Building a Law Firm from Scratch: Insights from Holly K. Sheridan

Transcript
Viktoria Altman (00:00)
Guys, welcome to the Law Firm Accelerator. Today we have Holly with us. Holly is a family law attorney in Pennsylvania. Holly, thank you so much for joining us.

Holly K. Sheridan (00:09)
Well, thank you for having me today. I’m excited to speak to you about a lot of what’s going on in my industry as well as yours.

Viktoria Altman (00:17)
So Holly, could you introduce yourself, and tell us a little bit about your practice and why you decided to go into the field of family law?

Holly K. Sheridan (00:24)
Sure. My name is Holly Sheridan and I decided to become a lawyer a little bit late. I had already signed up for college at a state school to do finance or art or pretty much anything but law school. And one thing led to another and I ended up going to law school and loved it. I loved the law. I loved the process. I loved the system even though it’s extremely broken at times. And I’m a big believer in that everyone should have one.

Now shooting forward many years when I started as a new attorney I was working at a small law firm here in Pennsylvania and My now husband at the time was finishing up law school in Florida And it was a general practice. I did all types of law criminal family estates contract disputes personal injury claims You name it I would do it and as a young attorney that is extremely, extremely intense and a lot of pressure because you’re still trying to learn how to practice law and then when you’re thrown into different areas of law, you have to know what you’re doing and be competent in each area. So about two years in of practicing there, at this point my now husband, Hillary, is living in Pennsylvania. He was a public defender in a county over. He’s always done well with criminal law. I just had this moment, I thought, I can’t do this. I’m so stressed and unhappy.

This just is not going to work out long term. It’s not sustainable. So I was 27. I had zero plans. Other than I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep doing what I was doing. So I turned in my notice. It did not go well. And now years later, this man is still my mentor and we have a good relationship. But he said, well, what are you going to do? And I said I don’t know. He’s like, you don’t have a job? And I was like, no, I’m just going to go home. So at the time I was broke, a brand new lawyer living in a one-bedroom apartment with my boyfriend. And I had one client, one of the clients that, you know, frankly, Had a complex case. like, well, I got to go with you. So I just started with one client, one check. And then from there, it just slowly grew. And the one bedroom became, you know, a two bedroom with a bonus room. And then it became, we moved back into my parents’ house so we could have more space. Cause now we had to take over the formal dining room. And so in the beginning days, was a lot of trying to get our ducks in a row, but also not knowing how to do that.

So a lot of research, a lot of reading, different material on management recommendations, and also becoming a business owner, and that in and of itself is a big task. But I look back at the early days and they were fun. I miss those.

Viktoria Altman (03:08)
You started pretty much kind of like a law firm in your garage it sounds like.

Holly K. Sheridan (03:13)
It kind of felt that way. Yeah. And so when I started, just to answer your first question completely, I had started my firm with no investments, no assets, no real money. I could afford the $ 9.99 at the time GoDaddy website a cell phone and you know my expenses were under like a hundred dollars at that point other than trying to figure out my living expenses. And then as things progressed I thought I would never do family law again. Out of all these areas of law I was doing at my old firm I couldn’t stand family law. It was just something about the rules and the lack of concrete black-and-white rules in family law that bothered me. I like taxes. I like I’m a rule-based.

So when I started the firm 10 years ago in that apartment, said, I’ll do personal injury law. Like that’s what I love and have a passion for. But slowly over time, family law cases just kept coming to me, being referred to me. And I started taking them. And throughout that ride until today, I love family law now.

