David Shields, Shields Legal Group P.C. | The Jeff Crilley Show

Show Notes

On this episode of The Jeff Crilley Show, Jeff sits down with David Shields, tax attorney and co-managing shareholder of Shields Legal Group P.C., to explore the complex legal landscape facing today’s business owners. David shares the story of his three-generation law firm and the philosophy that guides their work: tackling “hard stuff that has a big impact for good people.” The conversation spans corporate transactions, high-net-worth estate planning, commercial litigation, and the firm’s fast-growing cybersecurity and data privacy practice. David also explains his firm’s “Growth to Exit” model, a structured approach to preparing entrepreneurs for a business sale in the midst of the “silver tsunami.” Through powerful client stories, he highlights the importance of early planning and assembling the right advisory team to protect and maximize a lifetime of work.

Key topics:
- business law
- tax strategy
- mergers and acquisitions
- business exit planning
- commercial litigation
- estate planning
- cybersecurity and data privacy
- succession planning

Timestamped highlights:
- 02:15 — A Three-Generation Law Firm Story
- 03:46 — "Hard Stuff That Has a Big Impact for Good People"
- 04:50 — Four Core Practice Areas Explained
- 05:20 — Negotiating with Hackers: Cybersecurity Incident Response
- 06:15 — Introducing the "Growth to Exit" Model
- 07:25 — The Silver Tsunami and Business Sales
- 07:55 — Selling a Business Is Like Selling a House
- 09:00 — Resolving a 20-Year Family Litigation Case
- 09:40 — Helping Entrepreneurs Shift from Operator to Seller Mindset

Creators and Guests

Host

Jeff Crilley

Having seen the failures of the public relations industry first-hand from within the news room, CEO Jeff Crilley founded Real News PR® with a vision to equip his company with a team of media experts.

What is The Jeff Crilley Show?

Jeff Crilley is a former news reporter, who spent more than 25 years in newsrooms across the country. He’s an Emmy Award winning journalist, who decided to make the jump from news in 2008, when he founded his own PR Firm, Real News Public Relations.

Today, the firm has more than 100 clients, and Jeff continues to tell the stories of interesting people he meets along the way.

These are those stories.

