I found a nice little niche, which is the financial services area, of course. The clients are all very well educated, interesting people, well traveled and generally good managers. It’s been a really great experience to be able to deal with these people that are interesting and become friends.
I don’t know if I’d say ‘father of international banking in Florida,’ but I’ve certainly been at the head of the parade.
The firm had four very small, community-bank clients, and I started doing securities work for them. Then there were some banking questions. There was nobody at the firm, so I jumped in.
In the early ’60s, Florida-chartered banks weren’t allowed to operate outside of a single county. You can imagine the constraints that put on the growth of banks. A good part of my career I spent trying to break those barriers down. We had a lot of creative ideas that really did help break down the barriers to interstate banking for Florida as well as for the country.
I started off to be a journalist. I started off as a copy boy at the St. Petersburg Times. I worked there for five years in the summers as an intern on the sports desk, features, ultimately in the Clearwater bureau on the police beat. It was a super experience. Started when I was in high school and went through college. The newsroom was quite a place. Sitting there with one of those old typewriters facing a deadline. Everybody had a cigarette hanging out of their mouth.
I did a law and MBA degree combined. I moved down from New York, came down here just at the right time. The best thing that ever happened to me was moving to Miami at the time when I did. It was just beginning to bloom.
My reading time is limited. A lot of it’s travel oriented. I like to travel in offbeat, out of the way places. In Asia, I read Burmese Days by George Orwell, which I found to be really very interesting. Then for the Galapagos, it’s Eden Undone. It’s about a German couple in the ’30s that went off to a deserted island in the Galapagos.
“I don’t think about legacies, I think about trying to do a good job for each client and assist them in expanding their businesses and being a good steward in being involved in the management of the firm.”
We’re still a Florida firm, and that’s a conscious choice. We have eight offices, so we cover the state.
In a world where increasingly the practice of law has become more corporate and more regimented, more like accounting firms, it’s been a really nice place to practice.
Having so many major, world-class banks show up in Florida has helped groom the climate for financial services. I think that’s helped build the infrastructure for the rest of the financial center activity that’s moved here — both interstate banking and broker dealers and investment advisors.
The practices become more and more sophisticated as these financial institutions and hedge fund managers and securities brokers and asset managers have increasingly arrived. Just incredible amounts of money. Young hedge fund managers making millions. If you walk down Brickell at night, it used to be deserted, and now it’s just packed with young families and kids.
We started representing (Henry) Flagler and (Barron) Collier. So we’ve been involved, I can say fairly, in the development of all this from the mangroves to what it is now. We’re continuing to be involved in the development of South Florida and Florida as a center of economic activity.
We have a little place down in Key Largo. I found that it’s been a lifesaver to get down there on weekends. It’s boating, windsurfing and so on. It’s sort of a tree house, because the walls, they’re sliders. So you can basically open all the sliders, and the breeze comes through from the bay.
I use ChatGPT a lot. I think it’s just an incredible world changer, the whole AI thing. It’s going to make a big difference in the practice of law. Huge difference.
One of the things I do is take my youngest son on these father-son bonding trips every year. The last one was Roman history. … We did Sicily and all the Roman ruins, Naples and the archaeological museum in Naples and Herculaneum and Pompeii and all that. It really comes alive when you read Edward Gibbon’s account of what happened. It’s sort of my vacation reading.
I served as chairman of the executive committee for 35 or 40 years, and now I’ve stepped aside for the younger guys to have a shot at it.
There are interesting people from all over the world here. We’re able to attract good lawyers to the firm. The weather’s great. What more could I want?
How lucky I’ve been. I think I’m at the top of my game. I think I finally learned how to do it.