• Her article “Authorship, Audiences and Anonymous Speech,” was published in the Notre Dame Law Review.

Prior to her arrival at UF Law, the Sarasota native had just completed a Lyndon Baines Johnson internship with then-U.S. Congressman Connie Mack. Still, as she worked her way through law school, Savary Taylor’s interests were pulled in both directions as she took business-oriented classes while maintaining an eye for politics.

After clerkships for a judge in the Second District Court of Appeals and with the PGA Tour, she worked as deputy finance director raising funds for Mack’s successful U.S. Senate campaign, an experience that eventually led her to her first job in Washington, D.C.

“I feel like I’ve been blessed being in the right place at the right time,” said Savary Taylor, whose father, Johnson S. (Buddy) Savary (JD 56) is a member of the UF Law Board of Trustees. “I was given the opportunity to come to Washington, D.C. to work on Senator Connie Mack’s legislative team and was handed the portfolio of health care, an area where I had absolutely no background whatsoever. But I sunk my teeth into it, and as a result I worked for Senator Mack for six years.”

Savary Taylor continued to work with Mack during a brief stint as general counsel for the Joint Economic Committee before joining the American Medical Association as Washington counsel, and then spent eight years lobbying for the American Hospital Association. In 2006, she became a vice president with the Nickles Group, a strategic consulting and lobbying firm in Washington, D.C., where she’s navigating her way through a variety of physician, health-care and pharmaceutical issues as well as changes in the legislative agenda brought by the recent political shift in Congress.

“I absolutely love what I’m doing,” she said. “It’s a lot of fun.”

Lawrence S. Krieger, UF alumnus and keynote speaker for the March 30 Professionalism Symposium, posed this question to judges, lawyers and students attending his presentation on the “Inseparability of Professionalism and Personal Satisfaction in the Practice of Law.”

Krieger (JD 78) is a clinical professor and director of Clinical Externship Programs at Florida State University College of Law who began researching the link between personal wellbeing and professional behavior in the practice of law in 1991, only after he lost the vitality in his own job.

“I went to law school and did very well but was not really happy,” Krieger said. “I was a litigator for 11 years, and while teaching at FSU, observed the same distress and pressure in the law students that I had experienced myself.”

This realization sparked another interest in Krieger who received his B.A. from Princeton University in biology while also having a significant amount of psychological experience— lawyer health and personal satisfaction.

“Everyone in this room has people that hate them and love them,” Krieger said. “So don’t put too much focus on what ‘they’ think. Look at your own self, your own integrity—for the keys to your life and career satisfaction.”

Krieger and his research partner have conducted various studies on human need satisfaction and personal well-being and have found that intrinsic values—including developing one’s self, helping and relating to others—are the key to being a successful professional. Results from this research conducted on students in top-tier and fourth-tier law schools showed that students from the fourth-tier law schools felt more autonomous and respected, which translated into a higher passing rate for the bar and less stress during the first job out of law school.

In fact, this study, which will appear in the prestigious Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in June, showed that the basic needs of the fourth-tier students were more satisfied than a higher ranked school. Krieger said said the research showed the enormous influence that these psychological factors have on a professional’s performance, vitality and personal well-being—all keys to a successful career.

Professor Krieger served as Chair of the Clinical Section Committee on Externships of the Association of American Law Schools from 1994 to 1998 and has also served as Vice-chair of the Florida Bar Committee on Quality of Life and Career since 1996.

He has been conducting seminars on professional responsibility and professionalism since 1991 and has published booklets for law students on stress, values and career choices that are used at 100 law schools in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

“It is important to focus on the positive side of things and to change your values when something is not right,” Krieger advised. “Every choice we make has consequences, and once you have this kind of information, you can actually choose how your life will be.”

These and other issues will be topics of discussion at the Center for Governmental Responsibility’s Eighth Annual Conference on Legal & Policy Issues in the Americas, April 11-12 at the Holiday Inn-West in Gainesville.

Speakers at the conference include former U.S. Senator Bob Graham and Minister Carlos Mário da Silva Velloso, Past President, Supreme Federal Tribunal of Brazil.

The conference will feature daylong workshops and discussions on selected topics, including: Brazilian perspectives on legal and policy issues in the Americas; street crime, organized crime & terrorism; parliamentary reform; new directions in property law and policy in Latin America and the Caribbean; human rights; justice reform; legal education, professional responsibility and ethics; and environment and agriculture. The conference and workshops are designed to define and develop a research agenda for the 2008 conference, scheduled to be held in Brazil.

Elizabeth Lowe, associate director of the UF Center for Latin American Studies, and Terry L. McCoy, director of the Latin American Business Environment Program and associate director of the Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) at UF, will be honored with the 2007 Jon Mills Award for Significant Contributions to Relations Between Florida and the Americas.

Along with CGR, the sponsors of the conference include the Law & Policy in the Americas Program, Florida Journal of International Law, Hughes Hubbard & Reed of Miami, the Pontifica Universidade Catolica of Rio de Janeiro, and the Bob Graham Center for Public Service at UF. Several UF Law faculty members will participate, including CGR Director Jon Mills, Conservation Clinic Director Tom Ankersen, and Professors Fletcher Baldwin, Michelle Jacobs, Berta E.Hernández-Truyol, Pedro Malavet, Juan Perea, Michael Gordon, and Don Peters.