by Sean McManus
Staff Writer
It’s no coincidence that Franklin Akel’s favorite kind of family law is adoptions. Distinct from the rest, adoption law is the art of bringing families together instead of figuring out the most amicable way of tearing them apart. Akel and his wife just had a son, Jacob, and the lawyer-turned-general master said that family has always been his highest priority.
“It’s really unbelievable how many family law cases come through the Duval County courthouse,” said Akel, a Jacksonville native.
“Before they had general masters, I don’t know how the judges did it.”
And while most are divorces and child custody battles, some are adoptions — the one category where the lawyers and the judges and the general masters can make everybody happy. And that makes Akel happy.
Akel was a journalism major at the University of Florida and a double minor in psychology and theology. He was on the debate team even before that, at Terry Parker High School. That was a skill that propelled him into trial advocacy and eventually into family law.
At UF, Akel helped launch a student government tabloid that circulated with The Alligator, the student newspaper.
“The Alligator was too professional for just anybody to write for,” he said. “But this way, people who wanted to submit articles had a platform. Now you see tabloids everywhere.”
Akel was on the inter-fraternity council and served on the president’s cabinet at UF. He was one of the students who reintroduced Delta Sigma Phi to campus after that fraternity took a hiatus.
A graduate of the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University in Birmingham, Akel was a justice on the Honor Court there.
“Cumberland had kind of an Ivy League feel to it,” he said.
According to Akel, the history of Cumberland is a distinguished one. When it was part of the larger college in Cumberland, Tenn., there was a time when the majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices were graduates.
Akel did what a lot of attorneys in Jacksonville did upon graduation from law school: he hung out a shingle. His was on St. Augustine Road at Powers Avenue. He shared space with Fred Rice, one of the attorneys for Barnett Bank, who represented the bank in St. Johns County.
“He was really a terrific mentor for me,” said Akel. “It was the best of both worlds because I was on my own, but I could ask Fred how to practice law. I learned a lot.”
A few years later, in 1992, Akel moved his office to Atlantic Boulevard, in a building with attorneys Fred Issac and David Lewis.
“A lot of people don’t get the opportunity to work with great attorneys like I did,” he said. “I’m lucky. All of those guys treated me as if I was part of the firm. They showed me the ropes.”
Akel said he enjoys the small town legal atmosphere in Jacksonville. The cutthroat competition of a place like Miami, he said, is not his style.
“Every lawyer knows each other here and we all respect each other’s place in the community and in the industry.”
Initially, Akel thought he would go into real estate law. Rice, after all, knew a lot about real estate working for Barnett Bank.
“But what ended up in the door were domestic cases,” he said. “So by accident I got good at family law.”
Akel’s motives behind becoming a general master in 1997 were varied. The woman he ended up marrying, Dottie, was a clerk at the courthouse. Akel would come in to file probate papers and finally summoned the nerve to ask her out.
“I wanted to work at the courthouse and I sure didn’t miss quarterly taxes and payroll and insurance,” said Akel, making sure to articulate that the most important reason for wanting to join the general master’s office was his desire “to give something back.”
What Akel likes about being a general master is that he gets to help everybody. The lawyers, judges and pro se litigants who have no idea how they can get out of whatever myriad of predicaments they’ve found themselves in, all need him.
“I certainly haven’t had a bad life,” Akel said pensively. “But like everybody, there have been bumps in the road. It is those bumps that help you understand where people are coming from. The other general masters, the judges and I see people at their worst. It’s important to remember that and try to be patient. Everyone deserves their day in court and for every case that comes across my desk, that is their day.”
And Akel likes the academic, “quasi-judicial” capacity that is the crux of the office.
“I step in for Gary Flower when he is off from teaching at the Florida Coastal School of Law in the summers,” said Akel. “And I instruct paralegals at FCCJ. I wouldn’t have had time for any of that if I was still in private practice.”
It is that “trier of fact” role as opposed to “the advocate” that Akel grew to enjoy. On a philosophical level, it’s more even-handed. From an intellectual perspective, it exposes you to all sides.
It was Gary Flower who set the precedent of a general master moving on to become a judge — an opportunity Akel said he would be remiss in turning down if ever it presented itself. Akel likes that general masters work for all the judges, something that facilitates extracting specific knowledge from each of them.
Akel tells a story about a case in which two daughters were battling it out in court one day and their mother fell over dead.
“The stress killed her,” Akel said. “People have no idea what they’re doing to their families. This job impacts peoples lives in a very real and a very dramatic way. I just pray that we do it well.”