The Florida Bar’s first 55-year employee, Wallace Saunders
Saunders was just 15 when he became Bar employee #41 on October 29, 1970, working part-time in the Tallahassee headquarters
WALLACE SAUNDERS, a senior A/V specialist with 55 years of Bar service and no plans to retire, works with duplication machines that produce around 220 CLE DVDs and CDs for members each month. “After school, nights, weekends — as much as I could work,” said Saunders, who started with the Bar when he was 15. “If you’re going to make it to 55 years, you’ve got to start early.”
What do you call someone who’s spent 55 years mastering evolving technology, adapting to explosive growth, and serving with unwavering dedication? “Expert” might come close, but it doesn’t quite capture the depth of knowledge, skill, and quiet mastery that can seem almost magical to outsiders. “Maestro?” “Wizard?”
Wallace Saunders was just 15 when he became Bar employee #41 on October 29, 1970, working part-time in the Tallahassee headquarters mailing out practice manuals.
“After school, nights, weekends — as much as I could work,” Saunders said. “If you’re going to make it to 55 years, you’ve got to start early.”
Saunders has worked his way up from part-time mailroom assistant to senior A/V specialist in the Bar’s Programs Division, on the team responsible for audio/visual production of CLE sessions. And he has no plans to retire anytime soon.
In 1970, there was “no such thing as a VCR; there was no internet, there was no cell phone,” he says. Membership was less than a tenth of what it is now.
But his duties grew exponentially when the Florida Supreme Court made CLE mandatory in 1987.
Success meant scaling up production to meet demand, says Saunders. The Bar invested in state-of-the-art video cameras and the audio-visual team built racks for sound equipment.
The A/V production process for Bar CLEs was labor-intensive. The A/V team would drive the equipment to Miami, record the live CLE session, come back to headquarters, edit the recording, start making copies, ship the copies out to different offices across the state, then rent TVs in hotel ballrooms where 600 or more people would view the videos on 15-20 TVs placed around the room.
“We were running industrial duplicators 24/7,” he says.
Eastern Air Lines (now defunct) at first let Saunders check equipment as baggage when demand made it necessary to fly, even though it weighed a thousand pounds.
“They eventually stopped me though, and made me start using air freight,” he recalls, chuckling.
Saunders suggested that the A/V team could try making an audio cassette version of the VHS recordings at some point, which proved extremely popular. The team had to hire extra people and eventually added 30 duplication machines to keep up with demand.
The audio cassettes grew to add another $700K annually to total CLE revenue, which was as high at $5 million at its peak — although that technology began fading away about 20 years ago, he says.
The A/V team figured out and implemented the technology every step of the way, moving from manually editing the VHS and audio master recordings, to using software programs for editing CDs and DVDs, to the transition to online editing and cloud storage.
“I don’t know any other bar that has been this successful — I mean, to do it all in-house,” says Saunders.
He says the A/V team benefitted from having continuity. While he was undoubtedly the longest-serving member, a few of the Bar’s A/V team members remained for many years. The cohesion that came from working with the same crew for such a long time worked in their favor as the team scaled up production.
“We’ve been very successful reaching the growing membership,” Saunders says, smiling.
Saunders says the Bar has been like a second home to him. While working here, he graduated from high school, junior college (now Tallahassee State College), and Florida State University with a bachelor’s degree in physics.
While physics may or may not have come in handy for his day-to-day duties at the Bar, the discipline of science helped to shape his orientation to his work.
Dependable, organized, and team-minded, Saunders has an easygoing calmness and a reflex for methodical completion that seems founded in implacable efficiency.
Those qualities appear to be mirrored in his work environment — a boon to the office, which bears a weighty responsibility to members.
“Failure is not an option – we never have and never will,” says Saunders with surprising intensity. But, after all, he is a maestro — he is passionate about what he does.
“I have had the pleasure of working with Wallace for the past 20 years since I joined The Florida Bar team,” says Terry Hill, the Bar’s Programs Division director. “He is among the most loyal and dedicated individuals I have ever worked with over my professional career, and his work ethic is unparalleled. In addition to being an amazing individual, he is also an overall great colleague. He and I routinely talk all things college football and foodie experiences.”
Leroy Smith, the Bar’s director of Professional Development, says, “Wallace’s dedicated and loyal service to The Florida Bar for 55 years is commendable and a testament to who he is. His passion and love for his craft, The Florida Bar, staff, and members, exemplify his dedication and caring character.”
No other Bar employee has broken the 50-years-of-service mark. However, two of the 298 employees currently with the Bar have been here more than 42 years, and a whopping 35 employees have 25-41 years of service.