RE Log Fall 2018

)$// Ransom Everglades LOG 25 In a 1988 story, The New Times called you “a legal catalyst for the anti-development movement.” How did your firm get that reputation? 7KDW ZDV GH¿QLWHO\ WKH UHSXWDWLRQ , don’t know if that was the reality. I had a longstanding interest in government and in public policy. Remember my mother was a civic activist who fought zoning on Watson Island, so I had a very good understanding of how zoning and politics worked in the City of Miami. One of my classmates was Maurice Ferre ’79 , whose father was the mayor of Miami at WKH WLPH , WRRN VRPH WLPH Rɣ WR EH WKH press secretary for Dick Pettigrew when KH UDQ IRU WKH 8 6 6HQDWH LQ ɲɺɹɱ , DOVR had this day-to-day business litigation experience from two years at Stearns Weaver. I had had a very good relation- ship – through my mother – with the late John Fletcher, who was known as the pre-eminent anti-development lawyer in Florida. At that time, he had been ap- pointed to an appellate judgeship, and he QHHGHG WR ¿JXUH RXW ZKDW WR GR ZLWK DOO RI his clients. He approached me and said: “Do you have any interest in doing this?” It was positioned somewhere between a favor and a gift. I said yes. So we took on a lot of these high-level cases around the 2QH RI WKH WKLQJV WKDW KDV PDGH PH VR KDSSy LQ Py OLIH LV ,ȆYH EHHQ DEOH WR GR WKLQJV DW GLȧHUHQW VWDJHV RI Py OLIH WR DVVLVW WKH VFKRRO , ORRN DW Py VHUYLFH DV VRUW RI SDUW RI D FRQWLQXXP SDUW RI Py FRPPLWPHQW WR WKH VFKRRO ȉ city and no matter what we did, no matter KRZ LQVLJQL¿FDQW , WKRXJKW WKH FDVH ZDV LW wound up with several newspaper articles being written about it. So in a very short period of time, everything we did was relatively controversial, and every zoning matter spawned 10 newspaper articles. It came to the point that most people in Miami didn’t think we did anything other than challenge development. But to this day, we are just as comfortable handling a zoning hearing as we are in court. We’ve never been pigeonholed into one or the other. How did you get involved with RE as an attorney? A world-class aquatic facility had just been built, and it naturally elicited a discussion on how Ransom Everglades should best grow as a school, and how to do it on a naturally sensitive campus. The board and head of school (Ellen Moceri) at that time reached out to me to seek my advice. That happened to coincide with changes in the zoning regulations in the city of Miami that were encouraging property owners of a large scale to get approval for and implement long-term plans. That was the process WKDW VWDUWHG WKH ¿UVW VLWH DUHD SODQ 6$3 approval, which included the new STEM Center. “