Terry Russell President of The Florida Bar.

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Terry Russell President of The Florida Bar.

"Caring and courageous with service and leadership in his soul."

In 1978, when Terrence Russell was a young lawyer and Nova was a young university, both were flung into a David v. Goliath battle that not only secured his career as a stellar trial lawyer but rescued the school from the brink of extinction.

And that's no exaggeration.

"Terry saved the university. Not only do I think highly of his legal skills but also as a man. He is ethical, and he loves the law," says Abraham Fischler, president of Nova University from 1970 to 1992, a former public member of The Florida Bar Board of Governors who also served on the Supreme Court Judicial Nominating Commission.

It was a riveting, high-profile trial that grabbed frontpage news in Ft. Lauderdale. The defendant, the permanent trustee of a trust set up by insurance millionaire Leo Goodwin, Sr., had refused to turn over a $14.5 million bequest to Nova University.

Money tied up in the trust was the barrier between the law school and full accreditation from the American Bar Association that had required Nova to construct a law center instead of having law classes scattered around campus. It was a particularly critical time for the survival of the entire Nova University, at the forefront of cutting-edge distance learning while foundering financially.

"That school would be dead today were it not for the fact that Terry was able to get that money collected ... every penny that we said was owed," agrees Carl Schuster, who hired Russell to join his Ft. Lauderdale firm in 1970 that is now Ruden McClosky Smith Schuster & Russell.

When Schuster gave the Nova case to his younger associate, little did he realize it would swallow nearly two years full-time of Russell's days, as he litigated six lawsuits at the state, federal, and appellate levels. In the end, the case reaped $20 million for Nova, earned Russell his status as named partner, and resulted in the disbarment of the defendant, who was a lawyer.

Aided only by a paralegal and occasional help from an associate, Russell, a nine-year practitioner at the time, took on a cadre of lawyers whom the recalcitrant trustee had hired from major Miami firms.

"I was so young that I didn't appreciate the significance of the case until it w...

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