Founder and President
Joryn Jenkins
In nearly 40 years of practicing law, Joryn has enjoyed a wide variety of experience, which qualifies her well for her training and coaching other attorneys to expand their practice, both collaborative and otherwise.
In the beginning, Joryn worked for one of the ten largest law firms in the country in D.C., practicing employment law. She then broke from big firm life to work in California exclusively for a single client on 50 class-action sex discrimination claims. Winning 47 of those claims, she returned back east to accept a job offer from Tampa’s State Attorney. For the next three years, she spent nearly every workday in court, prosecuting both jury and non-jury trials. After serving there as a division chief, she accepted an offer from a highly regarded boutique litigation firm. She remained there for five years, handling all of the firm’s appeals and bankruptcy matters, as well as routine commercial disputes.
Before joining Stetson University’s College of Law faculty full-time as trial practice instructor, Joryn briefly joined a well-known Tampa law firm to head up its bankruptcy division.
Although she was still carrying a full-time teaching load as a Stetson law professor, Joryn founded Open Palm Law in 1994. Her first case was a successful appeal to the Florida Supreme Court.
Joryn is the only practicing lawyer in Florida to have been awarded the prestigious A. Sherman Christensen Award, presented in the United States Supreme Court. Only one person annually earns this honor.
She has worked as a government attorney; she has worked in a large national law firm, in a mid-sized local law firm, and in a small boutique law firm; she has taught law school and now, in her small firm practice, she is, herself, a small business owner. Her experience provides her with a well-rounded perspective, which permits her to understand how to help fellow attorneys grow the type of practice that they want to have.
Joryn lives with her husband on Davis Islands. In 1994, LexisNexis published her Florida Civil Motions Practice, and she has published seven books on collaborative practice, five as author and two as the editor.
