Jacksonville lawyer George Gabel, a partner at the Holland & Knight firm, has been practicing law for almost 50 years.
He is best known as a maritime lawyer and a communications and media counsel, although his practice comprises almost a dozen areas.
He was honored April 11 at the 2012 Law Day event held by The Jacksonville Bar Association as the Financial News & Daily Record “Lawyer of the Year” for his international outreach to expand Jacksonville’s global trade as well as for his other community service.
Gabel also was recognized in December as the International Business Leader of the Decade by the JAX Chamber. The Propeller Club of the United States, Port of Jacksonville named him Maritime Person of the Year last June.
He is the vice chair of the Jacksonville International Business Coalition and chaired international business on the chamber’s board of directors for seven years.
He serves as Holland & Knight’s national litigation practice development partner and deputy section leader, working with more than 400 lawyers in more than 20 practice groups across the country. He also served as the executive partner for the Jacksonville office and on the firm’s directors committee.
The Daily Record interviewed Gabel for “First Coast Success,” a regular segment on the award-winning 89.9 FM flagship First Coast Connect program, hosted by Melissa Ross.
The interview is scheduled for broadcast this morning and the replay will be at 8 p.m. on the WJCT Arts Channel or online at www.wjctondemand.org.
These are edited excerpts from the full transcript and some additional information.
You’ve had a fascinating career.
It’s been a good one. As you said, my primary practices are media law and maritime law, and both of those are interesting fields to practice in. The media law involves a significant principle, and most of the people you deal with are idealists, standing up for what the First Amendment stands for. And in maritime law, many of the people are from other countries. There’s a lot of travel involved. The law itself is interesting because it originated on the Isle of Rhodes. The king of Lindos controlled that area of the Mediterranean and developed the first written code, which was adopted by Justinian for the Roman Empire, and then by the Hanseatic League, and it’s the same code we use today for navigation of ships.
In media law, what are the most significant issues these days?
I think the most significant issue today may be the fact that the media, including newspapers and television, aren’t the profitable institutions they used to be. They don’t have the subscribers they used to have, and so they don’t have the money to stand up for the public’s right to know. Our government officials need to be prodded about opening up the records. Florida has one of the best open records laws in the country, and if the newspapers and television companies are not standing up for those rights, the citizens are not going to do it. They don’t really have the money to do it so much anymore. I think that keeps the press from performing the function it has traditionally had to perform.
Where do you see that leading?
I don’t think it’s good for the country. Thomas Jefferson once said, ‘if I had the choice between living in a democracy with a controlled press and a dictatorship with a free press, I’d choose the dictatorship, because it soon would become a democracy.’ It’s so important.
Do the citizens understand that?
I don’t think so. I think the media ranks about with our congressmen, and maybe even lawyers.
That brings up another question about the media. The media was focused on print media for centuries and then the broadcast media, but now it has changed so much because of the Internet, blogs and social media. How has that affected the First Amendment and the public’s right to know?
It’s a significant change. I would say that the advent of the Internet is as important a development in our lifetimes, or maybe our century, as the Gutenburg press was 500 hundred years ago. I don’t know that we really understand how that’s going to affect communication.
The three networks, for example, in television used to control what news we received, but as (former CBS anchorman) Dan Rather learned, all the media bloggers can have a great influence.
I see a couple of problems.
The traditional press has done a responsible job, I believe, for a number of reasons. One is, they get a good education as reporters and they have ethical standards. But also, they can be sued if they defame someone.
The problem with the Internet is that people can say anything they want, and damage someone’s reputation. If they have no assets, there’s no means to get a big judgment against them.
And we don’t have criminal libel in this country where if you defame someone, you go to prison, so the worst that can happen is that you have a money judgment against you, and if you have no money, then there’s no control. That’s one of the biggest problems, I think.
Another problem is how the media, certainly the newspaper side of it, can make money. I think most newspapers find that half of their readers buy newspapers. The other half, mostly younger, read it on the Internet. So how do you really make money anymore?
They used to make money from advertisements, the classified ads, and now with craigslist and others (websites) that income source is gone, and so there is a danger that you can lose your daily newspapers.
What are some of the biggest issues in maritime law?
One of the most interesting avenues that I’ve been in, in recent years, is piracy. We don’t have any piracy in Jacksonville, but I am part of a larger maritime community and I was the head of the American delegation on piracy that went to the Comite Maritime International in Singapore when we were trying to adopt a maritime code on piracy for the nations of the world.
We had a good proposal to consider. These were representatives from all the maritime law associations around the world, there are 50, the idea being that piracy is a crime committed at sea.
But there are millions of miles of ocean, and you can’t really patrol the ocean.
But while the crime is committed at sea, they have to come home somewhere.
That’s one place where the world has to work together.
Do you travel a lot?
I do. That’s part of the job, and over the years, my wife has traveled with me to Egypt, Indonesia, Norway, different places around the world. Our children, our two girls, traveled also.
