James C. Rinaman Jr.
One June 2, Jim Rinaman marked 50 years of service to the Marks Gray firm in Jacksonville. Rinaman earned his bachelor’s degree in 1955 from the University of Florida and received his L.L.B. in 1960. His career has been with Marks Gray. He served as president of The Jacksonville Bar Association as well as The Florida Bar, the Florida Defense Lawyers Association, and the Association of Defense Trial Lawyers. Rinaman wrote a series of columns about the practice of law. The first is today and the others will follow during the coming months. This is part one of four.
I graduated from the University of Florida College of Law in June 1960 and came to Jacksonville to work for Marks Gray Yates Conroy & Gibbs on the 13th floor of the Florida Title and Trust Building, later replaced by the Barnett Tower. My salary was $450 a month, the second highest in my class and at Christmas 1960, I received a much needed $100 bonus.
There were 6,600 lawyers in The Florida Bar, 500 of them in Jacksonville. Today there are 88,000 lawyers in The Florida Bar, and more than 2,500 in Jacksonville.
In 1960, most lawyers dictated letters, memos, pleadings and briefs to their secretaries, who took it down in Gregg shorthand and typed them up. Some lawyers wrote documents in longhand and gave them to the secretary to type. Dictating equipment was becoming more common, typically Dictaphones, recording onto blue plastic material the size of an armband.
Manual typewriters could make three carbon copies, and the new IBM electric typewriters could make seven carbon copies. There was no practical way to make copies other than a photographic process that required three chemical baths and an hour to dry, and we discovered 10 years later they had completely faded out.
If you wished to make minor changes in a multipage document you could use Wite-Out on the original, but too much of it looked very tacky, and for major changes the entire document had to be typed over again.
Appellate briefs were printed at a print shop. We did not have fax machines, but we did have a Thermofax, a round wax cylinder with a needle that made impressions thermostatically, which were printed, looking like an old-fashioned telegram. We often used that system to communicate with clients, but it was extremely limited.
We had rotary dial telephones, and of course, no touch-tone phones or Internet. Court reporters took everything down in Gregg shorthand.
In the mid-1960s, court reporters began to use the new wire recorders, but lawyers were leery of them because if someone coughed or talked over others, you would not have an accurate record. We allowed court reporters to use the wire recorder, but insisted they take everything down in shorthand. If you asked a reporter to read back the last question and answer, and they resorted to the wire recorder, rather than their notebook, they would not be used again.
There was no central air-conditioning, but most offices had window air conditioners, mostly by Fedders.
The body of Florida law was not yet mature and we used the Decennial Digest, the American Law Reporter and Corpus Juris Secundum for cases from other states on any subject the Florida Supreme Court had not addressed. Today most issues are covered by Florida case law.
The common law nonsuit was still in effect, allowing a plaintiff to dismiss his case without penalty up until the time the jury retired; a discomfort to defendants. I took an appeal to the Florida Supreme Court arguing that our 1956 Florida Rules abolished the common law nonsuit, with which the Court agreed, but created the two dismissal rule we have today.
Perhaps the most important technical advancement in the law was the advent of forensic DNA in 1988. More than 250 wrongfully convicted prisoners, 12 in Florida, have been vindicated, and no one is now likely to be prosecuted if DNA testing eliminates them from the scene.
In the early 1960s, there had been allegations of election fraud around the state and Secretary of State Tom Adams appointed young lawyers to go into each county to observe and report on the election process in November 1962.
I was assigned as a Deputy Secretary of State to monitor Columbia County. I was graciously received by the elections supervisor, who took me to various polling places, including small log cabins in the woods used solely for voting purposes for many years. I observed voters being assisted by others at the polling place to record their votes on paper ballots which appeared to me to be illegal, but the elections supervisor assured me that was necessary because many voters could not read, and someone had to show them who to vote for.
Our new courthouse on the river had been completed in 1957. The plans called for escalators on each side of the main lobby to take attorneys, litigants and jurors to the second floor. During construction, the county commission decided to eliminate the escalators to save money, but they did not add any elevators, and we have all enjoyed the consequences.
Cities and counties did not have home rule, and so had only such powers as were specifically granted by the Legislature by general law or special act. Special acts did not work well because some cities wanted powers other cities did not, so a system of “population acts” was developed whereby a special act would apply only to cities in a certain population bracket such as 50,000 to 100,000, which worked for a few years, until other cities grew into that population bracket.
Then a new law had to be passed exempting that city from the law and after 20 or 30 years, we had a real hodgepodge, and nobody could tell for sure what laws applied to what cities. Our Constitution of 1968 cured that by granting home rule to cities and chartered counties, granting them all governmental powers except those specifically withheld by the legislature.
Unfortunately, the legislature has increasingly abused those home rule powers, seeking more political control over cities and chartered counties.