At the Florida State University College of Law, we take pride in the tremendous engagement of our alumni and other attorneys and judges throughout Florida in our courses, professionalism programming, mentoring, clinics, advisory boards, career services, fundraising, and other activities.  Without this engagement in the College of Law, we literally could not be a Tier 1 law school. Your teaching and mentoring helps prepare our students extraordinarily well for the legal profession, your knowledge and advice keeps us in touch with the latest practice trends, and your support helps us contain costs and the indebtedness of our graduates. You do so very much to advance our mission as a first-rate, cutting-edge, cost-effective educational institution, and every student, faculty, and staff member here is grateful for your gifts of time, talent and treasure.

Volunteerism and charity, especially toward an institution one values, comes with its own internal rewards. I have for many years devoted time and contributed treasure to my college alma mater, so I know well the warm, fuzzy feelings of goodwill, usefulness, and accomplishment that comes from engagement. That said, we at the College of Law have spent much of 2022 working harder to find additional ways for you to reap rewards from connecting with the law school. We have sought more ways for you to network with fellow alums and other attorneys, opportunities for you to engage with the law school in ways that aid your clients or other business development efforts, and opportunities for you to broaden your expertise through educational certifications. Our efforts will be comprehensive, and ultimately, we hope to develop something valuable for everyone.

Our most significant case in point is the Stoops Colab, an educational online space with discussion boards, podcasts, course offerings, job postings, and other collaborative resources. Although currently in its early infancy, the Colab is designed to enable us to build professional ecosystems for attorneys and business professionals in all areas of law and business, including corporate law and finance, private equity, privacy law, technology law, employment law, health law, sports and entertainment law, insurance fraud, environmental risk management, commercial property law, hospitality law, and more. The Colab was launched with the support of a generous gift from alum Jeff Stoops, who wishes to help us raise the reputation of the College of Law in the area of law and business by providing a place for intellectual collaboration between lawyers, business professionals, and academics. Once the Colab is fully developed, we also hope to offer in-person events on current topics.

The Colab is designed to be fundamentally collaborative, so we need your help. Please visit the site at stoopscolab.com and like and share our social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Recommend the site on your LinkedIn page, and to office colleagues and clients. Please reach out if you have interest in teaching a course or being a guest speaker on our podcast. Please consider and share our course and degree offerings with those who might have interest. Let us know where we should be advertising the Colab and our course offerings. Please let us know if you have job offerings to post.  Use the Colab to share your professional accomplishments, videos of your lectures, copies of your professional publications, and more.  The Colab cannot be successful without the robust support that so many of you already provide to the law school. If others see your engagement, they too will want to join us. But first, we need to generate our own excitement for the Colab’s potential.

By giving back to the law school in this way, you help us build the reputation and create the opportunities for our students and graduates that we seek.  You also help promote your own work, your reputation, your firm, your fellow alums, and more. As a bonus, you will find a place to learn and to connect with a broad community of professionals with similar interests as we grow. We hope that this engagement tool will enable you to receive even more than you give, and we hope that your rewards are both internal and tangible.

Although we will work hard to engage as many of you in the Colab as possible, we also will work to create other engagement spaces for those of you who are not connected to law and business. That’s my New Year’s resolution for 2023.  In the meantime, we wish you all the happiest of holiday seasons and a new year full of opportunity and reward.

Published on December 16, 2022