It is an area that I do not intend to leave. And I look at it so differently than I did as a young attorney where it was just, I needed the black and white roadmap so could tell the client, this is gonna happen. If we do this, X is gonna happen. But in family law, it’s not like that. And I think once you learn to embrace the fact that this is an ebb and a flow, and each day, how you parent your or your co-parent with your spouse or ex-spouse is going to shape what tomorrow looks like. And so now I only do family law, but I love it. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Viktoria Altman (05:02)
It’s funny, I think sometimes our jobs pick us. If you told me like 10 years ago I’d be working with lawyers and doing marketing for lawyers, I’d be like, what? You’re crazy. I was a travel blogger and it was great. And I love this job. This is my favorite job that I’ve ever had. And sometimes you just end up in life where you never thought you would. And you love it.

Holly K. Sheridan (05:12)
Right?

Viktoria Altman (05:27)
So you start your law firm basically in the basement. Now I’m a marketing person. So my very first question for you is, did you open a Google My Business listing or a Google Business profile? Because now you have to have an office to open it. But 10 years ago, you could have done it from anywhere basically.

Holly K. Sheridan (05:45)
I believe at the time, this is a great question, at the time, one of the first things that I did was go and get a PO box. I believe I could register it to the PO box at the time, but now later we’ve had to change it to our physical locations. But that’s a whole process, as I’m sure you know, like setting up your Google location and maps. So, yeah, I think I got it right before they got stringent on no PO boxes.

Viktoria Altman (06:09)
Yeah.

So to our listeners, one of the questions that I get a lot from brand new lawyers, or rather, excuse me, not brand new lawyers, but people who are brand new at setting up their law firm is, do I need an office? Can I use a virtual office? The answer to that question used to be yes, because you used to be able to open a Google Business Profile. Google Business Profile, besides your website, is probably the second most important internet property you could have because it is part of Google Maps and it is one of the best ways for people to find you.

Right now, can no longer set up a GBP, which is short for Google Business Profile, without a physical office. So when I have folks come to me and say, I have a law firm, but we’re doing virtual, usually, I have to tell them I can’t even work with you because I know that I would be just taking their money without delivering really big important part of the pie. And I always say it like this, look, I don’t care where your office is. I don’t care if it’s a shoe box in a, you know, in somebody’s basement somewhere, but it has to have a legitimate USPS business address. It should be a separate suite and then we can set you up a Google business profile. So that is the very first thing you should do before you do any marketing at all. Make sure you have a GBP and you can do it yourself. You don’t need to pay an agency to set it up. You know, there are plenty of tutorials online, including, think I have one on my website as well on how to set

Holly K. Sheridan (07:35)
That was good.

Viktoria Altman (07:36)
Okay, so awesome. Thank you for sharing that. So you opened up your law firm in your apartment and you work with your husband.

Holly K. Sheridan (07:46)
Yes, so for probably the first year and a half, this is like 2014, he worked as a public defender for the next county over part-time. And that’s how we got our benefits, like health insurance and whatnot. And then he worked at, it used to be Samuel Law Firm, which was my maiden name, which we’ve now changed over time to Sheridan Lawyers.

But eventually about a year and a half in, it became to the point where we could not sustain the PD or the public defender clients the time it was taking because it became at the cost of our clients. And then that’s when I still remember having this moment at a restaurant. And at this point, our daughter was born. So she was a baby and we just decided like grow the benefits like we just have to do this like there’s no other way. So that was what felt like a big jump for us. It was just losing that security blanket even though public defenders don’t get paid much. It’s still like a steady paycheck and that’s something as a law firm owner you’re constantly thinking about and then you could probably relate once you start having employees. Now I’m no longer worried about my steady paycheck. I’m worried about making sure my employees have stay at a paycheck before I even pay myself. So it’s just interesting how your priorities stay the same, but it also shifts over time.

Viktoria Altman (09:14)
Yeah, it’s a challenge being a small business owner. I’ve joked with my friends, like, I’ll marry you, as long as I happen to have your health insurance, I will marry you. It’s a joke, but you know in every joke, there is part joke.

