Reflections of a Dad

My oldest child is about to graduate from college and enter the workforce.?I always stress to him that he must choose his own path and I balance that with advice from my years of learning about the consequences of decisions made over my lifetime.?It is the first Monday of the year, so thinking about this made me reflect on decisions I’ve made along the way and how they have impacted my life.?

In 1994, I was living in St. Petersburg, FL, working at Florida Power Corp (now, Duke Energy), and was offered a job in Orlando.?At first, I accepted the offer and made plans to move.?At the time, several of my friends were living and thriving in Atlanta and something told me that I wanted to be there.?So, I turned down the job offer in Orlando and moved to Atlanta.?I’m sure the job in Orlando would have been fine, but would I have met my wife and had my 3 wonderful children??

In Atlanta, I worked in a couple of engineering and sales positions before deciding to go to law school - another decision that changed my life.?The next several years were pretty rough – full-time work, a couple of kids, a mortgage, part-time law school, and an attempt at keeping my sanity.?Fortunately, I had a strong wife, good friends, and a solid family.

I was lucky to find a position out of law school with a fantastic regional Intellectual Property Boutique, where I learned IP law from some great mentors.?It was a fun place to work and I learned a ton.?After several years, the boutique was acquired by a large, national general practice firm.?While it was a great firm with great attorneys, BigLaw culture was just not for me, which brings me to the biggest decision of my life.

Two of my very good friends at the time, Kevin Broyles and James Fisher, started a law firm 7 years before, in 2002.?We discussed me taking my practice to their new platform.?The decision was both exciting and daunting.?I’d be moving from a national, well-known firm to a 33 person, all-partner, distributed firm with no offices.?Would my clients follow me??Could I build my practice while working remotely??What kind of clients could a firm like FisherBroyles attract??Well, I made the leap of faith in August of 2009.

To be perfectly honest, at first, it wasn’t easy.?I enjoyed the freedom to run my own practice and control my own schedule, but there was no daily structure laid out for me.?If I wanted to be lazy and not work, that would be fine, but I would also not make any money.?So, I had to learn to be accountable to myself, structure my days, and prioritize my time.?It took some time to get the hang of it, but over the years I was able to leverage the time gained by saving my commute time to balance spending time working and building my practice and the law firm with the needs of a young family.?I’ll never regret watching my children grow up and spending time with my family.?Heck, one year, my youngest played 72 baseball games and I think I made about 65 of them!

It's now almost 13 years later and I can still say that my decision in 2009 was one of the most impactful and rewarding decisions of my life, both from a personal and a financial perspective.?FisherBroyles is now an AMLAW 200 Law Firm with close to 300 partners nationwide and in London.?I no longer worry about whether I can build a practice or what kinds of clients the firm will attract.?My practice is thriving and we service some of the largest clients in the world.?Not only do I enjoy financial independence, but I also get to work with some of my best friends who happen to be fantastic attorneys.

What decisions will you make in 2022 that will impact your life??As for advice for my son, I plan to tell him that when he sees a fork in the road, he should pick it up and eat the cake. ??