Managing Editor
If you want to be happy, you need to love what you do.
If you give back to the community, you will double the return on your investment.
Those are the two key messages that Judge Karen Mills-Francis will share tonight at The Daniel Webster Perkins Bar Foundation Inc. dinner.
“My message is going to be about doing what you love in your job because there are so many people who become lawyers and other professionals because they want to make money,” Mills-Francis said in an interview Tuesday.
“They think being a lawyer will make them wealthy, but if they don’t love what they are doing, the whole profession of lawyering, they are never going to be happy, no matter how much money they make,” she said.
She also will talk about giving back to the community, above and beyond pro bono work.
“The more you give away, you get back double. The more you give of your time and your energy and your financial resources, it all comes back to you,” she said.
Mills-Francis will speak at the 2010 Scholarship Awards Banquet to benefit the D.W. Perkins Foundation Scholarship Fund. The event is 7 p.m. at the Omni.
The D.W. Perkins Bar Association was named after one of the first African-Americans to practice law in Duval County. Its mission is to improve the plight of the African-American community and to erase discrimination.
Her presentation is titled “The Courage to Make a Difference.” She is a former Miami-Dade County Court judge who starred in the “Judge Karen” TV court show and who will soon start “Judge Karen’s Court.”
Mills-Francis is a Miami native and graduate of Bowdoin College in Maine and the Levin College of Law at the University of Florida.
She practiced criminal defense law for 13 years in Florida in the Office of the Public Defender and in private practice and was appointed a Traffic Magistrate by the Dade County Chief Judge in 1998 to hear noncriminal traffic cases.
She ran for a judgeship in 2000, becoming the second black woman to serve on the bench in Miami-Dade County.
Elected twice, she stepped down in April 2008 to host the “Judge Karen” series by Sony Pictures Television. When Sony canceled its court series, she was contacted by another company to preside in “Judge Karen’s Court” starting this fall. It will be distributed by Litton Entertainment, but she doesn’t know yet where it can be viewed in Northeast Florida.
The experience of ending one show and starting another is a chapter in the life of Mills-Francis.
“I left the bench for a TV show in 2008 and everybody said, ‘what is going to happen if the show doesn’t make it?’ I thought, I can’t live my life in the what-ifs,” she said.
“I am on for one season, and Sony cancels all its court shows. I am coming from the inauguration of Barack Obama and I get this call that Sony is getting out of the business. I didn’t know what I was going to do,” she said.
Also wanting to serve as an ambassador, she began looking at foreign service opportunities. Then she received another call.
It was a production company whose vice president asked to produce a show, given that the stations were upset that “Judge Karen” was canceled. “That’s how I ended up back with ‘Judge Karen’s Court,’” she said.
Mills-Francis began her path when she decided at the age of 7 or 8 that she wanted to be a lawyer. “I grew up on ‘Perry Mason’ and I had always known that I wanted to be a lawyer,” she said, referring to the iconic 1957-1966 TV show featuring Raymond Burr as a master lawyer who works difficult criminal cases and usually prevails in the courtroom dramas.
“My dad said, ‘you love to talk and you love to argue.’ I always knew I was going to be a lawyer,” she said.
Not that she knew where life would take her. “The beautiful thing about life is that you don’t know what’s around the next corner. You just have to keep walking.”
She didn’t know that either TV show was around the corner. Nor did she know she would eventually author a book, “Stay in Your Lane, Judge Karen’s Guide to Living Your Best Life,” which will be released this fall.
“You couldn’t have told me 10 years ago I would have a TV show or 12 years ago I would be a judge. The beauty of life is the unexpected, what’s there at the end of the road, the twists and turns that are always different,” she said.
Mills-Francis, one of five children, does not have children, but has 10 nieces and nephews. She also became a foster mother to a child she first encountered in court and she continues to open her home for children in need. She supports child advocacy programs, including a transition program for girls in foster care.
Among her observations, some of which are included in her book:
• The what-ifs. “I know a lot of people live their lives in fear, fear of the unknown, the what-ifs.
• Living in the past. “So many of us can’t let go of the past. We say we had a bad childhood or there was no one there to guide me. At some point, you are going to have to own up to the things that happened in the past and make peace with it and move forward.”
• “You are what’s eating you.” That’s one of the chapters. “The first time I was invited to a lawyers’ event, I was so excited. It was a criminal lawyers’ banquet and it hit me, the car I was driving. ‘I cannot drive up to the front of the hotel in this beat-up car.’ I decided I wasn’t going to go. I spent several sleepless nights. ‘Why can’t I go?’ I realized it wasn’t really about the car. It was what the car symbolized to me,” she said.
When growing up, the girls at her school dressed in frilly Shirley Temple clothes, she said, but she didn’t “and I was ridiculed.”
“This car represented to me the have-nots. It hit me. I was dragging 5-year-old Karen around with me like a handbag in my adult life.”
She attended the event and ended up with a job offer.
• The burgundy robe. Mills-Francis could choose the color of her robe, and burgundy is her favorite color. “When I auditioned for the TV show, I knew they were auditioning seven judges, but I knew I had to stand out. I said, ‘I bet if I wear this red robe, it will look very unusual.’ That is the first thing they said. ‘She wears a red robe.’ They loved me, they loved the robe.”
• Common threads in court. “I see women who so desperately want a relationship, who so desperately want to be loved, they are willing to become doormats for the men in their lives. They give of their bodies, their bank accounts, their cars, everything in the name of a relationship,” she said. “What I see in court all the time are women who basically lost their way.”
• Baby drama. That is the book’s biggest chapter. “Baby drama has to do with what I see go on in court. Dad comes to pick up baby and baby isn’t there. Baby is there with no diapers, no bottle. Mom isn’t letting Dad see baby.” She writes about such cases and what “people put their children through.”
• What’s next. “Maybe in the next two or three years, I will go into business,” she said, thinking it could become a family business for her nieces and nephews. She hasn’t decided what kind of business yet, “but it has to be something that I love.”
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