Gwynne Alice Young: President of The Florida Bar: a loyal, selfless, and giving leader.

• Author: Pudlow, Jan

When Sylvia Walbolt suggested a friend get married at her family's place in rural Hillsborough County on Lake Josephine, she envisioned an intimate affair with a few dozen people gathered at the dock.

The bride was lawyer Elaine Holmes. The groom was Farrukh Quarishi, winner of the 1974 Herman Trophy who played soccer for the Tampa Bay Rowdies. And lots of fans wanted to see him tie the knot.

On this unforgettable wedding day in the late '70s, the front yard suddenly filled with cars that kept coming until the road bulged with a traffic jam.

After the vows, Walbolt scanned the crowd of faces. There must have been 400 people! And they were all looking for food and drink the minute the ceremony was over. Even though she'd played it safe and ordered extra food and champagne, Walbolt panicked.

"I was a basket case," admitted Walbolt, a partner and shareholder at Carlton Fields who joined the firm in 1963.

Thankfully, her colleague, Gwynne Young, who'd agreed to help with a small reception, stepped up and took charge. Calmly directing the caterers, preparing food with gusto, and pouring champagne--Young did it all with a smile.

"Gwynne can handle anything and do it without stress and without yelling at people. That is what impressed me the most," Walbolt said.

"I suppose other people could get things accomplished, but they wouldn't do it with as much grace and goodwill as Gwynne would do. She can deal with a caterer every bit as well as a justice, and treat them both the same. She is so calm and such a good people person that I have no doubt those skills will translate in her role as leader of The Florida Bar."

Gwynne Alice Young, a 62-year-old business litigator and trial lawyer who honed her courtroom skills as Hillsborough County's first female prosecutor, becomes the 64th president of The Florida Bar. A shareholder at Carlton Fields in Tampa, where she's practiced since she was 27, Young is the firm's fifth lawyer and the Bar's fifth woman member to lead Florida's more than 93,000 lawyers.

But this honor wasn't just handed to Young. She had to square her shoulders, thicken her skin, and go fight for it.

In the first three-way Bar presidential race since 1983, Young zigzagged Florida giving speeches and shaking hands, running against a former state senator from Ft. Lauderdale and a Jacksonville attorney. And she did it with her trademark unflappable, can-do determination.

"It was very much a contested race, and she handled it with aplomb and sophistication," said Wm. Reece Smith, Jr., both a former Florida Bar and ABA president and mentor to Young at Carlton Fields.

The first words that pop to mind when friends and colleagues think of Gwynne Young are: "genuine," "unstoppable," "leader," "loyal," "honest," "hardworking," "intelligent," "caring," "generous," "steadfast," "welcoming," "inclusive," "collegial," "engaged," and "fair."

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"There's a tremendous goodness in Gwynne," said Monsignor Robert C. Gibbons of St. Paul's Catholic Church in St. Petersburg, who first met Young when they were law students at the University of Florida.

"She's a person without guile. She likes people. She cares about people. She sees the best in people. And she wants to serve."

When Gibbons first learned Young was running for Bar president, "I think I told her she was crazy. I thought, my Lord, why in the heck would she want to dive into that? But Gwynne is a person who doesn't shy away from challenges."

And she doesn't shy away from helping people.

"One of the many things I love about Gwynne is she has a commitment to the underdog, to the oppressed, or the less advantaged," said Kevin Napper, who handles white collar criminal defense at Carlton Fields. "She's always been committed to those less fortunate who need help."

'DNA to Help People'

Young's instinct to help was obvious to Ruby Lee Jackson, now Young's 82-year-old housekeeper.

They first met 37 years ago in a Hillsborough County courtroom. Young was the 13th Judicial Circuit's trailblazing first female assistant state attorney, handling juvenile and dependency court cases.

Jackson was a worried mother trying to get custody of her grandson. Her son Benny, who had come back from Vietnam with chronic paranoid schizophrenia and post traumatic stress disorder, had a nine-month-old baby, Rico. The baby was living with his mother and suffering from failure to thrive.

That day, Jackson volunteered to Young that she had to put her son in the Veterans Administration hospital because of his mental illness. Young appreciated Jackson's honesty.

