by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
Backtracking over the years, we find that Kama Pierce is from New Jersey, lived in Washington, D.C., while getting her bachelor’s degree at Georgetown University, lived in Chicago while attending law school at Northwestern University, lived in Philadelphia while her husband went to law school and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and lived and worked in California.
All of which goes to explain how the Jacksonville Jaguars got to be her favorite football team.
Actually, that could be the result of the last move, when Joseph Pierce was named associate general counsel of the NFL team two years ago.
“I’m not even going there,” laughed Kama Pierce when asked what team she rooted for before the family moved here. “There’s no other team but the Jaguars. It’s all about the Jaguars.”
With two JDs and an MBA between them, the Pierces moved to San Francisco, where he was at a law firm and she “worked briefly before we started having children.” Marco is now 5; the twins, Jasmine and Julian, are 3.
Kama Pierce had clerked for three years for the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, for U.S. Circuit Judge Ted McKee and was a staff attorney for the 3rd Circuit, working on civil rights and criminal cases.
She has sat for the bar in three states. She’s now trying to decide when to make Florida the fourth.
As much as they enjoyed the San Francisco area, the move to Jacksonville was too good to pass up.
“He’s always wanted to do sports management, something in the sports area,” Pierce said. “We’re 35. To be a director of an NFL team at that age is a tremendous opportunity. He really had to jump at it.”
Responding to her “Type A personality,” Pierce said, she looked for something to do. Her legal career had been put on hold, and she wasn’t ready to sit for The Florida Bar. That’s when she heard that St. Mark’s Episcopal Day School was looking for a director of marketing and communications.
“When I first got here, I thought, ‘What do I know about marketing a school?’” she said. “But it’s been great. It’s interesting, and I’ve learned a lot. And the school, the board and the head of school have been very supportive.”
Pierce was hired at St. Mark’s to help the school fulfill a specific mission, to reach families beyond the Ortega peninsula.
“This is a well-respected school that feeds into Bolles and Episcopal,” she said. “But they wanted to move to the next level from a neighborhood school.
“We’re trying to shake it up and reach outside of the five-mile demographics that make up our families.”
She has helped the school with its five-year strategic marketing plan. Last year’s focus was recruitment, and 72 new families were brought in. This year’s concentration is on retention.
“You do your research, implement your plan, and you follow it, like a lawyer does,” she said. “It really hasn’t been the huge transition I thought it would be when I got here.
“I’ve gotten a huge education on how schools function behind the scenes. It’s a business. We’re not for profit, but it’s still a business. So we apply a lot of the same principles as business.”
Pierce also has been working her way back into the law slowly by signing on as an adjunct this semester at Florida Coastal School of Law.
“That’s been neat, just to flex those muscles,” she said.
She teaches legal writing and reasoning two nights a week to first-year students.
“The biggest tragedy for me in law school was we really didn’t take legal writing classes very seriously,” said Pierce. “I said to my students, ‘You don’t believe it now, but this is your most important class.’ I’m telling you this as a litigator. Ninety percent of the cases in the federal court were decided before we even had oral arguments.
“The law is the law, but you can really persuade somebody with the writing. After taking all the bars I have, I know it’s about the writing as much as it is about the substantive knowledge.”
All this activity “has been a challenge, but it’s fun,” she said. “The nice thing about a law degree is you can jump into a lot of things.
“Being here (at St. Mark’s) is fun, but there’s a part of me that misses the analysis and the state of the law. Things change so much in just a few years. Being at the law school is a nice way for me to keep my foot in it a little bit.”
Being where they are, doing the work they’ve found, “has been great” for the Pierce family.
“This is a great place to raise a family,” she said. “We’ve found a great school and supportive friends. The Jaguar organization has been wonderful to us; it’s a really neat atmosphere with them.
“And all of this all gives me the flexibility to be the mom I want to be. That was ultimately the most important thing.”