Shannon Schott

Kevin Daisey:
Welcome, everyone. We are recording. Welcome to another live recording of The Managing Partners Podcast. I’m Kevin Daisey, your host. I’m also the founder of Array Digital. We’re a digital marketing agency that helps law firms grow their case pipeline through digital marketing. So today I have a special guest, which is my fourth podcast today, so I’m very excited to have my fourth one today. So I have Shannon Schott. Sorry. I want to say Scott for some reason. Shannon Schott, welcome to the podcast.

Shannon Schott:
Thank you for having me.

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah. So we were talking a little bit backstage and just before, about our kids and all the things that we got to deal with these days. But why we’re here today is we want to hear more about Shannon’s journey about becoming an attorney, about where she is now, learn more about her firm. And really excited to have her share some tips with the other attorneys that are listening in to the podcast here about what she’s been able to accomplish. And so without further ado, Shannon, tell us your story.

Shannon Schott:
Yeah. So I’m from Jacksonville, Florida. I was actually adopted which is a random fact, but grew up in Jacksonville which if you’re not familiar with Florida it’s the most northern city in northeast Florida. And my dad was a chiropractor. My mom was a nurse. So I was actually around law a lot. My dad was a personal injury chiro and he gave a lot of expert testimony. I was so enamored with it and was so enamored with trial and I was lucky to be in this community in particular because there were so many amazing, very dramatic performative trial lawyers.

Shannon Schott:
And so all I wanted to be was a trial lawyer and from a very young age I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I mean five. And so I was very much fast-tracked, went to UF for undergrad and I’ve always been leader joiner. So I did a lot at UF. I was in a sorority and I went to a school in Jacksonville where, I mean, I was never going to be the valedictorian, I wasn’t one of the smart kids. I was one of the ones who was making all the connections. So my dad always [crosstalk 00:02:36].

Kevin Daisey:
Peoplesm is important.

Shannon Schott:
Yeah. Yeah. So I started building my network at a very young age and I think it’s definitely a learned behavior, but I saw my dad as a small business owner marketing himself, doing the attorney lunches, sending Christmas cards and having big parties. So I kind of had that baseline knowledge of marketing and developing yourself. And I always knew that the end goal would be to own my own law firm, but I wasn’t really sure how that would happen. So I go to UF, did not get into UF law because I was having way too much fun at UF. I was there when we got a bunch of championships.

Shannon Schott:
So I got into Stetson and I was very pleased to go there because again, number one trial school in the country, I was pumped and my parents were like, “If you’re not in and out in the three years your given. Or the four years of undergrad and get into law school, get in, get out, get out of school.” They were not going to condone any extra time in school. So again, wasn’t the valedictorian of any of my classes, I was definitely working towards the goal of just becoming an attorney because I knew once I was there I would shine, I would be fine. Well, that was 2010 is when I graduated. We were in one of the worst economic recessions ever. People really cared where I was in my rankings for law school.

Shannon Schott:
It didn’t matter that I had a license. So I had a lot of really tough conversations about whether I was going to stay in the Tampa Bay area or if I was going to come back to Jacksonville which at the time, I mean, it was just a slow sleepy town. And the best advice I was given at that time was, “Do you want to be a big fish in a little pond or a little fish in a big pond?” So I packed up all my stuff and I went back to Jacksonville and I just started looking for a job. And I got hired by this incredible PI attorney who I respected and he thought, “You and your dad are going to bring me so much business here to go make it rain for me.” Well, my father was retired.

Shannon Schott:
He had no desire to help me market and ultimately it didn’t work out. So I actually started volunteering at the office of the public defender. So my first real job for three months was volunteering. I slept on a mattress on the floor of my parents’ living room because they were renovating and my bedroom was gone. I had a luxury vehicle that my parents had bought me for college that I could not afford to maintain. And I had to beg my parents to pay for my bar dues. And a lot of people think because my parents helped me a lot financially that they bankrolled my first few years of my career. That is they cut me off cold turkey. But it was okay. I wanted to get into the business. I wanted to do trial work.