Holly K. Sheridan (09:29)
Well, it makes you feel better. incorporated, it was Samuel Loeffer, but Sheridan Lawyers in May of 2014. And I did not have benefits. And then my husband and I pretty much eloped in June of 2014, a month later, because I needed benefits. And we’re gonna get married anyway, but we’re too, too, but the benefit was a large point of that conversation. I’m just like, you know, what do you do?

Viktoria Altman (09:58)
It’s such an American conversation to have. It’s so easy to start a business in the States. I have employees all over, so I know that there are so many roadblocks in other places in the world when you want to start a business, and it’s so much easier for us. But on the other hand, we have our unique challenges. OK, so you start your business. You’re doing well. You have seven, or eight employees besides you and your husbands. Something like that, right?

Holly K. Sheridan (10:14)
Something like that. we’re, seeing my husband and me, we hired full-time then we did bring on a full-time HR this last year and a half, which has been awesome as a small business to bring in HR. And she does operations and helps with payroll. We have a full-time marketing employee that we brought in about two years ago. And then we have paralegals and then multiple legal It’s all together, it’s like 11, give or take, one of our favorite, favorite, favorite employees, and they’re all favorites, is getting ready to be deployed to Kuwait for a year. So we’re loving her extra now, and we can’t wait for her to have a good experience and come back, because her job will be here.

Viktoria Altman (11:04)
Wow. I don’t know. Right, of course. So.

So you have a pretty big law firm. Usually, I start this question off by going, tell me what kind of marketing is working well for you. But because we had a whole conversation about this and because I know that you are far from alone, I know you’ve had a less-than-ideal experience with a marketing agency. And just to give our listeners some background, every single person I speak with, almost without exception, except for the few people who came straight to me from law school.

They’ve had terrible experiences and as much as I hope every person who listens decides to go with me, I may not be the right agency for everybody. But what I do want to do is I want to talk about your experience and then in hindsight, what were the red flags? What can we avoid in the future as well as what maybe are the green flags and the other things that are working for you?

I hear the same stuff over and over again. So let’s talk about, you know, as much as you can about your experience and what happened and, you know, how did it, how did it end up, how did the whole thing go basically?

Holly K. Sheridan (12:22)
So maybe it was two years ago, my husband and I, you know.

And I don’t know if it’s just this company we ended up working with. It’s a lot of glamour and hey, come down. It’s like a big show. And why you should, you know, hire these people to do your marketing and business. And they did like a business management professional coaching. And so at that time, you know, it was post COVID and my husband and I, you know, know we need to take the next step and get organized in our business practices. So we decided to on with the company. And it was a lot of money a month, like a lot of money in hindsight. I want to almost like hit myself in the head.

So anyway, that being said, we did end up getting a professional videotaping and we were assigned a business coach to work with us pretty much as needed or at least once every other week or something like that. So I thought, and my husband I think would agree, the value in this for us was the coaching.

And after a series of multiple coaches, people quit or we can never actually like establish a relationship with a coach where it feels like we’re getting anything done. in hindsight, and then the video came out and you know, it’s nothing that, you know, it’s not, you know, the video they displayed at their big convention or something like that. But in hindsight, so a couple of the red flags were the revolving people I was working with.

you know, during discussions instead of, know, my husband and I come in, we’re asking like specific questions like to make sure we can get the most out of this experience. And when it’s almost like a therapy session, they start asking the question back to you and they got to talk to somebody else before answering the question. It started to feel like we’re just going through this cycle, but like we’re not gaining anything from it. and in hindsight though, what we did learn from this entire very expensive experience with that company I wouldn’t recommend finding someone that’s more like in your situation, you’re a small business. You likely work with everyone directly. In this case, it was a lot of just the glamour and I hate to use the words whining and dying in people or whatever to stay.

But the most important piece of this that we took with us was carving out the time that we were giving this company to get stuff done. We didn’t need to work with that company. We just had to carve out the time in our personal and professional lives to sit down and start having conversations about marketing, marketing expenses, what’s our 10-year plan, what’s our vision. And on the business development side, how are our processes, and how we can better support our employees? So I do believe that the light at the end of the tunnel is, you know, we value carving out time to work on business and marketing tasks now, which we didn’t before.

