President of Florida Bar describes last four months as 'crash course in crisis management'

VERO BEACH — The last four months of Vero Beach attorney John Stewart’s year as president of The Florida Bar “was like a crash course in crisis management.”

“There were no road maps” Stewart said, as he and the bar’s staff were tasked with the often-urgent dissemination of changes in court procedures and other information vital to the approximately 107,000 attorneys licensed to practice in Florida.

“Justice just can’t grind to a halt,” Stewart, 50, said Tuesday as he prepared for the bar’s annual convention, being held online for the first time.

“We have to continue to move forward,” said Stewart, a partner in the Vero Beach firm Rossway Swan since 2016.

“Some people were ready, some were kind of teetering and some people weren’t ready at all, but I think the profession as a whole did a very good job of getting up to speed if they weren’t already, or if they were implementing those practices in a real hurry so they could continue to provide essential services to Florida’s consumers as needed.”

Stewart also credited the Florida Supreme Court and Chief Justice Charles Canady with making the decisions to adapt the judicial system to constantly developing circumstances.

When Stewart was elected without opposition in December 2017 to serve as 2019-20 president, he said it was in part because “I have a little bit of a unique skill set because of the work the bar asked me to do in late 2012, early 2013 with regard to technology’s impact on the practice of law.”

He chaired the Technology Subcommittee for a three-year study on the future of the profession and oversaw implementing two of its major recommendations.

That knowledge and experience came in handy.

“Certainly, the pandemic is not the vehicle that I would have chosen to cause the acceleration of change, but we probably accelerated the profession’s and the judiciary’s use of technology in the practice by five to 10 years in three or four months,” Stewart said Tuesday.

Against the “backdrop of a terrible amount of pain and suffering,” Stewart said there is a silver lining.

“We talk about a new normal, what it will look like,” he said. “Well, we’re not going to roll back to the way things were. I think our lawyers actually like it better, they see that we can operate remotely, our staff likes it better and a lot of our clients like it better.

“It’s more efficient, it’s more affordable, lowers overhead and it’s just a more modern way of doing business,” he said.

Stewart said one important factor in adapting was to avoided overreaching.

“Even though we were trying to forecast the future, I think our members appreciated having certainty, saying no matter what happens for the next four to six weeks, this is what the landscape is going to look like so they could plan, at least in a moderate way, to manage their business and their clients.”

One project Stewart wanted to accomplish during his term got a late start, he said.

“We certainly got behind in the committee I am chairing about the delivery of legal services (to the 75% of the population legal needs are not being met),” he said. “It was set to start in January and run through a year from now, but we didn’t get started until this week.”