Thank you very much, and welcome to everybody. Listening to John speaking about the people we need to thank really drove it home for me, and I think for all of you too. Before going further, I think it’s appropriate that we, right from the get-go, thank the people who have put up with us—the unsung heroes in our lives who have enabled us to get to these 50 years. That’s our families.
I’m Billy Anderson, down here with some folks. They’ve put up with us, put up with me. As John said, we were late to dinner, missed dinners, missed suppers, missed games, missed recitals. Even when we were there, we weren’t always truly present; we were thinking about our cases, thinking about our clients. I believe they are the ones we need to truly recognize. Members, please rise.
Today, I’d like to take a look at where we’ve been in the past, where we are now, and what the future holds. I can’t get over 50 years; I don’t know how that happened, but we’ve made it—isn’t that something? Let’s take a little walk down memory lane for a minute. Our past president, Roland Sanchez Medina, was kind enough to organize this program. Let me share this with you: this is a big deal. I can’t even see the back of the room, and there are so many people here.
Let me show you what it was like in the past. In the 1980s and 1990s, I was on the Board of Governors, and we started doing these 50-year lunches. John, we started doing that some years ago. Nobody wanted to be involved. We didn’t have a senior committee like you, and we didn’t have a program. So I was asked if I would kind of moderate it. It was similar to what you did. It was a bittersweet affair. There were maybe three or four tables—20, 25 people who were 50-year lawyers. Looking out at the room, it was, gosh, kind of painful. People were not in good health. Some were unable to get up to receive the award because they’d never be able to navigate the room. So I didn’t have many, and I’d call their name, go out there, hand it to them, and have a photo opportunity. I think, for the most part, they weren’t even aware of it.
I want to contrast that with today. After a few years, I noticed more and more people in the audience. Then, one year, after about five or seven years of doing that, I looked and saw a lawyer I had a case against. The guy was a great lawyer, and he was giving me a hard time, really challenging me. He said, “Well, no, he was a 50-year lawyer.” I said, “How can that be? You can’t be 50!” That was crazy. I couldn’t believe it. That was the beginning of a sea change, where year after year, I would see great lawyers, like I see in this room today, who are still, like me, in the trenches. I don’t know why or how it is, but somehow we all gained about 20 years. I truly believe that 50 is the new 30. This room bears it out, doesn’t it? I’m seeing friends and people I’ve had cases against.
So, anyway, let’s continue that walk down memory lane a little bit. John, remember that? It’s hard to believe, because, you know, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing now, whether you choose to practice law, you’ve earned your due. We’ve all earned our future. So, if you’re practicing, if you’re teaching, if you’re mediating, being an arbitrator, traveling, spending time with your family—whatever it is, it’s a great thing. But think about how far we’ve come in the practice of law. Do you remember those old typewriters? And think about our poor secretaries; they couldn’t make typographical mistakes. Remember White-Out when we started? It showed you were a prosperous law firm. That was a big deal. Then they came out with the IBM Selectric II, and that was even more advanced. I guess they’re in a museum now. You couldn’t sell them for any money; nobody wants them.
Looking at this, I’ll take a moment. An old-fashioned phone like this… I’ll share this with you. I don’t want to just talk about myself, but everyone has their own stories. It was a phone like that that actually got me my first job. Think back on your first job. I came to Miami; I didn’t know a soul. Maybe some of you are from Florida, and I didn’t know anybody, and I didn’t have a job. I figured I’d go by the placement department at the U.S., but I didn’t go to school there, so they said, “No, sorry, can’t help you.” They had a bulletin board outside with all these great jobs there, but they were in code, and I didn’t have access to that.
I was standing there for a long time when a student came out, opened the bulletin board, and put up a three-by-five card. It had a job as a law clerk at a firm in downtown Miami. I don’t know if you all remember Night, Peers, Hoover, Pickle, and Amal and Flynn. The reason it had the name and phone number was because it was for 10 hours a week and five dollars. It was such a job that nobody wanted. They let me use that phone, and I talked to an assistant. They said, “Yeah, come on down,” and I got directions. Fifty bucks a week didn’t get you very far, but at least it was something. I was able to study for the bar, pass the bar, and they said, “Okay, we’ll make you an associate.” That’s great. I said, “How much am I going to get paid?” They said, “$6 an hour.” [Audience laughing] Making $12,000.
