After nine years, Rob Wilcox is stepping down as dean of South Carolina Law. But in that brief time, he has made an indelible impact on the school and its graduates that will be felt for decades to come.
Dean Robert M. Wilcox ’81 pauses to reflect on his tenure on what should have been a sleepy spring break Thursday — until the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic disrupted, well, everything.
Two days earlier, on March 10, the university announced that the students’ break would be extended an extra week to enable a campus-wide transition from in-person to online-only learning. A transition that would normally span months if not years had to be figured out in a matter of days.
But amidst the swirling chaos, there is calm in the second-floor dean’s suite.
“I live for moments like this, when you have this challenge to go from one model of teaching to another,” Wilcox says. “I told a colleague, ‘This could be our shining moment of doing it right,’ and that’s what makes me want to wake up in the morning and get to work.”
Dealing with crisis is a fitting bookend for a dean who took the helm of the law school in 2011 during a time of great uncertainty.
“I was very lucky to become dean at a time when people recognized that the status quo was not going to be the way to move into the future,” he says. “I was able to say, ‘We need to do things differently,’ and people saw that posed an opportunity not a threat.”
To many within the law school community, Wilcox was the ideal leader to right the ship because he was intimately familiar with the challenges at hand. As an alumnus, a long-time professor and school administrator, he also knew which relationships to mend to effect needed change.
“He was absolutely the right person to come in at such a confluence of events,” says David W. Robinson Professor of Law Alan Medlin ’79. “Because of his widespread connections and the esteem in which he was held by the legal community, he was able to get to work immediately and start fixing the problems that near-perfect storm had caused. It would have been an impossible job for just about anyone else.”
In the beginning
Wilcox rushed to his Property class from the event where he was formally announced as dean but still arrived late. Entering a dark lecture hall, he assumed his students had given up on their professor and left.
To his surprise and delight, they instead flipped on the lights, played a recording of the theme from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” pulled him to the front of the room and presented him with a bottle of cheap champagne to toast his accomplishment.
“That was maybe the single greatest day of my teaching career, to have students do that,” Wilcox says, noting the bottle is still displayed on his dining room sideboard.
The bottle remains corked, but Wilcox drank in the glory of that moment and celebrated with his students, touched to his core by their tribute. And then he did what Rob Wilcox does.
He got to work.
A modern home
The law school faced many challenges, begging the question: Where do you start?
“I just threw myself into the job,” Wilcox says. “You had to address all these things. You couldn’t put one aside while you worked on the other, and you couldn’t spend time agonizing over decisions. You had to think where you were going, go and hope that you did it the right way. It turned out pretty well.”
Still, one task overshadowed all others: updating the aging facility.
School administrators had tried for more than a decade to secure the funds and backing necessary to bring the new building project to fruition but gained little traction.
But Wilcox reframed the issue as a university priority rather than a law-only need. He recognized that it made more sense to build a new facility for law students on the edge of campus, and let the existing, centrally located building be renovated and repurposed to support the swelling undergraduate student body.
One by one, he built support for the proposal, leveraging relationships he had formed across 20-plus years at the university and winning the support of members of the board of trustees.
Now the most tangible sign of the Wilcox era sits at the corner of Senate and Pickens: the elegant, $80 million brick, federal-style building that opened in fall 2017.
William Hubbard '77, who will take over as dean in August, says Wilcox’s leadership was critical to the project’s success.
“Having someone with his understanding of what the needs of the bar are and what we need to provide our students was enormously helpful,” he says. “He also called upon his diplomatic skills to moderate the competing forces as decisions were made about the building’s features.”
For his part, Wilcox says the contractors told him they’d never worked with a dean who came to every construction meeting, involvement he credits with keeping the project on schedule and on budget.
“I was a very active owner in the whole process of planning and building this building,” he says. “This was not something that I could delegate to someone else.”
Not your father's law school
Like the physical space that was meticulously constructed brick by brick, so, too, was the transformation of the student experience.
First and foremost, Wilcox wanted students to graduate with a strong sense of professionalism.
To signal the importance of ethics and serving the needs of clients, Wilcox had introduced a first-year oath ceremony when he served as associate dean. Before admitted students sit down for their first class, they now pledge to uphold the professional standards of law — years before they are sworn into the bar as practicing attorneys.
Students also gain practical experience with clients before graduation, thanks to a host of clinics and externships that have been created across the last decade.
Under Wilcox, new student opportunities also have been added to reinforce existing programs, such as children’s law and environmental law. With each proposed addition, faculty have considered how the experiential opportunity (clinic, externship, pro bono) would contribute to the student’s professional identity in a different way and bolster the law school’s focal areas, he says.
Administrators and faculty also took apart the order of studies and created a new curriculum map so that students progressively build onto their skills and learning from the previous year. In addition, the law school now offers a preparation program to help students pass the bar exam.
Thanks to support from the late Jim Konduros ’54 (far right), the law school in 2015 created a selective leadership program that provides promising students with advanced problem-solving and relationship-building skills, equipping them to assume leadership positions in an increasingly complex world.
