by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
This is the sort of thing that doesn’t blemish a law school student’s resume.
Mark Tetzlaff, who will graduate from Florida Coastal School of Law on Dec. 20, recently argued a case before the 5th District Court of Appeals in Daytona Beach.
The bonus may come: apparently, he was successful.
“The decision could be at any time but my guess is it’ll come in the next few months,” he said. “It’s a fairly solid issue.”
It’s not unheard of, but it’s certainly rare for students to appear before appellate courts. Students typically get courtroom experience by enrolling in internship programs and working under the supervision of a licensed attorney.
Tetzlaff’s case began about two years ago when he was working as an employee benefit consultant.
“A colleague saw me at lunch with a competitor and I didn’t have a job the next day,” he said.
Tetzlaff’s benefits, he said, were originally denied by the Florida Unemployment Appeals Commission, which claimed he had not followed proper procedures. Part of the procedure is for claimants to file statements every two weeks that they are not employed.
“It’s all computerized over the phone,” he said. “At one point, I couldn’t get into their system. They denied my benefits for failing that procedure requirement, even though it was their fault.”
The commission’s position, Tetzlaff said, would be similar to refusing Social Security benefits because the recipient put the wrong mailing address on his form.
In his brief against the Unemployment Appeals Commission, he noted that the 3rd District Court of Appeals had already ruled against the state in two cases that were directly on point.
The 3rd District decided the commission’s rules in this instance were “advisory only,” Tetzlaff said. “They couldn’t allow this procedural requirement to swallow a substantive benefit.”
The whole experience before the appellate court was “wonderful ... no nerves,” said Tetzlaff. “I loved it.
“They didn’t have too many questions which challenged everything. That’s usually a pretty good sign.”
Tetzlaff came within a whisker of graduating from the DePaul University School of Law before enrolling at FCSL in the fall of 1999. He has spent most of his working life in sales and marketing.
“The brief was very strong,” he said. “My research skills and everything that went into it, I have to credit (FCSL) for giving me that. And there was the overall confidence I had going in because I knew I was well-trained. That’s why I wasn’t flustered by their questions.”
The school has also grounded Tetzlaff and his classmates well in the “bare bones practice of law, getting out there as litigators, getting out there as fighters,” he said.
The emphasis on being a “student-centered” institution sets Florida Coastal apart from DePaul — and most other law schools, he said.
FCSL arranged for loans for Tetzlaff, who had hit the federal student loan cap after his time at DePaul.
“Here, they structured a program financially and academically that is probably unique,” he said. “I like the student-centeredness thing. If you take a student like me and put me in any other school, they probably wouldn’t have bothered with me.
“But Florida Coastal looks at the individual situation. I think that’s where their strong suit is going to be.”