FEBRUARY/MARCH 2000

WAYNE HOGAN

DONORS

By Jan Pudlow
Special to the Florida State Times

Wayne Hogan goes back to his days in public school when he talks about what shaped his life as one of Florida's top trial lawyers.

In the second grade in Jacksonville, he remembers standing in line at long tables, where nurses gave children sugar cubes laced with the polio vaccine.
Lesson learned: "Take steps to prevent a gigantic problem."

Later in grade school, Hogan remembers the Golden Rule written on the blackboard.
Lesson learned: "A lot of people would be safer if businesses followed that rule."

And in Hogan's ninth-grade civics class in St. Augustine, a lawyer talked to the students about his career. It was the first lawyer Hogan had ever met, Frank Upchurch, who later became an appellate judge.
Lesson learned: "It struck me that was what I wanted to do."

Today, 52-year-old Hogan is a formidable force in the legal world, dubbed one of "Florida's Most Feared Lawyers" by Florida Trend magazine in November 1999.

One of the late Gov. Lawton Chiles' "Dream Team" of lawyers, Hogan helped wrest a $13-billion settlement from the tobacco industry in 1997.

For his role in the suit against Big Tobacco, he and his Jacksonville firm - Brown, Terrell, Hogan, Ellis, McClamma and Yegelwel - will collect about $180 million over a not-yet-determined number of years.
Hogan doesn't like bragging about financial success, but he is at ease talking about being a lawyer who helps others.

 He and his wife of 23 years, Pat, a counselor and registered nurse, recently gave $2 million to the FSU Foundation. The gift will be divided equally between the College of Law, where Hogan got his law degree in 1972, and scholarships for graduates in public schools in St. Johns County and St. Johns River Community College.

At FSU, the Wayne and Patricia Hogan Endowment Fund will support the Summer Program for Minority and Disadvantaged Undergraduate Students, an intense educational experience that introduces students to the rigors and challenges of law school with the hope of drawing more minorities into the legal profession.

"I was very impressed with the program, and it enabled me to meet some of the students and see the impact it has had on their lives," said Hogan, who is a member of the College of Law's Board of Visitors, where he is chairman of the professionalism committee.

The Hogan gift will also go to the mock trial team, for scholarships and travel to competitions. An earlier $250,000 gift to the FSU College of Law in 1997 established the Wayne Hogan Endowment in Civil Trial Practice.
A separate $250,000 gift in 1999 went to FSU's Seminole Boosters to support men and women student athletes in the "Student Life Skills Program." Hogan says he's been a Seminole fan for decades, even cheering on the team in the infamous pre-Bowden era when the Seminoles were 0-11 in the early '70s.

While courtroom victories have made Hogan a wealthy man, he grew up in what he describes as a "very close, working-class family" who moved from his birthplace of Jacksonville to St. Augustine when he was a boy. Growing up on the coast gave him a love for the ocean, where he still surfs.

He rode a school bus 30 miles through potato fields to what was then called St. Johns River Junior College.
His mother was a stay-at-home mom.
"Dad was what is called a switchman for Southern Bell. He did trouble-shooting and electrical work."
And his father was a union man, president of the local Communications Workers Union.

From an early age, Hogan was sensitized to the plights and rights of workers.

"A lot of what we do in the field I'm in regards the safety of workers," Hogan says. "If business and industry act in conscious regard for the safety of workers, people are so much better off. "I don't know if it's for me to say some grand statement about myself; I just know that I care to see that things are done right and the law is respected. It all goes back, I suppose, to remembering seeing that Golden Rule being up on the blackboard in grade school."

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