Sullivan & Boyd is a Northbank law firm that specializes in the civil litigation side of admiralty and maritime law.
WHO FORMED
THE COMPANY?
“I did, in 1989,” said Rod Sullivan. “For a very short time I was a sole proprietor. The firm has been through a number of changes but Tim [Boyd] and I have been together for 12 years. Tim’s focus was primarily in insurance and he is also well-skilled in litigation.”
WHO DO THEY REPRESENT?
Clients include importers, shipping lines, injured longshoremen, stowaways, boaters and the occasional insurance companies.
HOW MANY OTHERS
WORK THERE?
Howard Sutter is the other attorney practicing in the Jacksonville office. Frank Butler runs a one-man show at the Tampa office and Spanish-speaking Gustavo Martinez handles the Puerto Rico location.
HOW IS BUSINESS?
“Our business has been constantly increasing and I attribute that, in large part, to the growth of recreational boating in Florida,” said Sullivan. “When I first started practicing, a million dollar yacht was a huge yacht. Today, a million dollar yacht is a small yacht. A huge yacht goes for $50 million and up. The way that things have changed in the last 20 years is that there are fewer maritime losses but they’re much, much larger. When I started out, we would do cases as small as a few cartons of cargo getting damaged or pilfered from a ship. Break-bulk was still around. It’s gotten bigger. Today, nothing is less than a whole [20- or 30-foot] container load. Containers will get lost at sea in a storm or stowaways will get inside and damage the cargo or it may get stolen by truckers. You have no theft or you lose the entire container.”
HAVE YOU CONSIDERED EXPANDING?
“I would like us to have six attorneys in Jacksonville,” said Sullivan. “We have had plans to open a Ft. Lauderdale or Miami office for five-plus years and never managed to get it off the ground. I had a Miami office back in the late 1980s and it did not work. We’d like to try it again but you have to find the right people.”
“We’ve recently doubled the space we have here, though,” added Boyd.
Five conference rooms were added so other attorneys could lease neutral space for mediation sessions.
HOW FIERCE IS THE COMPETITION?
“We do most of the plaintiff side work in town,” answered Sullivan. “I would say there are two or three other firms that divide up the defense side of the work.”
HAS THE FIRM ALWAYS DONE THIS TYPE OF WORK?
“Initially our primary representation was doing subrogation litigation,” he said. “In other words, somebody would have a yacht or boathouse that would burn and the insurance company would pay the loss then we would recover from the responsible party. That has now become a smaller and smaller portion of our practice because our business has grown. We focus more on representing individuals. We do some kinds of cases outside of the maritime field for our maritime clients.”
WHAT IS YOUR BACKGROUND?
“I’m originally from Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island,” he said. “I clerked for an admiralty law firm in Tampa. When I graduated from law school, I went to Georgetown in Washington, D.C. and got a master’s degree in international law. I came to work here for an admiralty law firm that is no longer in existence. An elderly attorney, John Culp, was looking for attorneys to assist him. I worked for him about seven years and learned admiralty law from him. Then I went out on my own.”
SEAWORTHY
“I was working on a ship,” said Sullivan on how he landed in the legal profession. “I had a disagreement with the first engineer and got fired. I was moping around the house and my mother said there was a law school in Florida called Stetson that accepted applications in January. So I submitted it with unsubstantiated photocopies. It was just a spur-of-the-moment decision. I explained to them that I was a seaman and that if I didn’t get accepted to law school, I would have to go back to sea. They called me back next week and said, ‘All your materials check out; you’re accepted.’ The time between when I applied to law school and when I was accepted was 72 hours.”
WHAT’S SPECIAL ABOUT MARITIME LAW?
“I like the uniqueness of what we do,” he said. “We get to arrest cargo and represent people in boating accidents. I like the variety and constantly changing nature of the practice. Maritime law is different from any other kind of law. We try to be the best in this specialty. This is not a field for dabblers. There are many traps for the unwary. It is tricky because you just can’t do a little bit of it and think you’re going to survive.”
“There’s a whole separate history for maritime law that most people in law school are never taught,” said Sutter. “There are a number of unique concepts such as a vessel being an actual defendant and the statute of limitations vary widely from land-based types of claims.”
BOYD’S HISTORY?
“I was born in Jacksonville,” said Boyd. “I got ready to graduate, [from Florida State University] doing something in the insurance field, and my father suggested I go to law school. I always had an interest in legal matters and legal TV shows, so I thought that was a good idea. Out of law school [Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Ala.], I went to work for the late Hank Searcy for two years. I met Rod and I went to work for him in 1990.”
SOME BACKGROUND
ON SUTTER?
“I’m a native Miamian,” said Sutter. “I’m in Jacksonville because my wife spent four years in the Air Force and we were ready to move back to Florida but we didn’t want to raise three girls in Miami. I decided to go to law school when I was about five or six years old as a result of my parents’ divorce, which got me interested in the workings of the court system. I was wondering how all those people could have so much power over my life. Then I became interested in sailing when I was 12. I’ve come to love admiralty from my boating activities. So when I managed to get into law school [Nova Law Center in Ft. Lauderdale], I decided I would do as much admiralty work as I could.”
WHO ELSE HAS HE
WORKED FOR?
“I clerked for John Thomas in Miami,” said Sutter. “I was looking for people that had high ethical standards and a basic love of this area of practice. When I got out of law school, I worked in his office for six or seven years. Later, I was house counsel for a real estate developer for about four years. When I realized we were going to move to Jacksonville, I started looking for maritime firms. I had met Rod and Tim at a Southeastern Admiralty Law Institute conference and discovered I liked them.”
— by Monica Chamness