Viktoria Altman (15:27)
Great, so your experience is very, very typical, and just from hearing so many folks talk, I’m hearing some red flags there for sure. When, and I’m gonna use myself as an example, not because I’m the only good agency out there, but because I know my business best. When I speak to people, I always clarify that while I have a big team behind me, I am the person who owns the company, finding responsibilities with me, you talk to me, and should there be a problem, you come to me directly.

One thing I’ve noticed with a lot of agencies that may not do as high-quality work as I’d like to see in this industry is that there is nobody responsible. And if they are responsible, they’re responsible for a portion. They’re not there. don’t understand either. They don’t understand the technical stuff or something is something feels a little bit off. So when you are talking, the first thing you need to do is when you’re talking to the marketing agencies, who am I going deal with? Who is the person who is going to be there to answer my questions? And if they’re just a salesperson who doesn’t seem to have a lot of knowledge, then I would say that’s a red flag, right? Because a salesperson is going to have a very hard time understanding. Now, if you are assigned an SEO and that SEO happens to be very good, what you should do is you should talk to their clients. You should ask them for referrals. Have you been speaking with Mr. Jack? You know, how long have you been with

How is the person who knows their stuff, how is your experience with that? Ask for references for that specific person, not for an agency, because when you have a big agency and you have 12 specialists, SEO specialists, one of them might be good, the other six may not be, you know what I mean? And certainly, salespeople don’t have enough understanding. It’s a very, very complex business. So I would say make sure you are assigned a good technical person. Like I said, in my I am the technical person, am the strategist, you know, it’s my agency. Another thing, the wedding and dining generally means they have a very large budget. And if they have a very large budget, then why is that budget not being put towards their clients?

Holly K. Sheridan (17:37)
I think they’re in those big corporate law firms that you have people going and you know they’re not necessarily bringing back you know the results are my husband I need and we’re looking for but just to speak to what you just said you know about asking that should have been my first red flag so we go back for like this workshop or whatever and everyone’s having lunch and I said or my husband said to someone like who’s your who areyou working with and they said the person’s name and it happened to be the first person assigned to us who my husband and I had already decided you know did not have the knowledge that we were looking for I said Well how did it how’s it going he was like it’s great and she you know helps me like work on my goals and I’m thinking to myself to my husband we got to get out of here if that is like the standard of like doing great and people are happy with This is not for us. So, red blood, away.

Viktoria Altman (18:41)
Yeah, and another good point is, Look, some agencies do small companies well, and that do larger companies well. Now, I will not take on a larger law firm. And the reason why is because I just don’t have the process for them. They need a lot more hand-holding. I’m not set up for this. My system’s not set up for it. So look for somebody who specializes in your size law firms, whether that be small, big, medium, or whatever. What you want is clients who are in the same practice area as you and who also have a similar number of lawyers a s, number a a of associates, and a similar number of office staff, right? So like right now, off the top of my head, I can give you 10 people who are in family law who are very similar in size to yours. And that should be the response of any agency. Another thing, of course, if you ask them for references and they are only able to give you a reference of somebody who’s outside of your practice area or a different size, you know, that’s a red flag. Another one and that might not be the one you’ve thought about, the best, I should be careful about this, are the best guys and girls I know, and there may be other ones, but the ones I know, do not require any long-term commitments. And the reason why, I don’t have a contract at all, I have an agreement month to month you can cancel. And the reason why is because I don’t need it. Nobody leaves if you do great work. And if they do leave, what am I gonna do, sue a lawyer? Come on.

