Case Studies

The legislative process is unpredictable. On occasion a very difficult situation will arise through no fault of the client or its advocacy group. It is at these times when a good firm can provide a very good return on the investment a client makes in that firm. Below is one such case study.

 

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A client had three of its contracts with the state terminated through proviso language in the General Appropriations Act. This provision was never debated during the session and was inserted as the budget went to print by the Senate President, who was trying to open up a new market for a close friend. This provision was released in the state budget four days before the close of session. In Florida, the budget is a conference committee report and is not available to amendment. In short, the budget was done and the language could not be removed from it. However, there were still several bills that generated the money to balance the budget pending in the Senate. We were able to work with the Senate Minority Leader and the Senate Majority Leader to cobble together the votes to keep one particular bill that generated $30M from moving forward while we drafted an amendment to supersede the budget language. Without the passage of this bill, the budget would not balance. We also worked with the House leadership to secure their approval with the superseding language. Within three days, we were called by the Senate leadership and told that they would accept our language if we would release our votes on the bill. The bill ultimately passed, along with the language reinstating the contracts in question. The client still holds those three contracts to this day.

We believe at times you have to go to war with top legislators on behalf of our clients. We believe it can be done professionally and without damaging long term relationships.

 

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A client manufactured a product that had been banned in another state as an environmentally unfriendly package. We were retained to prevent that from happening in Florida and to turn the view of this product from a negative one to a positive one. We worked closely on substantive recycling legislation to ensure that the package was not in any way targeted or taxed or banned in Florida. Then we worked with the Governor’s staff and the House and Senate budget staff to write proviso language authorizing a competitive grant process for recycling a variety of products. We also inserted $250,000 to fund the grant. We identified a manufacturer in Florida willing to recycle the product and wrote the grant application for him. Our manufacturing associate won the grant and immediately began recycling the product and selling it in Florida as toilet paper.

We were able to demonstrate to the environmental community that the product was indeed environmentally friendly through a series of news stories on the client. The product is still commercially viable and we believe it is still being recycled in Florida to this day.

 

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A nationally known manufacturer was having difficulty securing a manufacturing permit from a Florida regulatory agency. The agency intended to deny the permit request, thus denying the company from doing business in Florida. We first worked with the agency to delay the permit denial. We also worked closely with the Governor’s Office to inform them of the negative impacts on the State of Florida if the permit was denied. Over several weeks of negotiations, we arrived at a compromise. The agency agreed not to act on the permit application and instead allow the legislature to clarify the regulatory statute governing this area. We were able to pass legislation clarifying that this manufacturer and others qualified for a manufacturer’s permit. The Governor signed that measure into law. We then returned to the agency to once again seek the permit. After several more weeks of negotiation, we were able to secure the permit on behalf of the client. The client continues to hold the permit and do business in Florida today.

 

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A large coalition of well funded foreign corporations initiated an effort to eliminate a client association’s members businesses. We were able to learn that the effort was coming many months before the coming legislative session. We worked throughout the summer and fall with the client members to develop a comprehensive political, media, and legislative strategy to defeat their legislative initiative. By the time the legislative session opened we had taken the momentum away from our opposition and they dropped the effort to eliminate our clients’ businesses and instead began looking for narrowly drafted amendments to work around the edges of the issue. We worked with legislative leaders to craft language that actually advanced our competitive position and were able to pass it because the opposition knew that they did not have the support of the majority of members in either legislative body. The Governor subsequently signed that measure into law. The clients’ businesses are doing quite well today.

 

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A client in the environmental area had a business that had not been able to secure any governmental contracts. We were retained to improve the public image of the client and to pursue governmental contracts for them. We met with environmental regulators and environmentalists throughout the state to educate them about the virtues of our client’s services. We also met with leading legislators in the environmental field for the same purpose. Over a period of four years, we were able to persuade the legislature to appropriate over $15,000,000 for various governmental entities to contract for services provided by our client and a few others in the same business. Our client has been retained by several of those governmental entities and continues to provide environmental services to the public sector in Florida.