Shannon Schott:
And within the first four months I finally got hired and I tried five cases in the first six months of being a public defender, felony, jury trials, first chair and I was hooked. I mean, people’s lives were literally on the line and I did fine but no malpractice. But I was hooked. And so my reward for doing so well was that they sent me down to juvenile. And juvenile isn’t like worst job in the world but it’s not where people want to be. And I loved it. And my first day, this girl Belkis Plata came up to me and she goes, “Are you Dr. Schott’s daughter?” And I was like, “Yes. Who are you?” She was like, “I worked for your dad. I’d been in a car accident and I actually worked for your dad.”

Shannon Schott:
And my parents were like, “Oh my gosh, Belkis, yes. We remember her.” While I was out in the front of my dad’s office pulling weeds, she was working in the air conditioning. She had been in a crash, she’d been a patient. And so Belkis and I connected, we loved juvenile. We excelled at it. We ultimately became experts in juvenile law. And then we had a boss, an elected boss who got in a lot of trouble. It’s public record. He’s not Shark [crosstalk 00:07:08]. And Willem. Yeah. So he just started getting in a lot of trouble. And we had news reporters out of our office every single day.

Shannon Schott:
And I was doing really well. We were both doing really well in the office. We were really committed to the job and I looked at Belkis and I was like, “I’m going to get out of here. What do you think? I got three and a half years of experience. I feel like I can open my own law firm. Do you want to come with me?” And we did. And we left and we gave our notice and it was super scandalous. People were really not supportive. People told us we were never going to succeed. And yeah, here we are seven years later.

Kevin Daisey:
Awesome. That was a great story. Felt this, I mean, you had to get through a lot of different struggles there to keep pushing on and get where you’re at.

Shannon Schott:
I think we both were just so blindly ambitious and super over-confident and that was really helpful for us to just kind of be like, “We can do this. We’ll figure it out.” So that’s how we just kind of pushed the struggles to the side and just kept pushing on.

Kevin Daisey:
Well, I think a lot of people would’ve given up halfway through that all story you just said, so kudos. I mean, you made some big changes and decisions to have to move and to do all those things. So not a lot of people would make those decisions. They’d probably go the safe road. Right. So check out her website too, since you just mentioned your partner. So this plataschott.com.

Kevin Daisey:
It’s down at the bottom of the screen. If you’re listening that’s P-L-A-T-A-S-C-H-O-T-T.com. You can check out her firm and see what they’re all about. So more about the firm. So you kind of mentioned a little bit of hints on there. What you kind of focus on, what you specialize in. So it’s been seven years since you started your own practice.

Shannon Schott:
Yes.

Kevin Daisey:
What areas do you really focus on? What you say your specialty would be. And how has that kind of grown, I guess over the years as far as what you guys cover?

Shannon Schott:
Yeah. Well now you know the pain that is having to give my email address all day long and spell your domain name. It’s quite a problem. [crosstalk 00:09:29].

Kevin Daisey:
Figured it might help the audio people.

Shannon Schott:
We did not think through our domain name. So we only knew criminal when we started. The first day, we got one case for $250 and we were like, “We’ve made it. Yes. We’re going to survive.” So Belkis and I have a very… You have to meet Belkis to really understand what I’m about to say, but we are very different. And our priorities are very similar in the sense that family is always first for us and then our duty to our clients.

Shannon Schott:
We believe in professionalism and ethics. We hold those very dearly to us. And so we always knew that the baseline of our firm was going to be practicing law with professionalism and ethics in a way that helps our family. So in the first few years, we had to dabble in a lot of things that we were not experts in and that we really didn’t want to do like family law. For all the family law attorneys out there, I feel you.

Kevin Daisey:
You hear that family law people?

Shannon Schott:
I know. So I did it for two [crosstalk 00:10:32] years and I was out of there. But criminal is what we really started to do. And then of course we knew juvenile and we had a judge help us get on the appointment, the conflict counsel appointment list. So we were able to continue to do a lot of criminal and juvenile without being privately retained. And then we started trying to pick up PI cases. And that obviously for those who practice PI know getting the cases 90% of the battle. And so we just started pounding the pavement and just getting ourselves out there. But also I had to learn personal injury. I mean, I really had to take the time to do the CLEs and everything else.