Holly K. Sheridan (20:04)
And that was how this company was operating. Like, you’re on a two-year contract. And I kind of went back and said, OK, so to resolve this, I’m leaving this. This is not going to work out. And in consideration, I will not go on social media and blast you for my experience. But you’re right. That’s a red flag. And that’s the same thing with employees or clients. If it’s not working well and I mean, you don’t want to keep that relationship moving forward. At least that’s how we look at employees. We have an amazing culture here. And it’s fun and it’s silly, but also it’s hard-working and honest. And when we have an employee come in, or a new employee, and it’s just You know, I don’t like a lot of negativity and, you know, I’m very much a teacher. So I want to teach employees how to do something so next time they can do it. So the first flag that we see that this probably isn’t going to work out, we no longer keep that person. So, you know, it’s the same thing I would imagine with marketing, you know.

Viktoria Altman (21:10)
Yeah, and it works the same way for clients. Look, sometimes people come to me and I sign them up and I just see it’s just not going to work. Why am going to waste my time? Why am I going to waste your time? I would rather give you a refund and wish you the best of luck. And you know what? Nobody’s ever mad at you on social because you gave them a refund.

Holly K. Sheridan (21:24)
because you look at it more compassionately, feel like. Like how I’m too, didn’t, it’s not working, best of luck both ways, yeah.

Viktoria Altman (21:29)
Yeah, you know, if I can sleep because the client is stressing, yeah, it’s not worth it. So as an agency owner, and again, I know an agency that works with very large law firms and they don’t do contracts either because they just don’t need to. Now, I will be clear and explicit, and lk, we’re not going to get your results in three weeks. That’s just not how marketing works, right? So you’ve got to give us at least three to six months depending on your area, but you will see results in three to six months enough that I don’t need to put you on the contract. So that’s a good, that’s a big red flag.

There are two types of agencies out there. The ones who focus on promoting themselves and the ones who focus on promoting their clients.

And so if your resources are going heavily into promoting yourself, then chances are they’re not going as heavily to promote the clients. that’s, it sort of doesn’t, I’m not even sure why it’s that way because it doesn’t need to be because you could run a really good ad campaign for yourself and your client. But for some reason, that’s what I notice over and over again. So that’s sort of a pattern.

Holly K. Sheridan (22:35)
I’ve never thought about that, but it seems very accurate from my experience.

Viktoria Altman (22:39)
Yeah, so, you know, I’m sorry about this bad experience. We spoke about this before. Unfortunately, my industry is unregulated. Anybody can do anything, which means when you have a good business model, you know, you do great, you have wonderful clients and you don’t feel like you need to put anybody under sales pressure. Like I’ll follow up with my sales course, but I’m not here to like sign, sign, sign, you know.

On the other hand, it also leaves a lot of room for people who may not be as conscientious. And I apologize for my industry, the fact that you’ve encountered this. But it sounds like you’ve figured out a lot there. And you’re doing marketing in-house now. Now, you’re not doing web design and SEO, I noticed. But what are you doing? Are you doing social media marketing in-house?

Holly K. Sheridan (23:23)
Social media, she does like managing the website. Also, like an event coordinator and works with our local, in our local community to set up, you know, events where we can market.

One of our offices is in a town called Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, which is famous for being the mushroom capital of the world. And there is a mushroom festival every September.

Viktoria Altman (23:51)
wait, That’s awesome.

Holly K. Sheridan (23:54)
Plus people get drawn to like this little town and our office is like right on one of the main streets. So that is one of our biggest marketing events of the year. And I, you know, in the past we’ve given away like a MacBook Pro. If people signed up for our raffle, sign up for our newsletter. It’s just a really fun way to meet members of the community you know, and it’s an annual thing. So she coordinates all of that. She gets, you know, pretty much everything done. I think you saw that she also does a newsletter on the Uptown Express. you know, the goal is to have quarterly ones that are a little bit longer, but the monthly one or the short one is just like a blurb. We want our clients to see us, hey, we’re still here. We’re still doing stuff. You know, give them a little bit of, you know, whatever the season is or, you know, the topic, the hot topic and family law, I like to live like a pro tip. You know, for example, in the summer, we have a lot of families and clients come to us, you know, fighting over school for next year or summer camps. So it’s just trying to, you know, focus on, hey, right now, the hot topics here’s a little advice on how to best deal with it and co-parent and just for encouragement too.

