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LOBBYING AVENGERS When lawyer Fred Baggett combined his Tallahassee lobbying/law firm with Greenberg Traurig in 1991, the firm’s founders made clear, they were “now one firm.” Even though that new enterprise at first was like serving, say, collards in fatback on top of key lime pie. “We were good ol’ boys in Tallahassee and they were the South Florida lawyers, and the legal and political community in Tallahassee scratched their heads: ‘What the devil are you guys doing?’ ” recalls Baggett, now the managing shareholder in Tallahassee. “We did litigation, contracts, and our lobbying, but most of our work related to government in one way or another,” he says of his old firm, Roberts, Baggett, LaFace and Richard. Greenberg, he says, “did not have the resources to deal with Tallahassee. They came up to see us and said ‘this is not our town.’ We merged the firms and we were their first office outside South Florida.” The combination worked, and Greenberg Traurig since then has exploded to 2,000 attorneys in 38 offices on three continents. And its capital lobbying practice, with Baggett still at the helm, is steaming on. In recent years, Greenberg has made marquee hires, including veteran insurance lawyer-lobbyist Fred Karlinsky and Liz Dudek, former secretary of the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration (see story, page 90). The firm came in fifth this November in legislative lobbying compensation for the third quarter of 2016. State law requires lobbying firms to report revenue, but it only requires them to do so in general ranges, not in precise amounts. Greenberg posted $1.03 million in lobbying revenue. Having offices around the country only helps, especially for larger clients: “We may tell clients, ‘if you have a Medicaid problem in Florida, chances GREENBERG TRAURIG A happy collaboration between litigators and lobbyists for 25 years BY JIM ROSICA 88 | INFLUENCE WINTER 2016 PHOTO: Mark Wallheiser Photography


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