Courtesy of Ursula Ungaro
It’s never too late to blaze new trails. Just ask Senior U.S. District Judge Ursula Ungaro.
After 34 years on the bench in Florida, the Miami-based jurist submitted her resignation on Friday to join Boies Schiller Flexner as a partner on June 1.
She is 70 years old - and she’s not slowing down.
“I like the idea of a challenge,” Ungaro told me. “I wanted to see what it would be like with the credentials I have behind me, to see if I can build a practice and generate business and mix it up in court again.”
I’m going to say it right now: Ursula Ungaro is my role model.
The impetus for her move came after a former clerk who went on to launch a biotech startup asked her to serve on the board of directors.
For a federal judge, that was a no-no. But for Ungaro, the opportunity “ignited a spark,” she said, kindling a long-suppressed urge to “do something entrepreneurial.”
Being a federal judge is of course one of the highest honors in the legal profession. But entrepreneurial? Not so much.
For Ungaro, saying yes to the board seat meant leaving the bench. At the same time, she was not at all ready to put herself out to pasture, with hazy days of golf, gardening and bridge.
Hello Boies Schiller.
“I’m very aware - I’m not an ostrich - that the firm has had a lot of departures,” Ungaro said. Boies Schiller, as I previously reported, saw about 60 partners exit in 2020.
“I think they have a great base to restructure,” Ungaro said. “I have all the respect in the world for David Boies and the other lawyers” including her old friend Stephen Zack, a Miami-based partner and member of the executive committee, and Stuart Singer, a fellow executive committee member who is based in Fort Lauderdale.
“I’d like to be part of the restructuring,” she said, adding that “the chemistry should be right.”
Ungaro and Zack met in the mid-1970s, when both were associates at (now defunct) Frates Floyd Pearson Stewart Richman & Greer.
“We suffered together,” joked Zack, who previously served as president of the American Bar Association.
“I am thrilled to be able to work with her again,” he continued. “Bringing on a distinguished jurist like Ursula Ungaro aligns very well with what we do best in the courtroom as a litigation firm. She will be a difference-maker.”
Boies Schiller has about 30 lawyers in Florida, an increasingly hot legal market. As my colleague Arriana McLymore reported earlier this week, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan just opened a 10-lawyer office in Miami.
Boies Schiller clients in Florida include Florida Power and Light, Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Nextera Energy, Trividia Health and the City of Miami Beach.
Ungaro plans to work in-person from the firm’s office in downtown Miami. She was just there trying to figure out where to put her desk – she’s buying the one she used as a judge from the court and having it moved over. “A big souvenir,” she called it, never mind that it won’t match the office’s midcentury modern décor.
Born in Miami to a family of doctors, she said was “brought up to be a professional person,” whether that meant becoming a doctor, lawyer, teacher or other occupation.
Given her affinity for language, law school “seemed to be kind of a natural fit.”
She earned her J.D. in 1975 from the University of Florida College of Law, one of just 17 women in a class of about 250.
She spent the next 12 years in private practice, specializing in complex commercial litigation and becoming a shareholder at Sparber Shap & Heilbronner.
“It was a different time,” she said, and the bar was still very much a “Florida old boy’s network.”
She’s curious, she added, to see “what’s it going to be like (to practice) as a woman now compared to 34 years ago.”
In 1987, she was appointed to the Eleventh Judicial Circuit Court of Florida and in 1992, George H.W. Bush tapped her for the Southern District of Florida, where she was the second woman elevated to the bench.
Was the relatively low salary compared to what she could make in private practice an issue? I asked.
“When I started, the disparity was not as great as it is now,” she said, adding that one of her clerks who is moving to Williams & Connolly stands to make more as a new associate than she does as a judge.
But she “never gave the money much thought. It’s such a wonderful career,” Ungaro said. “It’s not a job. It’s a vocation for most of us.”
She ended her tenure on the bench with a bang, presiding this week over the Southern District of Florida’s first in-person civil jury trial since the pandemic.
Her top tip for lawyers? “Understand the importance of winning the war, not the battle and don’t get hung up on individual rulings.”
In many ways, being on the bench is “a protected environment,” she said. “It’s comfortable.”
And let’s face it: Change can be hard.
That Ungaro at this point in her career said yes to what she called “the allure of doing something different” should be an inspiration to us all.
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