You grew up in Jacksonville’s Murray Hill neighborhood, you attended local public schools — John Gorrie Junior High School and Robert E. Lee High School, serving as a student council president at both and co-captaining your high school swim team. As a student, you also performed in the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra as a percussionist. How formative were those years in influencing your law career?
Very formative. I had the good fortune of being selected the president of the student council at Gorrie, and then at Lee. You learn how to express yourself, and that probably builds self-confidence.
You also were on the swim team at Davidson College in North Carolina, you were president of your fraternity, and you’ve held many leadership positions in your career. What do see as your particular qualities of leadership?
I’d say probably one is my ability to get people to work together. The best came out when I was president of the Rotary Club of Jacksonville. We just celebrated our 100th anniversary, so I’m not a charter member. But I was president about 25 years ago, and in 1988, we inducted our first black member. And, you know, the Rotary Club of Jacksonville was fairly representative of what Jacksonville was like then. So the membership committee voted not to do it. And our board was a good board, and didn’t enjoy doing it, but overruled the membership committee for the first time in the history of the club, and we inducted our first black member.
We prepared the way for women to come in, and that day, as our new member was being introduced, the president of The River Club came up to me and said, how did you do that? So we helped him, and The River Club started having African-American members, and I got calls from other Rotary clubs. There were 12 Rotary clubs at the time in Jacksonville, and they said, we were just waiting for you to do that.
Not that everything has been that dramatic, but I think my skill of helping people work together is probably the one that’s most effective.
Do you think that the generations behind the baby boomers fully understand what sort of barriers had to be broken?
To even think that there were times not that long ago, when people because of their color couldn’t go to a restaurant or a movie, or belong to clubs, it goes over the (younger generation’s) heads, I think, which is good. It’s good for our society that some prejudice is gone.
You are in pivotal positions in Jacksonville. You serve on the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission, which is being dissolved, and you also led the JAX Chamber’s international business efforts. What will be your role in the City’s economic development efforts when the commission dissolves and the city creates a Downtown Investment Authority and Office of Economic Development within the mayor’s office?
I don’t know if I’ll have any formal role, because the mayor is taking that part in-house.
But one of my passions is to assist in bringing companies to Jacksonville, high-quality companies. I think Jacksonville’s been discovered, certainly by international companies, for a number of reasons.
With the Jacksonville Jaguars and Super Bowl (XXXIX in 2005), almost a billion people saw Jacksonville, it brought our city to the attention of the world. And when they come to visit, they like what they see. They find a sophisticated business community with Southern hospitality. It’s almost easy to sell Jacksonville to these companies that come to visit.
What sort of questions about Jacksonville do you receive when you meet with these companies?
One of the questions, when we take them out on the river, is, ‘why is your river so polluted?’ I say, well, you have to understand about our river. It comes up from the south a long way away and goes through primeval forests, where the leaves fall in and tannic acid gets into it, just like tea. So when you look at our river, don’t think pollution, think iced tea.
That’s a new way of looking at the St. Johns River.
That’s right. But we have so many benefits here. I think consolidated government is a good selling point. The chamber asked me to lead an effort, when they renovate their building, to build an international plaza on the corner.
We have 85 companies from 22 countries, and we’re talking with those companies about putting flags up. It’ll be colorful along Bay Street. It’s going to be lighted at night, we’ll have a little pocket park, and that’ll be a nice welcome to Downtown Jacksonville as people come off of the Main Street Bridge.
It’ll communicate to companies that might be interested in coming here that we’re open to having international businesses here, and it communicates to our local citizens that we’re part of the global marketplace.
Your most visible role at the JAX Chamber is with international trade. What is the status and potential for international trade and logistics in Jacksonville and Northeast Florida?
Logistics is going to be probably our biggest success story in Jacksonville.
In fact, I started telling this story 15 years ago, when I visited in China, at China Ocean Shipping to try to get them to start coming to Jacksonville.
I had met some of the young people who worked at COSCO — China Ocean Shipping — when I was at a meeting in Sydney. They invited me to come, I took my wife with me, and she went with me over to the COSCO headquarters, and they invited her to come in.
So I’m on one side and Mr. Liu and all of his advisers were on the other side. I told them about Jacksonville, how we have the interstate highways that connect us with the Northeast and West, and the end of the shortest transcontinental highway in the country.
We have three major railroads in and out, every day, and more movements than any other place.
The University of North Florida has made logistics one of its flagship programs.
And our location — we’re the westernmost port on the East Coast, we’re due south of Cleveland.
So I said to Mr. Liu, I understand that some shipping companies, instead of coming through the Panama Canal, are coming around through Suez.
And he said, ‘oh, we started doing that.’ And I said, well when your ship passes the Rock of Gibraltar, just look straight ahead, and that’s Jacksonville.
Young people need to stay home and get into logistics. That’s a growing field. In fact, we’ve identified ourselves and named ourselves ‘America’s Logistics Center.’
Define logistics. How broad is that field?