"She was on the other side. And even on the other side, she was still a nice person. The first time she saw me, she liked me and I liked her. We bonded," Jackson said. "I'm black and she's white, and she trusts me with anything."

In the end, Young helped Jackson get custody of her grandson. Once at Carlton Fields, Young represented Jackson again, setting up a guardianship to take care of Benny.

Years later, Young once again came to Jackson's rescue when her husband put their house up as collateral in a lease truck deal, then got cancer and couldn't work. When the company wanted to foreclose on the Jacksons' home, Young enlisted help from a law partner who did bankruptcy work. Negotiating a resolution, Young gathered donations for a settlement and saved the Jacksons' home.

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Asked if Young did right by her, Jackson answers: "No, honey, she did over right. I love that girl to death! Gwynne has an education. You can tell. There's not very much Gwynne don't know. But she don't let that get in her way. Some people would be big with that. That's not her."

Even before she became a lawyer, Young understood that it is the right thing to help people, and she was influenced by her stepfather, Judge Luckey, the longtime public defender of the 13th Judicial Circuit, who died in 1994.

"I have just always had a strong desire to serve or help people," Young said. "My stepfather represented indigents, and it was important to him that people deserved representation, even if they couldn't afford it. I think it was something I grew up with, and it was innate in me. And I have found a place to work where that is important, too."

Young thrived under Carlton Fields' strong culture of pro bono service, learned from examples set by Smith, who as ABA president led the movement to save funding for Legal Services Corp, and her first boss in the trial department Tom Clark, a kindhearted soul always helping needy folks get access to the judicial system. Very involved in pro bono work, Clark once represented the Hillsborough Association for Retarded Citizens in a land use appeal so that they could build a group home.

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Currently, Young co-chairs the pro bono committee of the Bar's Real Property, Probate and Trust Law Section, and has served on the pro bono committee for the Business Law Section.

As young as 25, she was already committed to her Hillsborough County community, serving on the board of the YWCA. Young helped forge a successful merger between the YMCA and YWCA to combine resources and rejuvenate programs for youth and families. YMCA branches sprung up around Tampa.

"I feel good about what I do for my business clients, that I can get them a good resolution to their problem. But it's not the same kind of emotional feeling when you help somebody solve a personal problem," Young said of her pro bono work.

Like Young's colleague said after Ruby Lee Jackson gave them grateful hugs for saving her home, "I never get hugs from my bank clients."

Young's former legal secretary from 1991-2000, Debbie Tillmann, said: "It's in her DNA to help people. Gwynne was so different from other attorneys I had worked for. She was always all about righting wrongs. In my prior jobs, all the plaintiffs' attorneys would get excited about 'good injuries,' and getting a big paycheck."

Carlton Fields helped start an intake program for Bay Area Legal Services, and the firm's attorneys lined up to do intake and handle conflict cases.

"Gwynne took more than her fair share of cases. She didn't do it to build a resume. She didn't have to build a resume. She was already chair of the biggest practice group in the firm. She still felt passionate about taking pro bono cases. I am definitely a member of Gwynne Young's fan club," Tillmann said.

One day, Tillmann shared with another secretary her concerns about her daughter's recent assignment to an inner-city public high school that she wasn't sure would be a good fit. She had tried unsuccessfully to get her into another school. Young overheard, asked her about the problem, went into her office, and made a phone call that set the wheels in motion for Tillmann's daughter to receive a scholarship to attend Tampa Preparatory School, where Young served as a trustee.

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Tillmann proudly says her daughter, Kristin Phillips, earned her Ph.D. and works in breast cancer research. When Tillmann wanted to go back to college and finish her undergraduate degree, Young supported her and worked out a flexible schedule. With a graduate degree in industrial organized psychology, Tillmann was promoted to marketing proposal manager at Carlton Fields.

"Talk about being empathetic! She's the pro. Gwynne connects with people immediately and in a way that's a real gift. Combine that with a huge intellect and a real drive in everything she does. That has always been her signature," said Tom Icard, a former partner at Carlton Fields who knew Young as a "baby lawyer."

"What marks Gwynne is this genuineness that somebody who has never met her before immediately senses and picks up on. She is the same person, regardless of whether she is in front of a jury or talking to somebody in the mailroom back at the office or having an audience with royalty. Not everybody has that gift. And it's not calculated. It's just who she is."

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