Carol Klock feels like all roads led her to the University of Miami School of Law, where she is set to graduate in May.
When she arrived as a first-year student and on the tail end of the baby boomer generation, she worried that her work methodology wouldn't mesh with law school processes (it didn't) and that she might not fit in with her children- and grand-children-aged classmates (not an issue).
Now, on the cusp of graduation, she conquered all. She joined Miami Law Women and the Environmental Law Society, and the lifelong Catholic joined the Cardozo Jewish Legal Society after October 7, 2023. She won the CALI Award for "Emerging Forms of Philanthropy" and was a research assistant to Professor Martha Mahoney.
"Law school was the best decision I could have made for my future," she said. "I have loved being in law school and because of it, I know that I'll be able to effect real change in the world, even if in just a small way."
The soon-to-be double Cane grew up in the University's backyard; she and her friends treated the campus as their personal playground. And like the Wizard of Oz's Dorothy (also her mother's name), Klock always went home.
She dreamed of becoming a conductor as she marched toward her goal, fingers tapping on the keys of her saxophone, through middle school and high school band and to the Frost School of Music. The legendary former associate dean for Undergraduate Studies at the school of music, Connie Weldon, would help her win a scholarship. Still, ultimately, with the opportunities for female conductors few and far between, she changed course.
She continued to use her education and knowledge for a time as the music director at nearby St. Augustine Church. Still, after a summer volunteering in rural Mexico, she joined the family business, the Klock Company, a real estate firm founded by her parents in 1974 and later acquired by Coldwell Banker. She would spend the next more than three decades in residential and commercial sales, construction, and development, which, providentially, included assisting new School of Law professors to find homes in the area.
Throughout the last five years of their remarkable lives, Klock would leave it all to care for her parents, Mary Dot and Joe Klock, Sr. Her parents died within months of each other, at ages 92 and 93.
"I realized after my parents passed that as hard as it was at times, every day was purpose-driven and fulfilling," she said. “When I thought about what I wanted to do next, I knew it needed to have purpose and give me the ability to do something to improve the future for my nieces and nephews."
Klock is part of a huge family, with seven siblings and 53 nieces and nephews over two generations. "My biggest concerns for them were, and remain, the uncertainty of sea rise mitigation here in South Florida, and vulnerability of the rule of law," Klock said. "When they were considering their futures, I would often ask the kids what they wanted to fix in the world and what training they would need to be able to do that. I realized that the training I needed I could only get by going to law school."
Klock's road to The Bass Bricks would follow one already taken by two siblings and four nieces and nephews, though theirs were the right-sided bookend of their educations. She also trained and became a certified Florida Supreme Court Certified County Court Mediator and will be certified for the Circuit and Appellate Courts in June.
After taking the bar exam this summer, Klock plans to focus on transactional law, mediation, and arbitration. She wants to wait until then to decide where to begin her practice and feels fortunate to have good options.
