Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

Biography chronicles Holland & Knight chief

Michael Jamieson's Remembrances is part biography, part local society history and part political rant.

By SCOTT BARANCIK
Published June 12, 2005

Shortly after the 1968 merger that created Holland & Knight, greenhorn lawyer Michael Jamieson was called into the boss' office in Lakeland.

I'd like you to move to Tampa, the boss said. You'll find more work at our office there. You and the law firm will benefit.

Jamieson returned the next day with a problem: his 6-year-old daughter, Ann, had just enrolled in an exclusive Lakeland school, and his wife was not eager to pull the young girl out.

The boss was not pleased.

"(He) folded his arms on his desk, leaned forward, glared at me and said, "Mike, (expletive) Ann!"' Jamieson, now 65, recalls in his recent book, Remembrances: My Life with Chesterfield Smith. "If you're a man, you will go home and tell your wife that this is important to me, it's important to the firm, and it's important to your family, and you'll move to Tampa."'

Jamieson promptly moved his family to Tampa. Several decades later, he thought highly enough of Smith, Holland & Knight's first chief, to promise his widow a written tribute. Smith, a visionary businessman and former American Bar Association president, died in 2003 at age 85.

Though Jamieson writes that he included "warts and all" about his former boss, the beauty marks easily outnumber the blemishes in this 178-page testimonial. Still, Holland officials were taking no chances. "Holland & Knight has not condoned, supported, authorized or approved the writing or publication of this book, which is solely the personal work of Mr. Jamieson," the company said in a statement Friday. Holland probably doesn't need to worry. Remembrances is not the 797,326th most-popular title at Amazon.com for nothing.

Though Smith may loom large in the minds of Holland's 1,250 lawyers, even the legal field generally, the Bartow native was far better known among Florida's power-players than its plebes. Much of the book's subject matter is parochial, from seemingly endless anecdotes about Holland's merger-driven growth to sophomoric reminiscences of boozing, high-school dalliances and college rivalries.

And though Jamieson rose to lead the firm's nationwide business law practice for 13 years - he left Holland this year for rival Foley & Lardner - he is neither the insider that former Holland chief Bill McBride was nor a professional biographer.

Still, Remembrances manages to entertain and enlighten.

In often jarring language, Jamieson makes his opinions about people and events known: Former President Bill Clinton is a "slimeball." The liberal lobby People for the American Way is "insidious" and "un-American." Former Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Hugh Culverhouse was a "vindictive skinflint." Liberal Democrats, not pathetic debate performances, cost Democrat McBride a bid for the governor's office in 2002. Gov. Jeb Bush, the victor in that race, is responsible for Florida's deteriorating schools, "perilous" finances and "laughable" economic development efforts.

"Bill (McBride) would have been as courageous a Florida public servant . . . as we have ever had or will ever have again," Jamieson writes.

By courage, Jamieson probably was not referring to the 1980s recruiting trip in whic h McBride allegedly drove the pair's car on the wrong side of a highway after enjoying several drinks. (Asked Friday whether the anecdote is true, McBride chuckled. "Well, I guess the best response is I have no recollection of that.")

More likely, Jamieson was referring to the young McBride who turned his back on the male-only University Club in the early 1970s on principle; whose quadrupling of the firm's lawyer base between 1992 and 2001 Jamieson half-jokingly compares to manifest destiny, the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition; and who often put staff and associates first.

Students of Tampa history may be interested in viewing the city through Jamieson's eyes, which is to say one of its elites.

"In those days, it was essential for a young professional to gain admission to the University Club of Tampa, Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla, and one of the two principal social clubs, Palma Ceia Golf and Country Club or the Tampa Yacht Club," writes Jamieson, who didn't break ranks. "It was also necessary, particularly if one was married, to live in what is now known as south Tampa. . . . How times have changed."

Like Tampa itself, Holland could be unwelcoming to women and minorities.

Martha Barnett, who became Holland's first female partner and its second ABA president, received the cold shoulder from "several powerful Lakeland partners" in the mid 1970s until Smith intervened and persuaded her to become a lobbyist in Tallahassee.

"Virtually every one of our women lawyers (had trouble) getting good assignments from the mid-level entrenched leaders of our practice," Jamieson writes. They still do, in fact, which is why Holland has created fellowships and an internal-networking group specifically for women. (Barnett was out of the office Friday and unavailable for comment.)

Remembrances contains disappointingly few anecdotes about clients. In 2001, Holland was representing one branch of the warring Lykes family of Tampa when the firm's Boston office inadvertently hired a daughter from the other branch. "We immediately "walled' her off from the case and prohibited visits to the Tampa office," Jamieson writes.

Though the book's merger-and-acquisition stories start sounding the same after a while, they arguably form the basis for Smith's and McBride's greatest accomplishment: the conversion of a sleepy, central Florida law firm into a national giant.

That Smith dreamed in the early 1970s of "80 by '80" - having 80 lawyers by 1980, or twice as many as any other Florida law firm at the time - is almost laughable in retrospect.

But his many innovations along the way impress.

Smith, Jamieson says, was one of the first law firm chiefs to give each partner equal say in business matters, as opposed to giving bigger earners more power. He helped start a nonprofit group dedicated to providing legal services to the poor, funded by interest earned on client escrow accounts.

And though his insistence that Jamieson move to Tampa was more than indelicate, it was nothing Smith wouldn't do himself. He moved his family from Bartow to Lakeland to Tampa to Miami to Washington in order to shore up new or struggling Holland offices in those cities.

"Any of his acolytes could tell similar stories," Jamieson writes.

Scott Barancik can be reached at 727 893-8751 or barancik@sptimes.com

[Last modified June 12, 2005, 00:38:17]