Florence SnyderWith the passing of Dexter Douglass, Florida has lost one more of its dwindling supply of lawyers who make friends out of clients, and leave them in better condition than they found them.
Douglass hung out his shingle in an era when law was a respected profession and lawyers aspired to be the person in town that everyone looked to as a wise counselor and community problem-solver. He held to that standard, even as the practice of law devolved into just another business.
Douglass, who died Sept. 17 of bladder cancer at age 83, was a high-priced gladiator in high-stakes, high-profile litigation and a master storyteller. He could have made a lot of easy money as a cable news “legal analyst.”
Instead, and to the end of his life, he preferred helping real people with real problems, whether they could afford to pay or not.
Journalists old enough to remember a world in which professionals and public officials could think and speak for themselves appreciated Douglass’ accessibility, his love of language, and his ability to take his work a great deal more seriously than he took himself.
That’s why reporters who know the difference between real and fake friends of the First Amendment paid their respects in print and in person at his funeral this month at Tallahassee’s Faith Presbyterian Church.
“Sometimes he didn’t like what we wrote about him or his governor”[Lawton Chiles, in whose administration Douglass served as general counsel], journalist Lucy Morgan told the Miami Herald.
“Several times he and I had shouting matches over the phone,” said Morgan, who headed the St. Petersburg Times Tallahassee Bureau in years when Douglass was regularly making news “but the next time I’d see him it was as though we had never argued.”
William Jablon, a 45-year friend, underscored the point in his eulogy.
“Dexter served as my mentor and lawyer for 35 years when I became headmaster of Maclay School,” Jablon said. “He always told me do the right thing… He also told me that in speaking with the press, tell them the truth. It always confuses them.”
In addition to his service as general counsel to Chiles, for whom he quarterbacked the landmark tobacco lawsuit, Douglass is most often remembered as Chairman of the 1997-98 Florida Constitution Revision Commission. He was honored in 2006 by the Florida Bar Foundation for “a career spent providing legal services to the powerless.”
Douglass took joy from the practice of law because he kept things simple. Get up in the morning. Don’t do anything stupid all day long. Don’t let your clients do anything stupid, either.
In 58 years as a working lawyer, Douglass had only two kinds of clients: those who took his advice and were glad they did, and those, like Al Gore in 2000, who listened to other lawyers and wished they hadn’t.
