We actually had three attorneys that were instrumental in bringing the firm together: Bruce Bogin, and my brother Ranier, and myself. And we were all with very large firms. Bruce was with the Lowndes firm here in Orlando, Ranier was with Akerman / Senterfitt, and I was with Holland & Knight over in Lakeland and Tampa. And we all enjoyed those firms and were doing well at them, but there were just certain aspects of the mega-size law firms and the way they operated that just wasn’t who we were. So I left Holland & Knight actually and started my own little practice here in Orlando and I didn’t actually know Bruce Bogin but we ended up sharing office space and he needed some help on some cases so I helped him and not long after that we decided to form a partnership and about that same time Ranier decided he was ready to make a change and left Akerman. And so, the three of us came together and started this little law firm that has now blossomed into what it is today.
I think it was really one of those things where we all came from good situations. We all left very pleasantly and on good terms with the firms we were with, but we just felt like we wanted to control our own destiny, and we also felt that there were some, in terms of how a business is operated, there were some things about these large law firms and how they operated that, it wasn’t really to our liking, and we thought we could do a better job of them as a smaller outfit. Mainly related to client service, and how you treat clients, and also somewhat related to having a little more balance in your life and some of those kind of things. And that started really around 1978-79.
And since then we’ve kind of grown from what were initially three attorneys, to four to seven to six to ten to eight to twelve, you know, and on and one. Right now we have about thirty-five attorneys. The largest we’ve ever been, I think, was around forty. And we’ve never really had a strategy of trying to see how big we can be… The number of attorneys we have has not been a real material concern for us. Some law firms do! They want to have a hundred lawyers, or they want to have eighty or they want to have a thousand or something like that!
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We all left very pleasantly and on good terms with the firms we were with, but we just felt like we wanted to control our own destiny…
And we’ve just always said no! What we want to do is give our clients the very best service, do a great job, and hopefully be successful. And if we’re successful, if we need more people to help us get the job done, then we’ll grow. And if we don’t, we won’t. And taking that approach we’ve just gradually, over the years, gotten up to where I think we’re about the eighth largest firm in Orlando, or tenth or something like that. But we’re content. If we remain at forty that’s fine, if we shrunk down to thirty that’d be fine, if we went up to fifty or sixty that’d be fine.
Our objective is to get the job done, get it done right, and at a reasonable price, and not so much with just how many attorneys there are.
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– Rulon D. Munns is an experienced real estate attorney and managing shareholder of Bogin, Munns & Munns, a full service law firm with offices in Orlando, Clermont, Kissimmee, Orange City, Daytona Beach, Ocala, Melbourne, Gainesville, and Leesburg, Florida. He welcomes questions and comments regarding the above and can be reached at rulon@boginmunns.com.
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