Shannon Schott:
So we did a lot of different stuff. We did a lot of stuff through our legal aid to get free CLEs. And we’ve kind of practiced a little bit of everything. And we’ve really narrowed in the last few years to juvenile and criminal defense and personal injury. And if I could only do minimally injured people in auto cases, I’m good. I don’t want dead bodies. I don’t want amputees. I really like working with people who are injured, soft tissue injuries and who have a happy ending. Right. I get to compensate them fairly for their injuries, but it’s not like there’s not enough money or their lives are completely devastated because I’ve seen the effect of my colleagues who take those kinds of really high stress cases.

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah. Yeah.

Shannon Schott:
So yeah.

Kevin Daisey:
I can see that being very challenging. So-

Shannon Schott:
Yeah. And we’ve had plenty of people work for us. I mean, we’ve had as many as three other attorneys in the firm at the time, but eventually everyone asked if their name can be on the door and we say no and then they move on, which is completely fine and we’re happy to have ambitious people. But Belkis and I, we kind of agreed from day one it was going to be just the two of us as partners. And so that’s led to just the two of us really being the only attorneys. And not that we’ve pushed people out, it just doesn’t really work with other attorneys. And that’s good for us. So we have three support staff.

Kevin Daisey:
Okay.

Shannon Schott:
And we are completely virtual as of August this year. So yeah. So that’s been a really interesting change. I don’t want to say challenge, has been a change. But I think it’s-

Kevin Daisey:
And did you have an office that you were paying for that you now don’t have to pay for?

Shannon Schott:
Yes. Yes. So we were in a physical location for six years and then from day one, we had a physical office and COVID just taught us a lot of lessons. And one of them was that we can do our job without seeing people in person. So that’s been an interesting change.

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah. No. For us too, I mean, we do have a physical office still. But my employees are, I have eight in Florida, one in Jacksonville, so. And we find the best talent and the best folks to work at our firm. They’re not always going to be down the street. So it’s allowed us to expand and get outside of our comfort zone. But we still go to the office and meet there, because we want to. And I’m at my home office today. I did three podcasts today earlier from the office. So it’s allowed us to be more flexible, so.

Shannon Schott:
Absolutely. In 2016 it was a really weird year for us. Belkis’s father who had been with her for forever, he was diagnosed with end stage cancer, brain cancer. And he had no health insurance, he had no Medicare, no Medicaid. So she became his caretaker. And for the last few weeks of his life, I mean, it was 100%. At the same time I gave birth eight weeks early to my son and my son was hospitalized for an entire month in the NICU. And at the time we had no support staff. So we had to figure out how to run our law firm and meet the needs of our client while both of us were literally in the hospital with our loved ones or home with our loved ones.

Shannon Schott:
At the same time, we found out that for the first time ever, they had opened up juvenile certification as one of the board certification specialties in Florida. So I mean, we’re juggling our law firm, we’re dealing with death and new life and medical emergencies. And we’re trying to apply for and study for this exam that was in October of… Oh, excuse me. It was in May of 2017 but you had to apply by October, 2016. So it was a really wild time, but we’ve been very empowered since then in our ability to, like you said, have that flexibility. We can work from anywhere, we just have to know how we work. And also has allowed us to pull really good talent because we don’t feel like they have to be local.

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Well, you definitely had a huge test that year for sure. That’s a lot going on in your life and that it becomes part of us. I have a business partner. I didn’t have one for many years. And I’ll say that’s one great thing about having a partner or multiple partners, if you have multiple, is that you’re not really on your own every single time. So even though you both were pretty much out of-

Shannon Schott:
Let’s just say my maternity leave was not long. It was not long. It was a day.

Kevin Daisey:
You didn’t give yourself three months? Come on.

Shannon Schott:
I mean, I wish. I hope if I ever have another one I hope I’m there. Because again, that experience taught us that our family is the most important thing. Time is very precious and you can never get it back. So even when we have clients, I don’t know if we’re going to talk about this. But one of the things that we actually changed is we got rid of a third of our clients after that year. We decided to start ranking our clients as to the quality of how we work with them. And it’s not a rank of them as an individual. It’s how we are working with the client. One thing we really believe is that not every attorney is the right lawyer for every client and we committed to working with people who are the right client for us.