Being in the courtroom—we all have different specialties, transactional law, but that was my first job, so I stuck with it. If you went into the courtroom, that’s the way it looked. It was all men. It was all white males. That’s how it was in 1975. Seeing that picture brought back so many memories of how it was when we started. I asked the head of our Florida Bar Long Range Planning, our staff member, Derry Hill C. Marquillion, who knows him well, Mike Garcia. I said, “Tell me about the demographics in 1975 of our members of the Florida Bar.” This is what he told me: In 1975, it was about 98% white males. That was the demographic. And I said, “Well, gosh, I suppose what was the Florida Bar in 1975?” It was 17,000 members. How many members are there today? This year, it’s expected there will be 117,000 members of the Florida Bar. Can you imagine that?
He said, “Well, the population in the whole state was just about eight million people.” Well, how many do we have now? We’re pushing 25 million people and counting. This is the third most populous state in the United States. Oh, that’s amazing. When we started, when it was just 8 million people—gosh, we have more than half that amount, probably, in South Florida—but when we started, Florida was still very much a rural society.
I don’t know how many of you are from South Florida, but obviously from all around the state. In South Florida, you think of big Miami and Miami Beach, but if you went just a little further south, it was farms. If you got down into Homestead, which is Miami-Dade County, it was all farms, growing tomatoes and lettuce. It was like South Georgia; it was very rural. Let me give an example, see if this doesn’t ring some bells, especially for some people from North and Central Florida. It was rural. My very first week on the job, I had to go down to the courthouse to check a file, and I thought I’d watch a trial. I walked in, and it turned out to be a case where a farmer in Homestead was on a wagon, had a horse pulling the wagon—this was done then. And a pickup truck had been kind of careless and hit the wagon.
When I got there, the defense lawyer had the police officer on the stand, and he says to the police officer, “Well, now, did you go to the scene?” He says, “Yeah.” He says, “Did you talk to this farmer?” He says, “Yeah.” And he looked at the jury and says, “Here’s the question: Did the farmer tell you he was hurt, injured in this accident?” And the police officer says, “I looked him right in the eye, and I said, ‘Are you hurt?’ And he said, ‘No.’” And the defense officer said, “I rest my case.” Well, it’s going to be figured out, just a young guy. Why is this going to be a defense for me? The plaintiff’s lawyer says, “You know, I can call the plaintiff back to the stand as a rebuttal witness, just okay.” He calls him back to the stand, and he says, “Now, plaintiff, the farmer, you heard the testimony from the police officer. Can you explain that to the jury, please?” He says, “Well, you know, it was like this. There’s a real bad accident, and the police officer comes. He sees my horse; he’s lying on his side, and he’s got a broken leg. And the police officer pulls out his gun, shoots and kills the horse. And he just sees my dog, and my dog is bleeding profusely. He pulls his gun, shoots and kills the dog. He then turns to me and says, ‘Well, how do you feel?’” “Fine.”
Think about how things are today. If you go to the courtroom today, for those lucky enough to… I’ll talk about that in a second. This is what you’re going to see. It’s diverse, and it’s a good thing, and that’s the way it should be. But it took a long time in the United States for America to get that, but that’s the way the courtroom would look today. You know those books? Now, you plug in your cell phone and do your legal research. Who would have ever thought in a million years that could have happened?
And you remember we used to get letters, and this mail would get sorted for us. Maybe we’d get 10 a day if we were big shots, and we could think about it, and we could wonder how we’re going to respond, and we could react to it. We didn’t have to be at the moment. Now you have to have two of these things on your desk, and you’re getting not 10 letters a day, you’re probably getting 10 emails a minute, and it’s overwhelming, and you can’t think straight, and you don’t have time to think at all. I’m not so sure, you know, this technology has many benefits to it, but there are some curses to it as well. It stops us from thinking, and it stops our younger folks from really being able to deliberate and not just quickly react, but have time to contemplate this. You know, I have it. I guess, you know, they say if you don’t have it, you’re going to get run over. But be careful, because it hallucinates. I thought they were great briefs, and it turned out they were made-up cases. Eventually, it wouldn’t even have dawned on us.
And then finally, Zoom. This is now the present, and let’s talk about what we can do for the future. And what we’re facing with this… I don’t need to be too serious now, but I think it’s important. Zoom is a product of COVID. Before that, we all got to see each other, and we all got to know each other. And we went to depositions in person, and we had hearings in person, and we got to know our opposing counsel, and we’d see people and made friends, and we had camaraderie, and we learned from each other, and it was a beautiful thing. Now that doesn’t much happen, and we’ve lost the personal touch. I know I’m looking here, he’s a 50-year lawyer too. Miles, I can’t believe it’s 50 years for you, but Miles will be following me. I’ll tell you, if it was Zoom, I probably wouldn’t have known Miles, because we always had cases against each other. Yeah, we would fuss once in a while, but I respected Miles, respected his talent immensely, a very talented lawyer.
