Tampa area attorney found his footing on Florida ranch
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Attorney Spotlight
Tampa area attorney found his footing on Florida ranch
By Brian Cox
The double wooden gate marking the entrance to attorney Bob Bivins’s home in West Central Florida is embellished with an elegant “B” and “W” and the name “Bivinswood” in wrought iron lettering. Beyond the gate, which he likes to tell people is his own mini-version of the main gate to Jurassic Park, is a paved driveway that winds across Crooked Creek and past a spring-fed pond onto a 21-acre ranch where Bivins raises pygmy goats and Angus-mix cattle, specifically bred for the Florida heat. The smaller of his two ranch sites, this original location is the beating heart of the overall operation.
It’s fair to say the ranch is where Bivins feels most at home outside of his commercial law offices in Valrico, a city just east of Tampa. He fell in love with the property at first sight as a young attorney in 1993 and raised a few eyebrows among his law colleagues when he bought it and moved out of the city.
“In those days, all the young attorneys were expected to live in South Tampa and moving to the rural eastern county was viewed as akin to having a mid-life crisis,” he says. “Turns out, I was just a couple of decades ahead of my time.”
Though originally developed as a horse ranch, his law practice didn’t allow him quite that much animal husbandry time. But after a friend encouraged Bivins to raise a few head of cattle on the land in order to get a tax break, he bought six heifers that had aged out as roping calves, having no conception of what was in store. He was a kid from suburban Clearwater. What did he know about raising cattle?
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” he says. “I was a little bit out of my wheelhouse and to be honest was way over my skis in the early days.”
But it was a decision that would prove to make not only long-term financial sense, but have unexpected health benefits as well.
Before he bought the ranch, Bivins says his blood pressure “was through the roof and rising fast.”
“When I lived in Tampa, I could never really mentally cut off from the office,” he says. “Work was always with me. I was constantly worrying about some client matter and every time I walked outside of my house, I could quite literally see my office building and often went back in the evenings. It wasn’t an environment conducive to disconnecting.”
Tending to the calves, on the other hand, afforded Bivins the opportunity to turn his attention to concerns outside of the law firm and he says his blood pressure dropped 20 points overnight.
“When I tended to the animals and looked into their eyes, I finally learned that I could disconnect from the rest of the world,” he explained.
He recalls the day one of the calves got into a bunch of briars and he had to painstakingly remove hundreds of burs from her face and coat. In the process, he and the alpha-female calf in the group who he had named “Hillary” after a family friend, bonded for life.
“Every other human that had ever approached her had chased her, thrown a rope around her, and flipped her on the ground. So she kept people at arm’s length,” says Bivins. “After that day though, Hillary gave me her trust and she actually devoted the next 15 years to acting as translator between the rest of the herd and me.”
“You create a bond with these animals,” adds Bivins. “It’s hard when you lose them and it’s hard to see them in trouble, but you sort of learn what’s important and what’s not. You learn to tell an emergency moo from a ‘where is my breakfast’ moo.”
He now has 80 head of cattle on the ranch, down from the 400 he had at one point, and employs a fulltime ranch foreman. He also raises between 25 to 30 pygmy goats at any one time that he sells as pets.
“The pandemic combined with the breakup of large farms into smaller parcels has caused the demand for pet goats to skyrocket over the last two years,” Bivins says. “Didn’t see that coming.”
The ranch has proved appealing to moviemakers as well. An independent movie called “The Beast Comes at Midnight” was partially shot on the ranch last year. The werewolf movie is scheduled to be released this Halloween, and Bivins says there is some talk about a second movie being shot at the ranch as well.
Bivins is a third-generation Tampa Bay area resident. His grandfather Henry Bivins II founded several banks in the area prior to the Great Depression. Bivins tells the story that the family was well off in the 1920s, but that when the run on the banks occurred in 1929 his grandfather returned home at the end of the day and dropped 36 cents on the table.
“This is all we have left in the world,” his grandfather said.
In addition to cattle, Bob Bivins raises pygmy goats like Stripe on his ranch. He sells the goats as pets.
Bivins says the experience fundamentally shaped his father, Henry Bivins III, who went on to run a retail appliance business, proudly selling the first black-and-white and the first color televisions in Clearwater.
When the business failed in the 1960s, Bivins vividly remembers his parents arguing once about not being able make the $11 monthly mortgage payment on their home; but otherwise they never let on that the family was in financial trouble.
Not long after, Bivins’s father started a successful telecommunications business with his middle son, Bill.
“It was primitive technology by today’s standards but was cutting edge back in the 90s,” says Bivins.
As it turned out, one of Bivins’s first deals as a lawyer was selling the family business, which after a few more sales and mergers eventually became part of Sprint.
Bivins didn’t initially aim to be a lawyer. He first thought he might take up the family tradition of a banking career and after college worked at the Bank of Clearwater, one of the banks his grandfather had founded. But it took only a few months before he realized his opportunities for advancement at the bank were limited and he followed his parents’ encouragement to go to law school.