Shannon Schott:
And it’s a lot easier to hire and fire clients that way when we kind of see how the personalities fit. But one of our commitments to our staff is we will not let a client speak poorly to them and we will fire the client if that happens. And just the same way if a client speaks to me a certain way or if they don’t respect my boundaries. So it’s really shaped, that year has shaped so much of how we run our business. And I think it was necessary. And I think for any business owner, for any managing partner, you have to have a life experience that will shape your business because cancer, death, all of those things are coming for us at some point. And your business shouldn’t suffer just because you have a medical emergency or personal tragedy if you’ve built a really good foundation.

Kevin Daisey:
No. 100%. Yeah. What you just said was spot on. I think it was great. I think everyone should probably get to the exercise. We’ve actually done that too. And I’m going to address your marketing company completely different, but we went to the exercise a while back and that’s what led us to niche into working with law firms only.

Shannon Schott:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Kevin Daisey:
We had lots of clients in lots of industries and we were kind of sitting there like, “Well, what do we really want to do?” And we ranked our clients actually. We ranked them by the type of industry, the success we had and then we walked all the way down to the person that we worked with.

Shannon Schott:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Kevin Daisey:
The owners or were they the marketing people, who was it? And we kind of figured out who we really need to be working with. And so we kind of went through that same exercise. And we found on a ton of clients and then we niched into law and then we lost some clients because they were like, “Hey, you guys don’t want help us.” “We’re not a law firm anymore. We’re not law firm. Right. Although we can still help you and you’re a good client.” But they just kind of started to say, “Hey, if you’re only working with law firms maybe you can’t help me because I’m a CPA or whatever.” So it was a natural kind of progression and we still have some clients that are definitely not law firms that we help, but new clients, they have to be a law firm.

Kevin Daisey:
And then there’s a certain profile, certain type of client that really works well. And you have to be willing to say no and to say, “Hey, I can refer you to someone else that’s a better fit.” And that’s hard to do and I think most people just want to take every… In the beginning you take everything you can get. I’ll take anything and we’ll do for you any kind of case. No matter what, we’re going to figure it out. And I think as you mature and you start to have, for you it was a big life experience but I think that’s a great exercise that I don’t think most will do, is to say, “Hey, wait a minute. Who do we want to work for?” So-

Shannon Schott:
Yeah. But it certainly increases your quality of life. And also it helped with our staff to build trust with them that we will not stand for a client speaking poorly. I can’t pay you millions of dollars but what I can do is show you respect and I can try to make this job as comfortable as possible because I appreciate the work that you’re doing. And so our team is very loyal to us because of that, because we’re loyal to them

Kevin Daisey:
I love it. And you mentioned family. It’s there on top of my head. There you go.

Shannon Schott:
Yeah. Exactly.

Kevin Daisey:
You have to have the means if you’re running a business, law firm or any kind of business. A lot of times business owners get caught up. They are working around the clock, on weekends or whatever. So you got to build your business in a way that is going to allow you to get away when you need to or if you have some situation where you’re going to be gone for a month, that what’s going to happen to your business? Can it continue?

Shannon Schott:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Kevin Daisey:
So you got to put some of the things in place. [crosstalk 00:21:10].

Shannon Schott:
Or the pandemic hits.

Kevin Daisey:
Or the pandemic. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve had some cool attorneys on, young attorneys earlier this year where I had one young girl, I was like, “Hey, you want to be on the podcast?” And she’s like, “Oh, I’m not a fit for the podcast. I just started my firm last year in the middle of the pandemic and terrible time and it was super rough. And I can’t talk about any good experiences.” And I was like, “Are you still in business?” She’s like, “Yeah, I’m still in business. We’re hiring some people.” And I’m like, “You just told me that you just struggled in the worst time ever. You started your firm with no clients and you’re still here and you’re hiring.” Yeah.

Shannon Schott:
These solo, small law firm that’s still in business at the end of 2021 and honestly through 2022, pat yourself on the back because we hope it doesn’t get worse but also we’ve all learned so much. It truly was something else.

