by Mike Sharkey
Staff Writer
Has it really been 10 years since Florida Coastal School of Law opened its doors with fewer than 100 students and six faculty members? Has it really only taken a decade for the enrollment to reach 1,040 with 100 full-time and adjunct professors? Has Florida Coastal actually evolved from a small school on Beach Boulevard that offered aspiring lawyers the chance to get their juris doctorate to a school that’s moving into a state-of-the-art, five-story campus and now offers nine specific focus areas of study?
Yes, yes and yes.
This year Florida Coastal will celebrate its 10th anniversary with a slate of events, parties and a relocation. At some point graduates will mingle with current students, former and present faculty will compare notes and here’s betting the school’s only two deans — Peter Goplerud and Don Lively – pose for a photo or 10 together.
Why not? Like the Jacksonville Jaguars, the school was once little more than a topic of speculative and dreamy banter. Jacksonville wasn’t taken seriously as an NFL town until Touchdown Jacksonville! was formed and shoe magnate Wayne Weaver endeared himself to the National Football League’s top brass and ownership and convinced them to put a team in the smallest NFL market ever. A law school in Jacksonville was as remote a possibility 15 years ago. That is, until Lively and a handful of others got serious, raised some capital and opened the doors.
While the history of the team and the school really only parallel each other in a time aspect, one similarity is eerily identical. In 1996, Florida Coastal opened with 60 students. Counting the practice squad, an NFL roster consists of 60 players. Also, both had a core group that laid the groundwork for the initial decade of success.
“My original role was as dean and co-founder,” said Lively, who also taught in the early days. “There were a number of people that were involved in getting the school off the ground.”
Lively, who is now vice president of program development for Infilaw (a Naples-based company that assists in the growth and development of the entire state law school system), is one of six original investors that ponied up $1.5 million to open Florida Coastal. Interestingly, that’s cheap start-up money by law school standards.
“Other schools that started at the same time did so for 30 times the capital,” explained Lively. “It was unusual to start a school with that level of capital.”
Lively attributes the success of the school’s first 10 years to several things. The founders started with a strong concept and brought in the very best administrators and staff to help them execute that concept.
But, what spurred the idea locally? Lively says the Genesis of the school was a 1992 education report that decried the growing chasm between the legal profession and legal education. In short, the report said law schools were not doing a job of producing trial-ready and workforce-ready attorneys.
“As I began to discuss this, my perception was there was a need for the school,” said Lively, who was teaching law at the time the report came out. “The original idea was to bring on board a group of people who also saw that gap or chasm and the need to bridge it.”
The school got its license from the State of Florida in 1995 and a year later classes began. Today the school has over 1,000 students and will enter its second decade with new leadership and on a new campus in Baymeadows. Lively says it was truly a group effort that made the first 10 years possible and will assure the school’s future growth and success.
“The success was not because of any single individual. It was due to the strength of the concept and vision,” said Lively, who left the school when it was sold in 2004. “The idea was we could create a model of excellence not by replicating history or accepting the norm, but by blending that with excellence based on student outcomes. I think the success and growth speaks well of the vision and equally well of the people that have taken that vision to a higher level.”
Enter the 21st Century where technology and the school’s growth have made 1996 look like the Ice Age. The first graduating class had 55 students. In December Florida Coastal sent 109 budding attorneys into the real world. The price tag has gone up, as well. Tuition in ‘96 was $16,000 a year. Today, it’s $24,000 – a reflection of inflation, the law of supply and demand and the rising costs of luring top-notch faculty and administrators to the school.
In 2004, Goplerud took over as dean and he’ll lead the school into the next decade. Like the previous decade, Goplerud expects the school to grow. Unlike the previous decade, Goplerud doesn’t expect exponential growth. There won’t be 2,000 students and 200 faculty members and it probably won’t cost $32,000 a year. Instead Goplerud sees other areas where the school can get better, not necessarily bigger.
“We will continue to concentrate on the student recruitment effort,” said Goplerud, who wears many hats — administrator, manager, ambassador, recruiter. “We really got that ability once the school gained full accreditation by the American Bar Association. That allowed us to expand our recruiting network.”
The school currently uses several methods to recruit students including the school’s Web site, direct mailings, on-campus visits by prospective students and forums hosted by the Law School Admission Council.
“There’s also the personal side where we really try to take it to the next step,” said Goplerud, explaining why a student may choose Florida Coastal over a bigger state school. “It’s the way we approach education in the classroom. As we develop policies and ways to teach, we think of the students and how they impact them.”
Goplerud said the key to the school’s future success is preparing graduates for entry into the profession with the right skills and experience. Much of that is provided by a solid faculty and real-life courtroom experience long before graduates get their juris doctorates.
“We want to improve the overall goal of the program and the way you do that is to be stronger with regards to student academics,” he said, adding the student body at Florida Coastal is a mix of both typical and atypical law students. “I think we have a diverse student body in every way that term can be defined. We have students straight from undergrad and students that have been in the working world for the past 20-25 years. We have students from 40 different states and 200 to 300 different colleges and universities.”
Goplerud said the future of Florida Coastal lies in technology and continuing to produce conscientious attorneys.
“Ten years from now the education process in the classroom will likely be very different than today. I know there will be greater use of technology in the classroom, but not technology for the sake of technology, but as an enhancement to help educate students and produce lawyers focused on their clients and the profession,” said Goplerud. “We want to produce counselors that are committed to being a compassionate lawyer and we will work heavily on that. We will look for new areas to focus on like sports law and we will try to anticipate new developments in law and the legal profession.
“We want to create a different and better lawyer, one that has all the goals of being truly committed to being a problem solver, not a problem creator. We want to produce lawyers that understand their clients are human beings, too, and they require attention, professionalism and integrity.”
That ought to make for another good story in 10 years, said Lively.