We got to build a relationship, even though we were always on the other side. When I was lucky enough to be President of the Florida Bar, Miles, on a very contentious issue where the reputation of lawyers is a little better now, but in those days, it was really at the bottom. We wanted to do something about it. We wanted to form an outreach where we could get laypeople, citizens of Florida, to regularly come and talk to us and feel involved and tell us what we’re doing wrong and what we can do better. We wanted to call it the Citizens Forum. Well, that was going to be a mission impossible because in those days, we were not well-liked at all, and we couldn’t be in the state. The only person I thought that had the talent to be able to do that was Miles O’Reilly.
So what? You know, I knew him. We were friends. I knew his family. I would see Patty, his wife, at meetings, and his kids at our meetings. I said, “Miles, can you get this done?” He said, “Of course, I’ll do anything for you.” And he did, and he did get it done. I want you to know, I noticed at this bar meeting, they still have, nearly after 30 years, they still have the citizens forums, thanks to Miles McGrath, but thanks to being able to have those type of personal relationships.
Now what do we do? So I don’t mean to be giving you a sermon, I don’t mean to be preaching or anything like that, but we’ve got to do something about this, because I got to try a case about maybe three or four weeks ago in Palm Beach, and it was so exciting. I hadn’t been in the courtroom for so long, but the place is a ghost town. You know, people don’t use it. They’re not going in like they should be. It’s really sad. So we need to teach. We know what it means. We know how important that is. We need to get out there and talk about it and say, “Look, let’s just do things in person. Let’s communicate with each other. Let’s stay off Zoom when we can. Let’s try to set something in person.”
We need to mentor younger lawyers, and we need to mentor our judges, because this is what I know: You can be a judge now if you’ve only practiced five years. You can be a judge in this state. COVID was in March of 2020. Very soon there will be judges that will be appointed or elected in the state of Florida that the only time they will have ever sat foot in a courtroom is for their investiture. That will be the first time. And what does that do to our country? What does that do to our democracy? What does it do to the rule of law? The majesty of the bench? And that’s what we’re facing. But we can make a difference, because we’ve got the energy, still have it, and we’ve got the wisdom, we’ve got the knowledge. So let’s share that. At any rate, I’ve only been given a small time, and I’m probably going over my time, and I’m sorry for that, but it’s been a beautiful run. It’s not over yet. The law has been good to us. It’s given us self-esteem. It’s given us a purpose in life. It’s allowed us to serve justice and help others, and I wouldn’t do it any differently in a million years. I’m sure you’re all the same way.
I want to share this with you now in closing. When my kids were little, they would say, “You know, I get going off to work,” and they’d say, “Well, what do you do? Where do you go? What do you do?” And I said, “Well, I’m a lawyer.” And they’d say, “Well, what is a lawyer?” And I’d say, “Well, you know, we help people.” And they’d say, “Well, what do you do? How do you do that?” And that’s hard to explain. That’s why one day you’ll figure it out. I kind of left them puzzled. I felt bad about that, and I thought about it a lot. I still think about it: What is a lawyer? But I think I kind of figured it out, and I want to share it with you now. What is a lawyer?
A lawyer is the genius in the courtroom. A lawyer is a historian when examining an abstract. A lawyer is an engineer in a construction litigation case or a patent dispute. A lawyer is harsh and reprimanding to a set of neglectful parents and a wayward child, but kind and consoling to a bereaved widow. The lawyer is counseling to a young couple whose marriage is on the rocks. The lawyer is active in their church, synagogue, and local charity, and the lawyer gets involved in community affairs. A lawyer wrote the United States Declaration of Independence. A lawyer wrote the United States Constitution and its Bill of Rights. The lawyer is the only one that stands between the lone individual and the abuse of judicial power, the abuse of legislative power, the abuse of executive power, the abuse of corporate power, and the abuse of the power of an ever-shifting majority. The lawyer is the real American hero. And you are my heroes.
If I had a glass up here, I would toast to our past 50 years of accomplishment and for the years of life ahead. Thank you very, very much for everything you do.