Nothing recharges the battery like a trip to warm and sunny Florida in the middle of winter.
I just returned from a week in Miami, where I get to see several classmates and friends who are practicing in the area and meet several other alumni.
I have been trying to convince Lu Alvarez '88 and Dean Mahoney that opening a satellite office for the Foundation in Miami from mid-December to mid-March is a smart and sensible thing to do. Several of the alumni I met make Miami their winter home and I can’t understand why I can’t do the same. I remember calling my mother one of the days I was there and telling her it was cold outside. She asked me the temperature and as I looked at the dashboard of my car and told her that it was 60 degrees, I remembered cold is a relative term. It was 4 degrees where she was.
We have a little more than 120 alumni in the greater Miami area. The list I have includes Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and all the cities in between.
My classmate Samantha Kavanaugh ’96 helped me organize a breakfast for local alumni at Akerman Senterfitt. We had 12 people at the breakfast. It was an excellent networking opportunity for our local alumni and a great opportunity for me to share the state of the Law School through a PowerPoint presentation that I had put together.
Despite the great winter weather, the sentiment from our alumni in Miami is the same as it is in other areas of the country. Lawyers are anxious about the economy and worried about their employment opportunities. The news of firm layoffs and closings travels quickly in the legal circles and Miami is not immune to the stormy economic weather that other cities are enduring.
I did get to visit with Josh Hartshorn ’08 and his wife, Sarah. For those of you who don’t know, Sarah
worked with us at the Foundation in the accounting and finance department while Josh was in Law School. She was loved by everyone at the Foundation and we were all sad to see her leave when Josh accepted a position as an associate at White & Case in Miami. When we had Sarah’s going away party in June of last year, we all were discussing how much we would miss her and what life at the Foundation would be like without her. Secretly, I was happy. I had already begun planning a visit to Miami in the winter.