So, I do think people read it because it’s free from our, you know, it’s from law, it’s free. It’s something that’s like, I hope to, you know, bring people in just to read what’s going on.

Viktoria Altman (25:20)
So a couple of great points there. First of all, I have to apologize for my family walking through the background. I live in Brooklyn and we have limited space. So I may have asked my family before not to, but I’m on the phone all day. I mean, you saw my people open the door in the back there. So, okay, the newsletters.

Viktoria Altman (25:46)
So you have a little bit of an interesting situation in your office because you have somebody who has a long sales cycle and somebody who has a short sales cycle, right? Family law is a longer sales cycle because people take a while to make that decision and so they will do a little extra research. They may read a newsletter before they make a move. With criminal law, on the other hand, it is a very short sales cycle. I need a criminal lawyer right now and a lot of people are simply embarrassed to ask people they know for an attorney. So what they’ll do is they’ll go and they’ll type it on Google and they’ll get you to know whoever has the most reviews or whoever they feel has the best connection with them from let’s say socials. So

The newsletter is a great idea for your family law and a brilliant idea to advertise at this festival. bet you get good PR and it’s just a great way to do it. For your criminal law on the other hand, if you tried to do a criminal law newsletter, you probably wouldn’t get a lot of bang for the buck because again, those people have to make decisions quickly. And you’re gonna have hopefully no repeat clients in criminal law, right?

Holly K. Sheridan (26:55)
reality, but that is the hope.

Viktoria Altman (26:57)
Well, yeah, so many of my clients will say a lot of times they’ll talk to a person and, you know, hopefully they never hear from them again. I hope the same thing for your divorce lawyer clients too. I hope you don’t get a lot of rapid business there, although I’m sure there’s probably more than one criminal.

So it does call for different types of marketing. Now I’m an SEO person, I’m an online Google person, that’s my specialty, that’s what I do. So I look at it from the viewpoint of what is the best return investment still to this day the best return investment assuming you have a great agency of course and you have good experience as going to be a CEO of search engine optimization but having those newsletters in the long run can be very helpful to help you nurture those leads and stuff so You are doing a lot of social media, but that’s also a longer sales cycle. What do you do for your husband’s portion of the business, sort of the criminal law? How do you advertise that?

Holly K. Sheridan (27:59)
Well, a couple of of different ways. I’ll tell you a way that didn’t help first speaking directly to the point of what you just said, there a business networking groups, they’re national, and there are small chapters. So for a while, he was involved in our local one and he went in as a criminal attorney and nothing’s coming out of this. And we finally like sit down, we’re like, why would we go under the criminal law category in this, in this setting? When I’m with business owners, I’m with people who know someone who might need guardianship of an elderly

So we switched the category to a business attorney because he does business law as well. And then all of a sudden things start to click. But if any of those people though, you hear someone needs a criminal attorney, they do send it over. There’s also free advertising in a lot of ways. Like for example, the Daily Local News for our area just came out with the best lawyers of our top lawyers in Chester County, which is like a voting reader’s choice where they vote. And we were listed in multiple categories. And my husband was under DUI, landlord-tenant, and then we’re under trial. So I think just, you know, the more people that you engage with, you you’ll receive some of that word of mouth, as well as he just one day started leaving court, because like he comes back with pretty fun stories from the court. It’s just the stuff you make it up, right? You just can’t make it up. And he’s a criminal defense attorney. I’ve fully decided, we got an argument recently, and I said, this has to be the result. Like all of the evidence points to this is missing. It had to have been this person. And you go, it’s a 98 % probability, but I cannot say certainty. I’m like, so try nuts, but kind of all of that though, you get a little bit of his personality when he leaves court. He has been filming himself walking back to the office a couple of blocks away, walking with counsel. And just a little blurb about, what did he just deal with in court? And try and give some of the viewers a little bit of a snippet of the law that day. One thing with a criminal defense is like you said, it’s a short turnaround. getting clients in right away when they call today, not two weeks from now. And or jumping on a call, talking to a new client. Also sending out letters because where we’re at, it’s published who’s been charged with a crime. So I think just globally, we try and do a lot of little things. But he would love to talk to you because he’s our Google guy.

