391 in Florida make the 'best lawyers' list
Lawyer, lawyer, on the wall, who’s the top-ranked of them all?
In its biennial attempt to answer that question, Harvard Law grads Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have published the fifth edition of The Best Lawyers in America, a guide to who’s hot and who’s not in the nation’s legal profession. And lawyers everywhere are scrambling to find out who made the cut.
Most will be disappointed: Only 11,363, or slightly more than 1 percent of the nation’s 715,000 lawyers, made this year’s list. That’s a bit more selective than the 11,501-lawyer group that made the list in 1991, when the last edition was published.
This year, the authors, who rank the lawyers by specialty and state, have added two new categories, environmental law and employee-benefits law, in an attempt to reflect the legal profession’s increasing specialization. The list includes 391 lawyers from Florida, up from 372 two years ago. There are 188 lawyers from Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.
Naifeh says the authors compiled the list by polling thousands of prominent lawyers and asking them to name the lawyers they consider to be the best. Naifeh acknowledges that this method tends to favor older, better-known lawyers over talented newcomers, though he says the authors continually try to include more women, minorities and younger lawyers.
At the same time, he says, “some lawyers like to wait until a person gets a little gray” before voting to put him on the list.
The Florida ranking includes many of the top names in Miami’s legal community: bankruptcy lawyer Francis Carter of Coll Davidson Carter Smith Salter & Barkett; litigator Robert Josefsberg of Podhurst Orseck Josefsberg Eaton Meadow Olin & Perwin; Cesar Alvarez, a corporate lawyer at Greenberg Traurig Hoffman Lipoff Rosen & Quentel; criminal defense lawyer Joel Hirschhorn; family lawyer Marsha Elser at Elser Greene & Hodor; First Amendment lawyer Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte; health-care lawyer Barry Craig of Mershon Sawyer Johnston Dunwody & Cole; immigration lawyer Ira Kurzban of Kurzban Kurzban & Weinger; labor lawyer Elizabeth du Fresne of Steel Hector & Davis; zoning lawyer Robert Traurig, also of Greenberg Traurig; personal injury lawyer Bill Colson of Colson Hicks Eidson Colson & Matthews; Martin Nash, a tax lawyer at Fine Jacobson Schwartz Nash & Block; and Paul Stokes, a trusts and estates lawyer at Kelley Drye & Warren.
Included from Broward are First Amendment lawyer Bruce Rogow of Nova Law Center in Fort Lauderdale; James Fox Miller, a family lawyer at Hollywood’s Miller Schwartz & Miller; and real estate lawyer Donald McClosky of Ruden Barnett McClosky Smith Schuster & Russell, also in Fort Lauderdale.
Dianne Weaver, senior partner at Weaver Kuvin Weaver & Lipton in Fort Lauderdale and one of only two women named to Florida’s personal injury list, says she’s delighted to have made the cut again this year. Weaver says she’s hopeful that, in future years, more women trial lawyers will be listed in the book.
“When I graduated law school in 1970, I can’t tell you how difficult it was to get a job as a trial lawyer,” Weaver said. “It’s much less difficult for women now.”
Apart from lauding South Florida’s old guard, this year’s listing also crowned some newcomers who’ve made their mark in South Florida’s legal community more recently. They include divorce lawyer Cynthia Green of Elser Greene & Hodor; health-care lawyers Gary Matzner and Jay Ziskind of Fine Jacobson Schwartz Nash & Block; corporate lawyer Tom Tew of Tew & Garcia-Pedrosa; criminal defense lawyer Jon Sale of Sonnett Sale & Kuehne; First Amendment lawyer Sandy Bohrer of Bohrer & Aprill; bankruptcy lawyer Mark Bloom of Greenberg Traurig, and tax lawyer Robert Panoff.
Panoff, a sole practitioner who was recently elected to chair the tax section of the Florida Bar, says he’s flattered by the mention.
“When you’re a personal injury lawyer, you get a big case and you get your name out there,” Panoff said. “When you’re a tax lawyer, it probably takes about 15 years to be recognized.”
The Best Lawyers in America is not available in bookstores. It can be ordered from Woodward/White Inc., 129 First Ave., Aiken, S.C. 29801, or by calling (803) 648-0300. It costs $110.
Portrait Labels
Alvarez; Hirschhorn; Du Fresne; Berger.
Columnist portrait: ROSALIND RESNICK.
Author Biography
Rosalind Resnick, a free-lance journalist, writes the Professions column for Business Monday. Write her in care of Business Monday, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla. 33132.