract. "At a minimum, we want our money back," says Winter Park lawyer Howard Marks, who represents Cheatwood and Robert Wilson, a Barry graduate working as a paralegal for the Orange County Public Defender. The plaintiffs are also seeking damages for lost income and lost earning capacity.
Marks says students at the school, which Miami-based Barry University bought from the University of Orlando in 1999, were led to believe that accreditation was imminent. "The law school all along had represented -- not only in the brochures, but to the students -- that it was taking all necessary steps" to achieve accreditation, Marks says. "Otherwise you're not going to spend $75,000 and three to four years of your life on a hope and a prayer. They failed woefully to live up to that representation."
The law school's dean, Stan Talcott, says the school's efforts to satisfy the American Bar Association's Council for the Section on Legal Education have been "superhuman almost" and will continue. He says it's nearly unprecedented for the council to reject the recommendation of an accreditation committee. "This is the first time, so far as I know, that the council has substituted its judgment for the committee's recommendation," he says.
School officials have asked the ABA's House of Delegates, which meets this month, to intervene, but Talcott acknowledges it's a long shot. "The higher up you have to go to get a decision, the more difficult it gets to turn the train around."
Cheatwood is not hopeful. "I think we're screwed," she says flatly. Talcott says if the school is unsuccessful, it can reapply in 10 months or perhaps sooner if a waiver can be obtained.
Lucinda Hofmann, a lawyer with Holland & Knight in Miami who represents the school, says there's still hope for the school's earliest graduates -- if the school is successful in reversing the ABA council and if the Florida Supreme Court grants a petition to make accreditation retroactive to the ABA's November 2000 site visit. That would satisfy the 12-month window. "There is a possibility," she says. "That's all it is -- a possibility."
Solicitation -- Or Invitation to Fraud?
Fort Lauderdale chiropractor Charles Bradford was fed up with handing out business cards from inside carnival booths to promote his business. So when he heard about a company that would do the work for him, he jumped at the offer.
In exchange for a fee, Prebeck Consultants agreed to furnish him with patient referrals. The relationship was never all that profitable. According to Bradford's attorney, he never got more than a half-dozen referrals and only two actual patients.
But it was enough to put Bradford on the wrong side of a 20-year-old law banning the solicitation of accident victims for the purpose of submitting auto insurance personal injury claims or making tort claims. In 1996, he was arrested and charged with a third-degree felony. Bradford was not alone. At least a dozen other chiropractors around the state were similarly charged as part of a sweep by the statewide prosecutor's office and the Florida Department of Insurance.
But now the Florida Supreme Court says Bradford was engaging in commercial speech protected by the First Amendment. Because the law makes such a solicitation a crime without requiring any evidence of intent to commit insurance fraud, it's unconstitutional, the court held in its unanimous opinion. "While the statute, as drafted, may prevent or deter fraud, its criminal net also captures legitimate and otherwise lawful conduct," Justice Fred Lewis wrote in the opinion. "There is absolutely nothing sinister" about presenting honest and legitimate requests for compensation from a PIP carrier or filing a tort claim based on damages sustained in an automobile accident.
Insurance fraud investigators complain that the ruling will hamper their efforts to deter insurance fraud because it's difficult to dispute a chiropractor's findings or to prove that a particular treatment was unnecessary. They say chiropractors are a key link in the insurance fraud web because they can provide unscrupulous attorneys with a finding of permanent injury -- the ticket to a fat insurance settlement.
"You get a chiropractor to give a personal injury lawyer a permanent injury report and that lawyer has got the insurance company" at a serious disadvantage, says Charles Gowland, an attorney in the insurance department's fraud division.
But Bradford's attorney, Michael Dutko of Fort Lauderdale, says it ought to be difficult to bring such charges. "You can't make it too easy for investigators and prosecutors because you end up ensnaring innocent people." That's what happened to his client, he says. Despite the fact that prosecutors conceded there was no evidence that Bradford had any fraudulent intent, he ended up facing the possibility of five years in prison.
The opinion joins a long line of appellate court opinions skeptical of broad limitations on commercial speech. In 1993, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Florida law banning in-person solicitation by accountants. The court, however, has upheld the Florida Bar's prohibition against lawyers soliciting personal injury or wrongful death clients within 30 days of an accident.
Seeking Diversity
South Florida's biggest law firms are being pushed to do something about the abysmal number of black lawyers on their partner lists. The pressure is coming from the Dade County Black Lawyers Association and some powerful advocates. In May, former 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Joseph Hatchett took law firm partners to task for their failure to recruit more black lawyers into their ranks.
Hatchett's remarks at a law firm luncheon came in the wake of a study by the black lawyers organization that showed only nine black partners among the 1,500 or so lawyers in the Miami offices of 35 major law firms -- just four more than there were a decade ago.
Law firm leaders say the problem is not one of intent. They say it is difficult to recruit top black candidates because they are in demand all over the country. But Jason Murray, a black partner at Carlton Fields in Miami and the Black Lawyers Association's immediate past president, doesn't buy it. He says many big Florida law firms never even make a recruiting stop at predominantly black Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C., which counts Hatchett, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Florida Supreme Court Justice Leander Shaw among its alumni. "There are fabulous legal minds a lot of these law firms didn't even look at," Murray says.
The Black Lawyers Association plans to follow up its study with a look at south Florida's hiring record among public sector lawyers.