Chairman Frank E. Brown was appointed effective July 1, 2013, by Governor Rick Scott. Chairman Brown brings to the Commission 30 years of labor and employment law and litigation experience in both the public and private sectors, working at such firms as Carlton Fields, the Florida Attorney General’s Office, Zinober & McCrea, P.A., and MacFarlane, Ferguson and McMullen, P.A. He graduated with honors from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1983 and Florida State University College of Law in 1987. He has been peer-recognized as an outstanding labor and employment law practitioner in a number of publications, including Best Lawyers In America, Florida Super Lawyers, Florida Trend’s “Legal Elite,” Chambers USA America’s Leading Lawyers For Business, Tampa Bay Magazine’s “Top Lawyers,” and Martindale-Hubbell. He has been board certified by The Florida Bar in labor and employment law since the certification was first established in 2001. In 2019, he was recognized by Florida Trend’s “Legal Elite” as one of Florida’s top government lawyers. He was also selected for induction in the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers, a professional organization of the nation’s leading labor and employment lawyers.
Chairman Brown has extensive substantive law and litigation experience across a broad spectrum of labor and employment areas, including reemployment assistance law, equal employment opportunity law, wage and hour law, employee benefits law, collective bargaining law, employment contract law, drug testing law and procedure, and civil rights law. He has tried dozens of employment and civil rights cases in federal and state courts and in private arbitration. He has represented parties in a broad variety of administrative hearings, and presided over hundreds of employee discharge administrative hearings during a decade as counsel to the Hillsborough County Civil Service Board. He also successfully defended numerous favorable decisions in state and federal appellate courts.
Throughout his legal career, Chairman Brown has devoted a significant portion of his time to legal scholarship, writing, and education, with emphasis on civil discovery, employee benefits, and wage and hour law. He served for over a decade as a chapter editor for the annual supplements to the ABA treatise The Fair Labor Standards Act. He has given over 60 continuing legal education presentations for the American Bar Association, The Florida Bar, and other sponsors. He served as an instructor of business law at the University of South Florida from 2010 to 2013, teaching over 3,000 students. Since appointment as chairman, he has been an invited speaker on topics such as labor and employment law issues, evidence, and the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules for the annual meeting of the National Association of Unemployment Insurance Appeals Professionals. He has been a member of the Executive Council of The Florida Bar Labor and Employment Law Section since 2002 and has served in numerous positions for the section, including editor of the section column in The Florida Bar Journal for nine years and chairman of the section for the 2015-16 bar year. He also currently serves on The Florida Bar’s Labor and Employment Law Certification Committee and the Florida Supreme Court’s Standard Jury Instructions Committee for Civil Cases.