Frederick M. Rothenberg is a partner in Holland & Knight's Tampa office. Mr. Rothenberg practices in the employee benefits area, emphasizing the representation of employers with respect to general ERISA concerns as well as specific qualified and nonqualified deferred compensation plan issues. He also advises individual plan participants and beneficiaries with respect to the income, estate and other tax implications, as well as the asset protection implications, of the various options available to them with respect to the distribution of their benefits. Mr. Rothenberg also practices in the area of trust and estate planning and administration.
Mr. Rothenberg served as a member of the Florida Supreme Court Judicial Nominating Commission from 1987 to 1991. He has been actively involved with the education of his fellow professionals for some 40 years, having spoken on numerous occasions in the early 1970s about the then-current state of employee benefits law while sharing speculation regarding the various pension reform legislative proposals which eventually came to fruition when President Ford signed ERISA into law on September 2, 1974. In fact, Mr. Rothenberg was chairman of The Florida Bar Tax Section's Continuing Legal Education Committee which was responsible for organizing and presenting The Florida Bar's seminar on ERISA, and he was also a speaker at that December, 1974, seminar.
Mr. Rothenberg served as an Associate Editor of How to Live—And Die—With Florida Probate, published by Gulf Publishing Company in 1973, as well as Associate Editor of Tax Articles for the American Bar Association's Law Notes (1974 to 1978) and he was chairman of the Steering Committee for the Employee Benefits Manual published by The Florida Bar Continuing Legal Education Publications in 1980.
Mr. Rothenberg has been extremely involved in his community. In May 2007, he attended the graduation of his third mentee, thus completing his sixth consecutive year as a mentor at an inner-city Tampa high school, as part of the State of Florida's Take Stock in Children Scholarship program for at-risk students. And he has been active in helping the Hillsborough Education Foundation to raise the dollars needed to fund Take Stock in Children scholarships as well as to find mentors for all scholarship recipients.
Mr. Rothenberg served on the Coordinating Committee for the School District of Hillsborough County Superintendent's 1993 to 1995 Task Force regarding Vision and Goals for Quality Education, and he has been similarly involved with the School District of Hillsborough County Superintendent's Task Force regarding Middle Schools, which resulted in the school district's replacement of junior high schools with middle schools, as well as with the school district's implementation of its Magnet Schools program. He is also a former member of the School District of Hillsborough County Citizens Advisory Committee.
For five years he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Temple, Congregation Schaarai Zedek, and he has also served the temple as a member of the Board of Trustees, as well as treasurer, as financial secretary and as a member of the Planned Giving Committee of the Second Century Capital Campaign.
Mr. Rothenberg was President of Mental Health Care Inc. and a member of the Board of Governors of the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce. He was also a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Tampa as well as the Board's Executive Committee.
Over the years, including for his Dartmouth Class of 1964's 45th reunion and for many reunions of his Columbia Law School Class of 1967, Mr. Rothenberg has served as a member of each class's reunion committee. Presently a member of his Dartmouth Class of 1964's Executive Committee, he also served as the Class of 1964's Planned Giving Chairman for some 10 years.
A Captain in the United States Army, Mr. Rothenberg received the Army Commendation Medal for work as a government contracts specialist from 1967 to 1969.