“That’s where I really hit my stride,” says Bivins, who earned his law degree from the University of Florida in 1985, where he served as editor-in-chief of the UF Law Review and graduated with honors.
After graduating, he served as law clerk to Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Parker Lee McDonald for two years, during which time it became clear to him that he didn’t want a career in politics.
“One of my roles was serving as legislative liaison between the Florida Legislature and the Florida Court System,” says Bivins. “I learned very quickly how the sausage was made and at one point found myself in the middle of a political maelstrom between the Legislature and the Florida Supreme Court. In those two years I had my fill of it.”
He left the clerkship to join the corporate securities department of a Tampa law firm where he met a mentor who would transform him as an attorney.
As Bivins’s supervising attorney, Bob Rasmussen immediately identified that the introverted young lawyer needed to become more comfortable networking with colleagues and potential clients. He insisted Bivins attend two lunches or happy hours with different people every week, sign up for speaking engagements, attend mixers and chicken dinners, and report back each week on what he had done. Rasmussen was adamant that Bivins get out into the community and become involved, both as a lawyer and in community service.
He taught Bivins to “find that mission that’s in your heart that you care about and engage, get out there, and make a difference.”
“Because I am profoundly introverted by nature, I had to learn how to be able to flip the switch on,” says Bivins. “It is sometimes exhausting, but that’s what you’ve got to do without letting on you are doing it.”
It was a lesson Bivins took to heart and has lived ever since. He has served as chairman of the Brandon Regional Hospital Board of Trustees and as an active leader and advocate with the Tampa Metropolitan Area YMCA for decades, as well as serving as a past president of the Optimist Club of Tampa. He is currently serving as board Chair of The Greater Brandon Chamber of Commerce for the second time in ten years.
“In the grand scheme of things, we’re one big community,” he says. “You can ignore problems and ignore people, but those problems and people are still there in your community. If you want to make things better, you’ve got to get involved.”
After about three years in the corporate securities department, Bivins was given the opportunity to start up the firm’s real estate practice group and became the group’s lead attorney.
“I had only been in private practice for three years when the firm approached me about heading up our new real estate practice area,” he says. “I was honored and, to be honest, just a little terrified of failure. But that ended up being a big piece of what put me in the lane for where I am now,” he says.
After 11 years with the firm, Bivins says he was ready for a change and he left to join a group of lawyers who had started their own practice and had been lobbying him to come on board. It wasn’t an ideal fit, Bivins found, but it was a very early morning on December 6, 2006, that dramatically changed his life and career forever.
That Saturday morning, after working weeks of long hours with little sleep and while driving into the office, Bivins fell asleep at the wheel and struck a tree. The accident shattered his back and left him paralyzed. Doctors predicted he had a 50 percent chance of walking again and very little chance of walking normally. After risky but successful spinal reconstruction surgery, Bivins was told to take two months off from work to heal and rehab.
“It took a bit to recover from that,” says Bivins, who through physical fortitude and mental resilience was walking without a sign of his injuries within the year.
“I’ve got a ranch to run, I’ve got people and animals to take care of,” says Bivins of his attitude at the time. “Not fully recovering was off the table as an option.”
During his convalescence, he worked closely with John Hemenway, a first-year attorney who took the lead in handling a daunting matrix of year-end transactional closings after the accident.
Florida attorney Bob Bivins of Bivins & Hemenway, P.A., with Dallas, one of the 80 or so cattle he raises on his ranch Bivinswood.
“All I could do was give him limited guidance from afar for those first couple of months,” says Bivins. “Words cannot express how impressed I was with how he, as a first-year lawyer, took the helm and instinctively knew how to calm the clients and get the job done. He truly is the smartest most talented attorney I have ever met.”
Through that experience, the two attorneys forged a strong bond of trust that would lead them over the next months to form their own firm, Bivins & Hemenway, P.A., in Valrico.
“I was adamant that we get out of downtown,” says Bivins. “We were too small and too anonymous for the downtown towers, especially in light of the recession we both could sense was coming. We needed to get visible and we needed to get into the suburbs at street level where the growth really was.”
The pair hit the ground hard to establish a foothold and to raise the new firm’s profile in the larger Brandon business community.
“We shook a lot of local hands that year, but we needed to make sure we did not become a provincial law firm,” says Bivins. “It was important to me that we kept the clients we had while establishing ourselves as a firm that had a network and resources with an interstate reach greater than what we would have on our own.”
That’s where Primerus came in to the firm’s picture.
“If our clients have needs, we don’t need to be in the middle of it,” says Bivins, who serves on the Primerus board of directors. “We can place them with somebody in which we have confidence and who has credibility with our clients because we share the Primerus label. That’s been a big deal for us.”
The firm now has five attorneys and focuses its practice on Real Estate, Business Law, and Wills, Trusts and Estates. The firm also provides a full range of closing and escrow services.
“We have to make some decisions about growth,” says Bivins about the firm’s next five years. “Florida is one of the fastest growing states and legal markets in the nation. There’s a ton of opportunity.”