Arnold Slott is a partner in the law firm of Slott and Barker.
WHAT DOES HE DO?
“Our practice is focused on corporate and commercial work with emphasis on commercial real estate. We do quite a bit of estate planning, probate and trust work and commercial litigation. We are corporate lawyers because many of our clients are corporations in the commercial real estate development business.
HOW LONG WITH SLOTT AND BARKER?
“Earl [Barker] and I have been practicing together since 1983. We have had the Slott and Barker partnership since 1985. We were sharing space for two years before we teamed up.
BEFORE SLOTT AND BARKER?
He was with Glickstein, Crenshaw, Glickstein, Block and Slott for 12 years. That firm dissolved and he and his partner at that time, Byron Block, bought a building on Duval Street in 1979. “We bought it and practiced here together until he moved to Tallahassee.”
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF WHAT IS GOING ON DOWNTOWN?
“I’m an owner of downtown property. We are where we are because of the proximity of the Duval County Courthouse. We’ve been here since 1979 and unfortunately for us, this whole area is going to change because the courthouse is going to move near the new federal courthouse and take it out of walking distance for us. The courthouse is probably good. Out of their three possibilities only two were viable. One was to build it where it was, which made no sense at all, or build it here somewhat close to the jail, which made more sense than anywhere else, or to put where they decided to put it, which was a plan to help the LaVilla area.”
WHAT DO YOU THINK HAS BEEN DONE WRONG DOWNTOWN?
“There are a lot of things that need to be done in this city and I’m sure there are people working on that. There have been mistakes that have been made and it’s probably too late to correct as far as the mayor’s ideas about where things should have been placed. One thing is that the downtown convention center [Osborn Center] will never work where it is. You need to separate at opposite ends of downtown, the football stadium and the baseball park from the coliseum. What would make sense is to abandon the convention center where it is and build the new coliseum there, using the historical facade of the old train station, which would make a beautiful, impressive entrance into the new coliseum. There is a great amount of parking there, adequate for the new coliseum. That’s also where the fair facilities should have been relocated. What would have helped the LaVilla area a lot is a real good coliseum because the convention center we have down there will always struggle.”
WHY?
“You need to have the fair and the coliseum together so they would never again interfere with things going on at the stadium. You would have two things going on simultaneously at opposite ends of the city. Now, you’ll never have that because they are building it all together again. The other question is if all that were to happen is where would our convention center go? It needs to go where common sense says it needs to go. That’s what we should have been doing with the Better Jacksonville Plan, which would be tearing down a lot of the blight on the east side of Hemming Plaza and putting a big convention center right here where it is close to the hotels and then you revitalize downtown because the convention center is where it should have been from the beginning. It would have been so easy, just a matter of making the right decisions at the right time and they didn’t do it.”
HAVE YOU DISCUSSED YOUR IDEAS WITH ANYONE?
“I talked about this at the Northeast Florida Real Estate Council luncheon. I mentioned the idea to Mike Weinstein (former JEDC director) at the luncheon and it didn’t seem to make any impact whatsoever.”
HOW HAVE THINGS IN COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE CHANGED?
“When I started practicing law almost 34 years ago we were not pigeon-holed as they are today. We always practiced in a variety of things. That’s why we do estate planning, commercial litigation and a lot of transactional work.”
PASSED THE BAR?
1968.
WHAT MADE GO INTO COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE LAW?
“A lot of it has to do with what you start with when you get your first job. The firm that I started with was a firm that did an awful lot of business kinds of practices including a lot of larger real estate transactions. That was my training when I started. You do a lot of it and you either have an interest to continue in it or it turns you off and you go somewhere else. But, I was always interested in it.”
COLLEGE
He has a bachelor’s degree in pharmacy from the University of Florida and a law degree from the University of Florida College of Law.
WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO BE AN ATTORNEY?
“Most people who become lawyers don’t have a burning desire to do so from the age 12 on. It sort of develops from a sense that they would like to do important work in connection with people’s lives and businesses that doesn’t involve their health. Having a legal background is great for doing that whether you actually practice law or not. My degree was in pharmacy. I did everything I needed to do to be licensed as a pharmacist and put myself through law school working as a pharmacist part-time, knowing that I had no intention of continuing to be a pharmacist for the rest of my career. It gave me a lot of flexibility, I could go into medicine or law. I got the notion that I would like to do work related to the pharmaceutical industry, be it patent work or just general corporate work. That would have worked out fine, but I found out that in order to do that kind of work I’d have to move and relocate out of Florida and I didn’t want to do that.”
CIVIC OR PROFESSIONAL GROUPS
The Florida Bar, American Bar Association and the Northeast Florida Real Estate Council.
BIRTHPLACE
Jacksonville.
FAMILY
He has been married to Harriet for 35 years. They have two daughters, Leslie Burt and Kathryn, and two grandchildren, Tanner, 13 and Austin, 1.
HOBBIES
He enjoys watching sports. “I very much enjoy going to Florida Gators and Jacksonville Jaguars games and making a day of it.”
RESIDES
Mandarin.
CHURCH
Episcopal Church of our Saviour. He has been busy this year as the senior warden of the parish.
FAVORITES
His favorite movies are “Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” and “Witness for the Prosecution.” His favorite television show is “Frasier.”
— by Michele Newbern Gillis