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah. And hopefully it’s going down, declining and COVID is going away but we’ll see. But I think at this point if it spikes back up or whatever, I think the world is more prepared. All this stuff of being virtual and stuff like that. That’s not going anywhere. I still like to get in front of people and meet people in person and stuff like that as much as I can, but I think this isn’t going anywhere. This stuff is going to be the normal, for sure. I think people are going to start to want to go back and this won’t be quite as popular, but now it’s in place. The technology is there, the course have updated for the most part.

Shannon Schott:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:22:56]. It’s just gotten little bit of, I don’t want to say trouble, but so in my capacity as a leader, in one of my organizations, I kind of had to go head to head with the chief judge in our circuit. And I had to maybe send him a letter publicly and then put it all over social media. But it’s really interesting to see especially in the south and red states if you will, and red counties, the push and pull with technology, but I’m fortunate. I know we’re all fortunate that most of our bar organizations or Supreme Courts are embracing technology and there will be new rules related to technology just like with telephonic conferences or what have you, but we are chugging right along on Zoom. And I think it’s here to stay and I fight for it every day.

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah. Again, I get to interview a lot of attorneys so I tend to ask and find out, but some are trial attorneys through and through, been doing it for a long time. They find advantages of being in front of a jury and they think that’s their best chance of being successful. And I can understand that. And I have a lot of other ones that are like, “Man, this is the best thing ever. I only worked in this small area and now I’m seeing clients around the state.” And they’re able to grow their business, be more efficient and help more people at the end of the day. And you did this originally to probably help people. So-

Shannon Schott:
Right.

Kevin Daisey:
And so if you could see more people and help more people it’s-

Shannon Schott:
And it saves our clients money. And so I’m the president of the criminal defense bar association here locally and then I sit on the bar association and I’m on the board of governors for the Jacksonville Bar Association. So I hear all practitioners perspectives on this but we can do everything except for evidentiary. And in some cases we can still do that jury trials virtually. We can do it all. And 1% of cases go to trial.

Shannon Schott:
So the people who are resistant, I just can’t get on board with what they’re saying because I try jury trials. I’m trying one next week. I’m going to try jury trials in person. I don’t think we’ll ever try them virtually, although we did do the one in Duval County. The one binding virtual jury trial or the first, but it helps everybody to do everything else virtually. We save so much money for our clients and for ourselves and time, and then we’ll go do our trials in person and we’ll all be fine.

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah. Yeah. Totally agree. I think it’s the one positive thing that’s kind of come out of this whole event. So we’ll take that. We can take a little bit from it. So I guess Shannon, other than that so what do you think the next couple of years looks like? I mean, with the firm, two partners of course, but what’s some of your growth plans over the next couple of years?

Shannon Schott:
Well, if any attorney listening has never read the book Traction, I mean [crosstalk 00:26:07].

Kevin Daisey:
Love that book. Hold on.

Shannon Schott:
Yup. Mine is on loan right now.

Kevin Daisey:
Hold on. I got this one which I’ve had for years. And I got this one with the hard back and Gino Wickham the author signed it for me. [crosstalk 00:26:21]. I just met him at a conference a couple weeks ago.

Shannon Schott:
I hired a success coach a few years ago and she was like, “You need to read this book.” And I never read it. And I finally read it this year. And so we went through our whole Traction worksheet and some of the things that we’re bilingual from. I speak no Spanish. So I would very much like to learn Spanish in the next few years. We’re thinking about taking the Georgia bar exam since we’re so close to Georgia, but we’re really trying to recover from COVID and have better systems of process as you know.

Shannon Schott:
Building our systems of process now that we’re doing this virtually and we’d love to eventually actually buy a building. One of our biggest gripes with space is that we didn’t own it. So we have a lot of financial goals, paying off our idle loan or whatever that thing was. So we had never borrowed a dime before the pandemic. And so now we’re just like, “Okay, we want to reset. We were at 20% growth every year. We want to get back to that.” I mean, we literally won an award for our growth in 2019. So we really want to get back to that. [crosstalk 00:27:31]. But-

Kevin Daisey:
I said excellent. Sorry. On your award. [crosstalk 00:27:37].

Shannon Schott:
We want to get back to that. And then we just want to keep perfecting and perfecting where we can. I mean, within reason and building our team and just building the community of our firm and that culture of our firm in this new space.