Viktoria Altman (30:45)
Okay. That makes sense. social media usually the best social media is done from in -house because social media is so unique and you have to truly understand the person. I just recently spoke with another criminal lawyer in Arizona who’s doing very well on social media what he does too is something very similar where he goes and he explains things and he’s passionate about this and he does a lot of pro bono work. I think if you love it, it’ll come through on social media. Like I can talk about digital marketing, you know, 26 hours a day. I think when love comes through and it’s genuine and I think it’s very hard to outsource that kind of thing. So having a social media house in person is often a good idea and you can often you know start with somebody who is relatively inexperienced because even if they’re inexperienced they probably know a lot about social media due to just being you know younger and knowing all this TikTok and all this stuff. So a lot of times it’s not even a very expensive hire because you might be getting somebody right out of college but they will come in with good expertise in that. So good for you on maximizing that and it sounds like you’re doing well with it. So we are almost out of time, but before we go, I would love to ask you for your favorite client story. And I know you have a good one.

Holly K. Sheridan (31:52)
Yeah, that’s so hard. I don’t know if there’s a favorite or most memorable.

I don’t know if I can answer that. know, and it’s not because, you know, if I’m being very honest, a lot of my cases are sad. You know, I try and look at it positive light, but you have these families that are going through a transition and a separation, especially with children. You know, I don’t know, you know, maybe my favorite story is from years ago. It was when I got my first now one sweet office.

Holly K. Sheridan (32:36)
So probably like eight years ago or seven years ago. When he came in his wife had taken the two littles and just moved to a different state, almost three hours away. And he had substantial custody, meaning he did not share custody 50 -50, but he was like a good 42%, 45%, that’s a lot. Under Pennsylvania law, relocation is defined as any move that would impair the non-custodial parent, so in this situation, the dad has the ability to exercise his custody or substantially interfere with it. And I was just remembering in shock that the mother said, it doesn’t interfere, he’s just gonna lose one overnight a week and it’s not that big of a deal. And so we ended up fighting it. That was at the beginning of the school year. By Christmas, we’re at a full-blown trial.

She has already moved back because we got into court pretty fast and the judge said, you better get your tail back as fast as possible. But then it came back, you know, we did the full trial. looking back, now he has 50 -50 of his children. They’re at the school that, you know, he wanted them at and they’re doing good. So I think it’s hard to look at a case as a favorite, but I do love to see cases a few years later and see that they’re doing great.

Viktoria Altman (34:03)
That’s great. It’s a hard job, but when you do it well, these kids, they’re probably so much better off for having their dad close to them.

Holly K. Sheridan (34:14)
yeah, he was so involved too. He was like the sports coach. This wasn’t a case where you have a parent. But you know, in some cases it’s really sad. I see parents that don’t want to be involved. And then you have parents that need the help. And so navigating each case, you take little wins when you can.

Viktoria Altman (34:19)
It’s a job that requires a lot of empathy. that’s how you get through the not-so-good moments, right? By knowing that you’re helping. And yeah, it’s a sweet story. And I hope that the children are doing well. And I bet they are grateful for having their father in that life.

Holly K. Sheridan (34:51)
I hope so. So well, thank you for having me on your podcast. This was a lot of fun.

Viktoria Altman (34:54)
Thank you for joining Holly, please stick around, we’ll finish the upload and I will see you guys next time.