by Bailey White
Staff Writer
More than 300 new students will attend orientation at the Florida Coastal School of Law next week, and at least one member of the FCSL staff will be able to sympathize with them as they adjust to a new routine and work load.
Terri Davlantes is just a couple weeks into her new role as assistant dean of academic affairs, and though she’s not new at the school — she’s been with FCSL four years — she’ll be meeting new challenges just like the students she’ll be counseling.
In her new position, Davlantes will offer academic counseling and will work with students transferring to FCSL from other law schools and any students in need of setting academic goals and plans for themselves.
“I’m really looking forward to working with the students in this new capacity,” she said. “And this is a very exciting time for Florida Coastal. We got our final ABA accreditation in August of last year, which was just three years after getting our provisional accreditation. And since then, enrollment has skyrocketed.”
Davlantes said that in addition to the number of students applying, the quality of students applying is also higher.
“The average LSAT scores and GPAs have also gone up,” she said. “And our bar passage rate was 77.6 percent last year, which is outstanding for a new school.”
Davlantes didn’t begin her career in the legal or academic world. She earned a master’s degree in nursing and worked for several years as a nurse at St. Vincent’s in the coronary care unit.
“But I knew I wanted to get a higher education degree,” she said.
Law seemed like a natural choice. Six of Davlantes brothers — she has eight — are lawyers.
“One of my brothers joked that he’d been saving all of his law books for me,” she said, “and I took the LSAT on a whim.”
After graduating from the University of Florida, Davlantes, who has maintained her nursing license, spent several years at Rogers Towers, practicing health care law.
She took 10 years off to raise her four children — “I joke that during that time I was practicing dispute resolution,” she said — and then saw an ad in the bar newsletter about a legal writing position at FCSL.
“I had never taught before,” she said. “And I’ve found that I really love it.”
Davlantes taught legal research and writing classes, and appellate advocacy classes, helping to develop the school’s legal writing program.
“The workshops are great because they give students a hands-on experience in a style of writing they’ve not done before,” she said. “And its a way for them to test their abilities without being graded.”
She’ll continue to lead writing workshops, which will give her more of a chance to do what she cares about the most.
“I really love working with the students, whether they’re very focused and
know exactly what they want to do,
or are still trying to figure out what
type of law they want to practice, we’ve got a lot of neat students,” she said.