Judge Ursula Ungaro is retiring from the federal bench but not the law. She’s joining a Miami firm
For nearly half her life, Ursula Ungaro has been wearing a black robe.
Now, after turning 70, she’s about to hang that robe up — but she’s not leaving the law. Ungaro, who has served as a judge in the Florida state and federal courts for more than three decades, is returning to what she calls her first love as an attorney — highstakes litigation.
When she formally retires from the Southern District of Florida at the end of the month, Ungaro will be joining a prestigious Miami law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner.
Like most other federal judges who “retire” in the South Florida district, Ungaro assumed “senior status” and has continued to serve on the bench — including presiding this week over the first federal jury trial since the COVID-19 pandemic brought the local judicial system to a halt in March 2020. But rather than stay on as a senior judge with a lighter caseload, Ungaro said in an interview Friday that she chose to return to the practice of law and join the Boies Schiller firm after considerable deliberation.
Ungaro, a Miami native, said that shedding her judicial robe will allow her to engage more freely in the legal profession in a city that she sees as booming with entrepreneurial spirit.
“It’s a little bit of an adventure for me,” she told the Miami Herald. “I want to take the shackles off and express myself without the restraints there are when you’re a judge.”
Ungaro, who grew up in Miami Shores and attended Smith College and the University of Miami, went to law school at the University of Florida because it was the one profession that seemed to fit her personality, she said. After making her mark as a trial lawyer at a series of local firms, she became a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge in 1987. Five years later, President George H.W. Bush nominated her as a federal judge.
She has presided over hundreds of civil and criminal trials, gaining the reputation of a sharp jurist who distills the essence of a case, expects litigants to grasp her points and reprimands lawyers who don’t stay on track with the facts and the law during trial.
She said that while she has handled any number of memorable cases — including the tax-evasion trial of former Hialeah Mayor Julio Robaina — the one that haunted her was when she was forced to send the girlfriend of a crack-cocaine trafficker to life in prison under mandatory federal sentencing guidelines. Working behind the scenes, Ungaro was instrumental in helping Valerie Bozeman receive a pardon from President Barack Obama in 2015 after serving 22 years in prison.
“I had no discretion,” Ungaro recalled. “I always thought it was an injustice. ... When you sentence someone to life, they stay with you for life.”
RESPECT FROM DEFENSE
Criminal defense attorneys said that while they could be intimidated by her command of their cases, they respected her ability to raise the level of litigation in her courtroom.
“Practicing in front of her required not just being ultra-prepared on what you thought were the legal and factual issues in the case but also trying to anticipate what she thought were the legal and factual issues in the case,” said longtime Miami defense attorney Frank Quintero.
“That could be a very difficult task because of how smart she is. She can dissect a case down to its basic legal and factual issues in about 15 minutes,” he said. “Every time she asks a question to a lawyer, she already knows the answer and she is waiting to see whether the lawyer is candid and legally and/or factually correct with their response. God help you if you try to put something over on her.”
Stephen Zack, a former president of the American Bar Association who opened the Miami branch of Boies Schiller 20 years ago, said he had worked with Ungaro in a local law firm and recruited her because he saw the judge as a dynamic figure who could not only jump into the trenches of corporate litigation but also provide strategic advice and train young lawyers.
“This is not your typical hire,” Zack told the Herald. “This is a fabulous statement to women that they can have a long legal career and can do a lot of different things in their career.”
Ungaro is joining a law firm noted for high-profile clients and cases. The founder, David Boies, has enjoyed a celebrated history as the lawyer who slayed Microsoft and Bill Gates in a federal anti-trust case and led Al Gore’s legal team in the Florida 2000 presidential election dispute.
But Boies and his renowned law firm have also incurred bad publicity and the loss of dozens of top lawyers in recent years. The fallout partly stems from Boies’ representation of now-convicted Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, specifically the lawyer’s ties to a smear campaign against Weinstein’s sexual assault victims. The Wall Street Journal and other news media also revealed that Boies intimidated witnesses who helped expose Silicon Valley’s unicorn startup Theranos Corp., which fraudulently claimed to have developed a breakthrough blood-testing technology.
Zack deflected the notoriety surrounding the New York-based law firm, noting that because Boies is a superstar lawyer he attracts his critics. He said Boies Schiller’s South Florida division, with about 30 lawyers in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood, “is well suited for the future.”
Ungaro said she was aware of the national firm’s travails but still saw it as a good fit for her because of her “affinity” for Boies, who once tried a case in her courtroom, and the local firm’s involvement in complex litigation and public interest law.
‘SCRAPPY LAW FIRM’
“I like the fact that it’s a scrappy law firm that likes to take on scrappy clients,” Ungaro said, pointing out that Boies Schiller’s Fort Lauderdale office has represented victims in the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking case.
Whatever role she plays at the law firm, Ungaro is likely to influence everyone around her because she is a force of nature, according
to a former law clerk.
Francisco Maderal, a former federal prosecutor who now practices at the boutique law firm Colson Hicks Eidson, said that Ungaro hired him as a clerk while he was attending law school at Georgetown University and after he graduated. He worked two years for her and she helped launch his career.
“Judge Ungaro taught me how to think about the law and what it meant to be a lawyer,” Maderal said. “Every day demanded nothing less than being ready with the right answer to pointed questioning about any case at any time.
“Nothing could have better prepared a young clerk to be a trial lawyer.,” he said. “At the end, you were smarter, tougher, more confident, and you had the smartest person you ever met watching over you for life.”