Kevin Daisey:
I love it. That’s awesome. It sounds great. Very similar to our plans, I think, over here. So-

Shannon Schott:
[inaudible 00:27:59] the numbers but that’s rude.

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah. Well, no, I’m on the same page. We’re trying to always improve, get better, get faster and get more precise with what we’re trying to do. Processes and systems you can’t go wrong with those in place. Yeah. But Traction if anyone’s listening at all, Traction is amazing. I had another awesome attorney who turned me onto a E-Myth, which is a book I just started. I just started that myself.

Kevin Daisey:
So I’m going through that. But there’s a lot of information out there. There’s a lot of groups too in this space, like how to manage a small law firm is a good group. I’m actually getting turned on to a bunch of other groups that are out there who are district attorneys. So there’s a lot of resources out there but you got to continue to learn and perfect everything. So-

Shannon Schott:
Absolutely. And I think reading more or consuming more books, not just reading case law, but consuming more books, whether that’s audio or reading is another goal of mine because just sitting down and taking the time to finally read that book that’s been sitting on my shelf literally for three years, it changed my life and it changed my business. And so there’s just more good knowledge out there.

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah. With Traction, I’ve read this twice. My business partners read once or twice and we continue to get more stuff because we can’t apply it all overnight. Go back through and say, “Hey, what do we miss?” And then we go, “Oh, we didn’t do this. Let’s try that out.” So some books you can read over and over again. And my goal is 24 books, so two a month this year. So I’m a little behind but I guess I got some time.

Shannon Schott:
That’s really cool.

Kevin Daisey:
But yeah, you got to keep learning. You got to keep figuring things out and someone’s probably already done what you’re trying to do.

Shannon Schott:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Kevin Daisey:
And you can put your little spin on it. Your unique piece in there. So-

Shannon Schott:
Yeah.

Kevin Daisey:
Well, Shannon, I appreciate you sharing. Your story is very cool and unique kind of how some of the stuff you went through, a lot of struggles that you had to go through, but it’s kind of got you where you are and created the firm that you have and you know exactly what you want. So I think that’s pretty important. Well, some people might not ever get there to that point. You just kind of go through the motions. So-

Shannon Schott:
Yeah.

Kevin Daisey:
Congrats on that. The website again, below, if you want to check her firm out is plataschott.com. Email me if you need to know how to spell that. I’ll help you out. Shannon, is there anything else you wanted to share before we say goodbye to the audience?

Shannon Schott:
Yeah. Find me on social media, shannonschott.esq on Instagram. And that should get you everywhere else. I’m really active. I’m very much a millennial. I’m active on social media, dabbling in TikTok now. So I hope you all check me out. And if you ever need a personal injury or criminal attorney in Jacksonville, Florida, I am your girl so call me.

Kevin Daisey:
Awesome. Yeah. If you’re an attorney listening and have some possible referral, connections there where maybe you don’t do that type of work in Florida reach out to Shannon. Shannon, we’ll have this episode soon up on our website. So you’ll have a feature page and that’ll be at thisisarray.com/podcast. Everyone too, if you’re listening, we’re passing 140, 150, I think this year but you can sort by state. So you can find attorney episodes by state and by practice area. So if you wanted to see Florida and personal injury, boom, you’ll find Shannon for sure.

Kevin Daisey:
I think we’re only a few states that we haven’t had a guest in. So that’s a goal for me to figure that one out. But check that out. And then if you need help with marketing, growing your practice, website development, design, SEO, that’s what we do. We’d love to help you out. We only work with law firms and be happy to talk to you about that even if you just have questions. So reach out to thisisarray.com or connect with me, social media, LinkedIn. It’s just Kevin Daisey everywhere for me. And that’s Daisey, D-A-I-S-E-Y. Everyone thinks it’s Daisy like the flower, there’s actually an E in there. But check that out. Check out the episode with Shannon. Shannon, thanks so much for coming on today.

Shannon Schott:
Thank you for having me. [crosstalk 00:32:32].

Kevin Daisey:
Yeah. You can stay with me for just a second after we stop and chat for a few seconds and everyone else have a great day. Get out there, crush your goals and grow your firms.