On March 2, 1987, I walked into the building of the Florida Supreme Court just four days after finishing the Florida Bar Exam. Thirty-three years later, I still am at work there.
My jobs inside the state’s highest court have changed quite a lot over time. In 1987, I was a staff attorney helping Justices research the law on pending cases. Today, I am a manager responsible for court communications.
This was a career path I never imagined. And it has been far more interesting than anything I could have planned 33 years ago.
On graduating from law school, I envisioned myself working for a few years at the Court before moving on to work with a law firm specializing in media and communications law.
But just a few years later, Chief Justice Gerald Kogan set out quite different plans. The task he gave me was to create a culture of communications in the courts as the world moved into the online era that now dominates the Twenty-First Century.
It was a big challenge from the start. Kogan wanted to change old ways of work inside an institution first created when Florida received statehood from the U.S. Congress in 1845.
The projects I have managed since that time have been many. They include creating the Florida Supreme Court’s first website in 1994 and placing court documents on the Web for easy public access.
Starting in 1997, I coordinated a partnership with FSU to begin live broadcast of all Florida Supreme Court arguments. These broadcasts streamed over the Web, by satellite, and on cable television. It was a groundbreaking project soon imitated by many other courts worldwide.
There were major surprises along the way. In the fall of 2000, I managed all of the Florida Supreme Court’s communications during the 36 days of Florida’s disputed presidential election, known to history as Bush v. Gore.
And I had to grapple with the ever-changing technology. By the late 2000s, for example, my office oversaw placing the Florida Supreme Court’s communications on social media like Facebook and Twitter.
In 2005, I coordinated creation of the first state professional association of court public information officers. This was a challenge given to me in implementing part of an emergency preparedness plan crafted at the direction of Chief Justice Charles Wells in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks.
This association later would be given official duties as part of the first state court communications plan approved under Chief Justice Jorge Labarga. Around the world, this plan is being used as a model for Twenty-First Century governmental communications planning.
More recently, my staff and I arranged for all Florida Supreme Court oral arguments to be broadcast on Facebook Live. It was the first time any court in the United States had used Facebook for routine live gavel-to-gavel broadcasts easily available to the public.
A few weeks ago, the Court asked me to oversee planning to create a new outreach-based Judicial Learning Center inside our existing building. This is an exciting new project that is part of a growing national trend among courts to battle disinformation.
My career has been far different than what I imagined on March 2, 1987, as I filled out my employment paperwork in the Supreme Court’s personnel office. But the technology on which my career has been based did not yet exist at that time.
Over the next 33 years I would work with 22 of the Justices of the state’s highest court, nearly one-quarter of the total number since 1845. And I have directly advised 10 Chief Justices on legal and administrative issues.
Sometimes the best careers are the ones that never could have been planned.
© Robert Craig Waters 2020. For this and other writings: http://www.robertcraigwaters.com
Robert Craig Waters 