by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
Randy Fairbanks felt the time was right for him to swim against the tide.
Since 1997, he and Jim Walker practiced law at Walker and Fairbanks in Ponte Vedra Beach. His specialties were estate planning and transactional law — “pretty much any kind of business transaction, primarily corporate matters.”
“Except for lateral moves, people are moving from larger firms to smaller firms,” said Fairbanks, in his new office at Brennan, Manna & Diamond on the 17th floor of the Humana building. “I sort of did the reverse.
“Mainly it was because I thought it had a bigger and better platform from which to serve my existing clients and to hopefully generate new clients.”
He will focus on business matters, estate planning and asset protection.
His biggest adjustment may come in rejoining the mass of commuters alternately creeping and speeding their way between work and home.
“I commuted for a number of years before I started practicing in Ponte Vedra,” Fairbanks said. “It’s going to take a while getting used to, figuring out the timing of the traffic again.”
Fairbanks was raised in Satellite Beach, in Brevard County. He went to the University of Florida, where he received his bachelor’s degree in history, his law school diploma and a master’s of law in taxation.
He opted for law school when he was unable to decide what else to do with a bachelor’s in history . . . other than pursue advanced degrees.
“It was either go to law school or try to go to business school and get an MBA,” said Fairbanks. “I didn’t want to do that.”
At one time, he expected to become a high school history teacher. Student teaching at Gainesville High School — six classes of American history a day for about nine weeks — persuaded him to look in another direction:
“The teacher I was assigned to said basically, ‘I’ll be in the lounge. Come get me if you need me. The class is yours.’
“Although he was a really young guy, he was a good disciplinarian, and the class was well behaved. It’s just that I decided that wasn’t what I wanted to do for a living.”
Fairbanks decided to make the shift from Ponte Vedra Beach back to Jacksonville after discussing the possibility with Michael Freed, a partner at Brennan, Manna & Diamond.
The firm handles business and corporate law, commercial lending, education, finance, health and hospital law, estate planning, litigation, mergers and acquisitions, real estate, taxation and employment/labor law.
“After talking with Mike, I thought it was an opportunity to use my talents with an expanding, growing firm,” said Fairbanks. “I was intrigued by their representation of health care providers and physicians because I have numerous clients who are doctors.
“I felt like, with all the compliance and regulatory issues coming to the forefront, I needed to be someplace where those needs can be addressed.”
The best part about being a lawyer, he said, is “the variety of issues you deal with. It’s rarely the same day after day.”
And few legal specialties outstrip health care for the number and variety of cases likely to cross an attorney’s desk.
“I think, certainly, the compliance and regulatory aspects of the health care practice are growing,” said Fairbanks. “I just needed to be able to offer that service to the medical professionals that I would do business and estate planning work for.”
The soaring number of malpractice cases, accompanied by skyrocketing costs of coverage, have made life difficult for physicians and a challenge for their attorneys.
An erratic economy has added uncertainty to the mix, but it’s a blend attorneys haven’t seen before.
“We lawyers have always handled these matters for our clients,” said Fairbanks.“It’s just come to the forefront really in the last couple years with the malpractice crisis.
“Doctors are much more sensitive and concerned about making sure their assets can be protected to the extent the law allows.”
Fairbanks and his wife, Patricia, have six children: Brandon, Nathan, Lyndsay, Jeremy, Augustina and Andrew. The family lives in Ponte Vedra Beach.