These myriad changes across the school have been successful because of Wilcox’s strong relationship with the faculty, Medlin says. His reputation as dean was also beneficial for recruiting new faculty as a wave of aging professors stepped down.
“We’ve been very fortunate to replace them with an amazing group of talent,” Medlin says. “They’re great scholars, great teachers, great colleagues, and in large part, they were attracted to South Carolina because they thought he’d be a pretty good dean to work for.”
Extending the school's reach
In addition to transforming the experience for current and future students, Wilcox set his sights on changing how the law school engaged with other constituents — alumni, the legal profession and residents of South Carolina.
As an alumnus, he thought messaging that focused only on pleas for financial support was out of touch. He built up the development office and tasked the team with helping alumni connect with the law school and each other. Reunions have been refocused on graduating classes, and alumni events are held across the state to build community. The school, too, has ramped up its publications and social media messaging.
“I think alumni have re-engaged with the school,” Wilcox says. “They’re claiming their connection with the law school again.”
Wilcox, highly regarded in the state’s legal ethics community, aimed for the school to serve the profession beyond hosting CLE sessions and found a new avenue to serve them: cybersecurity. He recognized that cybersecurity posed a major threat to law firms because of the prized information they house and that few firms had adequate resources to prepare for a breach. To meet this need, the law school formed a Cybersecurity Legal Task Force.
Led by expert Karen Painter Randall ’84, the task force — compromised of national experts from the judiciary, academia, insurance industry, forensics, security vendors and federal agencies — hosts a yearly Cybersecurity Institute as well as periodic webinars and will eventually launch a certificate program for students and attorneys.
And for the first time, faculty and students soon will be crisscrossing the state to offer pro bono legal services to rural communities where such access is scant, thanks to a 43-foot-long rolling mobile office — the first of its kind in the country.
With a generous donation from the Konduros Fisherman Fund, the custom-built bus features two private offices, a waiting area and technology that enable on-site delivery of services, such as drafting wills or reviewing legal documents. This new resource allows students to serve the state while they gain hands-on legal experience and skills development.
The breadth and depth of Wilcox’s mark on the law school comes as no surprise to Medlin.
“It’s his character,” Medlin says. “He cares more about others than himself. He just makes everything around him better.”
Lowering student costs
Ask deans across the country if they’d like to lower the price tag of a JD at their institution, and you’re likely to get a unanimous “Yes!”
Ask those same deans how far they’re willing to pursue the issue, and their response may be somewhat different.
But for Wilcox, tackling the seemingly impossible goal of lowering tuition was not a battle he could afford to forgo. The school’s tuition was out of line with regional competitors, and year after year, promising students who had been accepted to South Carolina turned down their offers in favor of schools with lower costs, he says.
As with the law building, Wilcox cultivated supporters at each level to accomplish his goal, including House Ways and Means committee chairman Murrell Smith ’93.
“I think the thing that makes working with Dean Wilcox such a pleasure is his integrity, his character,” Hubbard says. “When he tells you something, you know it’s not off the cuff. He’s thought through the issues and you can rely on what he says. He’s candid and diplomatic and he’s very smart.”
Wilcox’s efforts paid off in spring 2019 when the South Carolina General Assembly increased law school funding by $1.9 million per year. That funding in turn enabled the board of trustees to approve a tuition decrease of more than $5,000 per year for in-state law students.
“Students are saving fifteen thousand dollars in what would have otherwise been debt for many of them,” Wilcox says. “That was my Zen moment as dean: I could say to myself, ‘I have done something good.’”
The next chapter
When Hubbard takes the helm as dean on August 1, Wilcox will step down, closing another chapter in an accomplished but accidental legal career.
Growing up the son of a respected newspaperman in Charleston, Wilcox planned to follow his father’s career path and attended law school to become a legal reporter. After graduation, however, the newspaper’s managers persuaded him to work for the business side of the company; since it was too late to apply for business school, he accepted a job with a large Washington, DC law firm while he waited for the next admissions cycle.
He met his wife Lisa there, and a few years later, they relocated to open the firm’s Atlanta office. A chance encounter with a former professor, Steve Spitz, at a CLE event led him to apply for a teaching position at his legal alma mater. And the rest is history.
He is grateful for the work-life balance afforded by an academic career. He coached his three sons’ baseball teams — one even became a college player — and never missed a school event.
“He was a wonderful father to the boys,” Lisa Wilcox says. “They got to see their father helping with homework, but not too much, and helping with baseball, but not pushing. He just always had the right balance.”
He has tempered the relentless pace of the dean position by retreating to a secluded cabin on the Broad River that he and Lisa built four years ago. A TV- and Wi-Fi-free zone, the cabin offers a natural respite for the birding enthusiast.
He hopes to someday returning to teaching, where he can again engage with students. But for now, as his professional commitments wane, Wilcox will perhaps spend more time by the river on his tractor contemplating life. Or perhaps he and Lisa will finally take their first-ever fall trip, although those plans, too, may be jeopardized by the pandemic.
But one thing is certain: Wilcox says his alarm clock will go by the wayside, a well-earned reward.