Super Lawyers - Florida 2017

RISING STARS
While many kids spent their summers covered in
bug spray and eating mess-hall suppers, Anas-
tasia Protopapadakis was forced to visit family in
Greece, where she had her run of the Acropolis and
Crete’s mesmerizing beaches.

“I remember thinking, ‘I just want to go to camp
with my friends!’” Protopapadakis says with a laugh.
“My parents were like, ‘You’re going to see your fam-
ily and that’s that.’ Of course, looking back, I realize I
should have appreciated it. I remember just running
up and down the Acropolis. … There were no lines.

Travel has always been a part of my life.”
The question “Where to next?” turned into a
blog in 2016. “I would get emails from friends or
colleagues after trips asking questions like, ‘Where
did you go? What did you see? How did you get
from here to here? Did you need a visa? What
restaurants did you go to?’” she says. “I found
myself writing the same email again and again. I
figured, instead of driving myself crazy doing that,
I should start a blog. A lot of it is ‘things I wish I
knew before I went.’”
If you need practical advice about, say, how to
dress for an evening spent viewing the Northern
Lights in Iceland (“Overdress in layers, paying special
attention to your shoes and socks situation”), or how
to command elephants at a Thai sanctuary (“didi
means good boy/girl”), talk to Protopapadakis.

Some of her wisdom—like the fact that baboons
can sniff out just about anything—was gained the
hard way. “[We] were visiting Victoria Falls, and I
had a protein bar in my bag. Our tour guide said, ‘If
you have any food on you, the baboons will smell
it and they will chase you. Leave it in the car,’” she
says. “This monkey comes swinging out of the tree
and starts chasing me. I’m screaming and running,
and my husband is cracking up. I remembered the
protein bar and frantically chucked it. The monkey
went in that direction, and I went in the opposite.”
Protopapadakis considers herself a natural
investigator. “That inquisitiveness led me to travel
and to the law,” she says. “When I research a trip,
I don’t just call a travel agent like, ‘Plan my trip.’
I do so much work to know as much about the
place as possible.”

Anastasia
Protopapadakis
GRAYROBINSON
CIVIL LITIGATION:
DEFENSE
MIAMI
Where in the World is
Anastasia Protopapadakis?
You don’t need a game show to find her—just check out her travel blog
BY AMY WHITE
It’s part of her personal travel philosophy.

“I like to add a charity component,” she says. “I
do the required research so I won’t visit any site
or attraction that exploits animals or children. I
completely vet and research every single activity,
tour operator, hotel, et cetera. I don’t want to visit a
country and just stomp all over their monuments,
eat their food, stay in their hotels and do nothing
that benefits the local people.”
On a recent trip, she and husband Chad lugged
50 pink goody bags stuffed with toiletries and
coloring books across Peru until they hand-deliv-
ered them to a girl’s orphanage. “You would have
thought we gave them diamonds,” she says.

Her vetting ability translates to detail-oriented work at GrayRobinson, where she practices civil and employment litigation defense, ADA defense, business litigation and banking, with niched focus on areas including funeral and cemetery law.

“Funeral and cemetery law is not really unlike
general contract and tort law,” she says. “The claims
are the same. People trip and fall in cemeteries just
like they do in banks and grocery stores, on city side-
walks. People also enter into contracts with cemeter-
ies and funeral homes for goods and services, and
then allege that that contract wasn’t fulfilled.”
Her business is her priority. “The blog is a passion
project,” she says. This year alone, she’ll have set foot
in Iceland, Greece, Mexico, Portugal and London. And
she’s researching trips to Cuba, Egypt, Bhutan and
India—“my bucket-est bucket list,” she notes.

“It’s a lot of work. I know a year in advance what
holidays our firm has. I try to take advantage of
those to extend a vacation so that I’m never out of
the office more than 10 days. When I’m away, it’s
not like, ‘OK, bye.’ I’m obviously not doing rigorous
motion practice, but I’m available to clients.”
Protopapadakis takes umbrage with the vaca-
tion time Americans leave on the table. “My family
in Greece always says, ‘Here, we work to live. In
America, you live to work.’”
While Protopapadakis doesn’t nerd out over the
analytics of who’s reading her blog, she’s happy
when she gets pings outside of the United States.