Many are predicting that the worst is yet to come, which is unfortunate, said one person here. Until now, they've enjoyed the reputation of being the nation's icebox. Watched a burglar in his home this morning by webcam. As a journalist of over twenty five years, stories are what make my world turn. Reporting live from The Dallas Newsroom tonight, Jeff Crilley, Fox four news. But in 2008, I took the jump from my familiar life and started a PR firm from my home. We're talking about anyone with a camcorder like the one I'm using becomes a television network. We started slowly growing the company and we now have over a 100 clients and we've branched into the world of live digital broadcasting. I now own eight different TV studios and have a huge team. And the stories that I now get to share are sometimes the most important of my life. Life has a funny way of coming around full circle. This is The Jeff Crilley Show. As a business owner myself, I can tell you that businesses are complicated. You have employee issues, you have, potential lawsuits, there's a lot of things that can happen to a small business owner as he or she is growing their company. And every once in a while you need to turn to people like my next guest, David Shields is in the studio. He's the co managing shareholder of Shields Legal Group. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Jeff. Excited Well, to be I'm I'm thrilled about your company. Thirty five years. Thirty five years. Tell us the story. Well, haven't been there thirty five years. I joined in 2012, so fourteen years ago now. I'm actually the new kid on the block from the ownership group standpoint. My dad founded the firm in 1991. His father was a lawyer. He graduated really in the middle of World War two from a small class in UT law. And they had separate firms for a little bit. And my grandfather's firm wound down for several different reasons and my grandfather actually joined my father's firm. Wow. So it's a three generation firm although my dad founded it. He started to you know gain more experience than he wanted to use every day. So wanted to start talking about transitioning the law firm. So as part of that, I had to decide if I was going to take the reins. That was about five years ago, he and I worked out a strategic plan for how to do that. And two years ago, I became co managing shareholder with one of our shareholders, Kathy Hoch. Mhmm. And now we're thirty five years in business. Congratulations on your success. We were talking before the show and you shared with me a philosophy or a motto that you've been using. Can you share with our audience? I've been trying to boil down to what it is that we do. We have a couple different disciplines. We have several different ways of approaching engagements. We always try to do the right thing, but the motto I've been kicking around is hard stuff that have a big impact for good people. We work on hard stuff that has a big impact for good people. And it's kind of a neat motto because the reverse is also true because the people that are on our team are generally good people that want to make a big impact on hard stuff. And I know it's not very scientific to say stuff, but you know sometimes we work on we have a litigation practice that works on problems. Yes. And we have a transaction practice that focuses on opportunities. So stuff seems to be the most I apt love it. We're going to pull up your website and as we scroll down the website let's talk about some of your practice areas. What are some of the things that you guys bring to the table? Yeah, we really have right now, we're really looking at growing, but we really have four key practice areas right now and there's subgroups underneath that but the corporate transactions team focuses on opportunities. So that's M and A, commercial real estate, banking and finance, corporate reorganizations, anything that propels a business forward. We have planning, which is business tax and high net worth estate planning. We have the dispute team, the fighters, the commercial litigators. And then we have a very, very cool, very new, very exciting practice that's cyber security and data privacy. And our partner that leads that practice is actually the the one that goes in and negotiates with the hackers that frees out people's business. Kidding. Freezes out their their data. So that's a very exciting that's like an emergency incident response practice. So, you know, we really we handle everything from, you know, as we say, opportunity to challenge Yeah. And planning for the in between. And, David, I love it that it's under one roof because you might get a call from a client and you say, actually, I have a colleague who is a specialist in that area. Mhmm. You walk down the hall and you say, this person's been doing this fifteen years. They've seen more than I have, certainly more than, you know, most people have. Let's let's get a consult and see if we can get you an answer. Beautiful. You are are gonna be on a panel for a free webinar coming up very quickly. Let's put this on the screen so you can talk about this. Tell us about the panel, us about what people will learn if they sign up. Yeah, so this panel is showcasing two things. One, sort of an engagement model that we have with businesses looking to sell. We call that growth to exit. It's really a sale preparation process for founders and business owners that are finally looking to realize kind of what they've built. And so showcasing that, our growth to exit model and the things that entrepreneurs and businesses can do to prepare themselves for a sale. And the second thing we're showcasing, and I don't mind saying this, is a very close partner of ours. You'll see, Marty Hannon and others from a company called Value Scope. Now it's called Marshall and Stevens. We've been working with them and that team for twenty years in the financial space. So we do the legal side, they do the accounting and finance side and there's as as good of that practice as you can get. Wow. Alright. Let's talk a little bit more about people selling their business because we are in the silver tsunami where so many business owners are, you know, looking to sell their company. Maybe their kid doesn't want to take the company. So when would somebody want to come to you if they're thinking about selling their company? Like how many years in advance? You know, I hate to say it depends because that's a bad lawyer answer, but it really does. Selling a business really is is kinda like selling a house. There's a price you can get if you put it on the market today with your food in the pantry. Right? There's a price for the market that the market will pay for it if you take, you know, thirty, sixty, ninety days and put in some new flowers and maybe a coat of paint. Right? Things like that. And then there's a price for moving walls, updating fixtures, ripping out bathrooms. And you know everybody has a different perspective on what they're looking for when they're exiting their business. So I would say, that's a long winded way to say it Jeff, thank you for asking, that the right time is when you're ready. And that ready maybe, I'm ready in six months, I'm ready in three years. I want to put the time in, but the right time is really when you're ready to do it. The challenge with that is, and I don't want to scaremonger or fearmonger anybody, but the challenge is if you haven't done anything to prepare and the worst happens, it can leave you in a bad spot. So really when you start thinking about it is the right time to reach out to somebody on what it takes. Alright. Share with me one of your favorite success stories without naming the client. Sure. I'm gonna I think I'm gonna share two. Okay, please. One is we recently resolved a twenty five year twenty year at least piece of litigation. My grandfather got to represent the actually, I guess at that time it was the second generation. My father represented the third generation, and I got to represent the fourth generation. That's a very it's very satisfying you know I'm not going to comment on the result or the process but just know it was twenty years of extreme complications and it really was a privilege to do that to have multiple generations of my family on the legal side health a multi generation family. That's cool. You said you had a second. The second one is, you know, anytime and we've done this several times, so I'll kind of maybe morph a few of those into into one story. But we we several times have taken businesses that were worth millions or tens of millions of dollars and taken an entrepreneur that really doesn't have knows more about running their business than anybody else. They are at the pinnacle of what it is they do. And we've helped them change their mindset into a this is how you this is what you do to run that business and it's a very different set of skills, actions, decisions, focus to sell that business. And so, you know, we're lawyers. So I'm not though we act as a quarterback and we'll take the ball and we'll run with it and we'll help all that process, at the end of the day we're lawyers. So all we do is really say, you don't just need us, you need a financial partner like the ones we're doing the webinar with next week. You need an investment banker or a business broker. And you need a team to help you shepherd that process through an exit. And we've done that many times. David, I can see why you're so successful. Thank you so much. Well, you'll be in 2000. Thank you for sharing your heart and your wisdom with us. We're going to end with his website, which is shieldslegal.com. The great David Shields, thanks for coming on the show. Alright. Thanks. You bet. That's it for now. We'll see you next time.