Logistics is getting your product from one place to another. Consumers and shippers don’t really care, unless time is part of the problem, if it goes on a truck or a bus or a train or whatever. The whole logistics and supply chain system needs to work so that it all gets the goods from one place to another. That’s all logistics is.
We have the headquarters for a number of logistics companies here. CSX, Crowley, Landstar, CEVA (Logistics), Sea Star Line, Horizon Lines.
We had a Japanese shipping company in 2005, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, which selected Jacksonville as their East Coast terminal. They were having labor problems on the West Coast.
Sixty percent of the people in the United States live east of the Mississippi. They said, ‘we need to be on the East Coast,’ and they picked Jacksonville for that location.
It looks like Hanjin Shipping from Korea is going to do the same thing.
It’s anticipated that we now have about a thousand trucks a day leaving the port. When these are in full operation and the economy gets back, there’ll be 8,000 a day. People are excited about what’s happening, but unless we prepare for it, they’re not going to be happy sitting in traffic.
There are preparations being made. One thing we’ve been working on is to educate everyone about preparing for the future, and taking advantage of the opportunity we have.
You’re also working with the Jacksonville Port Authority on the Mile Point project, which is the navigational issue, and also the deepening of the harbor. What is the status of those projects?
It looks like we’re going to have Mile Point fixed earlier than we thought. It might take another two years, but (CEO) Paul Anderson at the port has done a wonderful job in educating everybody who might be able to have any influence over that issue.
You wonder how much information gets out to all of us in the public. Probably two words that most people in Jacksonville know — Mile Point.
It’s an obstruction to navigation, which means that when ships can only come in at high tide, four hours at high tide each time, it’s exactly like closing all the bridges except for four hours during the day and four hours at night.
The port authority talked about maybe using some private funds, $38 million, to fix that. The port has got to fix that.
We’re in the same boat on the dredging. Our Congress has for some reason made the word ‘earmark’ so negative that they’ve reached the point where they’ve said that anything a congressperson proposes is an earmark.
Well, that’s how all our infrastructure has been built, by congressional action. And that would only be built if it’s in the president’s budget through the Corps of Engineers. That’s where it’s helping us with Mile Point, because it’s in his budget.
It makes no sense to me. The majority of the people in the House of Representatives don’t even like the President, yet they’ve given up all their power to him so nobody is going to be able to get any dredging done, until I guess the next election, which comes later this year.
In the meantime, we need to grow our port organically, which we can do without having the dredging done yet.
The dredging is well off into the future. I think it’s going to happen for us, but I think we need to do something about it in the meantime. There are a lot of things we can do. We’ve learned from other ports. We can give incentives; we can focus on having distribution centers. We never did that before because they weren’t high-wage jobs, but that’s where companies are sending their goods and we don’t really have them, so we need to work on that.
You also are the Honorary Norwegian Consul for Northeast Florida. Talk about that role.
It’s an honorary position, I was appointed by the king of Norway in 1989, and I helped mostly with shipping. I can promote officers. I can change registries on ships. People who are Norwegians, particularly students, can come to my office and vote in elections. I assist with passports and visas, and I get legal questions. That’s the reason I have the job.
The man who had it before me was the shipping agent, and he used to call me all the time to ask me what to do on certain things, and I told him. I never charged him. When he retired, he said, ‘if you don’t mind, I’m going to recommend you be the consul, you have been all these years anyway.’
Based on your 50 years of practicing law, what do you see as the state of the economy in Jacksonville and in Northeast Florida?
I don’t know if it’s so much about the economy, but I guess it is in part.
Jacksonville’s a better place than it was when I grew up here, and for lots of reasons.
I like the way people now are more open to people who are different. That’s a problem around the world, really.
We have the Navy, where so many people, good people, have retired here — it’s one of the favorite places to retire.
We have businesspeople who’ve served all over the world with their companies, who’ve selected Jacksonville for their retirement. You can see it in the World Affairs Council. It’s supported so much by people who’ve lived other places.
It helps all of us who grew up here to see a bigger picture, and that’s going to be attractive, and already has been attractive, for companies to come here.
Our economy — we’re bringing so many good businesses here that are creating jobs. I think we’re the envy of the state. I’ve heard that from people in Tampa and other places who said Jacksonville has become an international place so quickly, and I’m proud of us for doing that.
Do you have any suggestions or recommendations to business owners?
One thing our businesses in Jacksonville are missing out on is doing business abroad. I understand from the director of U.S. Commercial Service of the Commerce Department office in Jacksonville that only 2 percent of our businesses do business abroad. That’s a wide open market.
People say, ‘well, it costs more for American goods.’ And his answer is, ‘people want American goods. Do you know why? Because they work. They want made-in-America.’
Our businesses are missing out if they don’t go into that market. I know they have concerns, because I’ve dealt with them. Businesses think, ‘well, how am I going to get paid?’ and there are answers to that. Just because it’s different, don’t be afraid to do business abroad.
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