With a goal of transforming her personal traumas into her law firm’s mission, Shanna Hesketh (Law '17) founded Trauma Law California, a personal injury and criminal defense law firm that provides single point of contact, education and support throughout the legal process to its clients. Her journey, marked by the emotional murder trial of her brother and a series of life-altering accidents, not only shaped her legal career but her perspective on the very essence of justice. Learn more about Shanna, including the impact personal experiences have in shaping your career, the importance of empathy in the courtroom, and the undeniable strength that can be forged in the face of adversity.
Tell Us About Yourself and Your Road to San Joaquin College of Law.
I always knew that I wanted to be a lawyer. When I was in high school, I competed on the mock trial team at Central High School. I went on to compete at Fresno State and after that I knew that I wanted to go to law school. I’d always assume that I would go away for law school, but when it came time to apply, things changed. My brother was tragically murdered in 2011 and the next year of our lives was consumed by the aftermath and trial. Despite being accepted to most of the law schools that I applied to, leaving the Central Valley just didn’t feel right after everything our family had been through. But, I still wanted to be a lawyer, so literally the day before the SJCL’s admissions deadline, I submitted my application. I basically told whoever would listen to me in the office about what happened and said “you have to admit me, please.”
Thankfully they did. I paid my deposit the same day, and then I started law school. Two months into my first semester, I was in a bad car wreck and had a pretty serious spine injury. I ended up having three rounds of epidural steroid injections, then spent a year and a half in physical therapy. Eventually, I started to lose the use of my left arm and had to have neck surgery. I was still enrolled in classes at SJCL, but barely able to make grades and purely in survival mode. Once I was finally feeling better, I was able to do more than just survive and started thriving in my classes.
Then, in the summer between my 3L and 4L years, I was in another wreck. Someone rear ended me on my way to class. I ended up having another neck injury as well as a shoulder injury, so I had more injections and another surgery on my shoulder. I finally got cleared about two months before graduation and discharged from treatment. After graduation, I went through Bar prep, sat for the Bar, passed on my first try, and started working. I've worked in criminal defense and personal injury law since day one.
How Has Your Personal Experience with These Traumas Shaped Your Approach to Practicing Law Today?
It has shaped my law firm in many ways. I started by trying to think of the overlap between personal injury and criminal defense. They're both traumatic as hell and nobody enjoys being in either situation. I named my firm Trauma Law California because when traumatic events land you in the legal system, you need someone that will give you a little T.L.C.
My brother, Justin, was shot and killed here in Fresno. The shooters were charged with murder and it went all the way through to a trial and verdict. I just remember sitting in the courtroom feeling scared, confused, and overwhelmed but I had a handful of mock trial coaches ready and willing to answer whatever questions I had. I watched other parties in the courtroom as their cases were called, looking at their lawyers with the same fear and overwhelm, of being brushed off instead of getting answers. That always stayed with me because I knew that I wanted to be a lawyer, but I knew I didn't want to be a lawyer like that. I wanted to be a lawyer like the ones I had in my contacts that I could reach out to when I needed help, had questions, or needed support.
Then, during my first semester of law school, I received a phone call from my high school mock trial coach, Laura Guzman Magill. She told me that her cancer had come back, she had about three weeks to live, and she had some things to say to me. She knew, at the time, that I wanted to work at the District Attorney's office, and she told me she thought I would be a terrible prosecutor. She thought I'd look at every defendant on my calendar like they murdered my brother, and that I'd be so focused on vengeance, that I'd forget about justice. I was both hurt and angry when she said it, but now looking back, she was so right. So, I worked in criminal defense for a year with her husband, Chuck Magill, and I loved everything about it. I really got to see a different aspect of criminal defendants.
Then, cars started running into me and I started to love personal injury law as well. With my first two car accidents, I hired attorneys to handle my case for me that didn't necessarily care about my case as much as I wanted them to. I felt more like a burden to them than a valued client. This is something I never want my own clients to feel.
So, when I started my own firm, I needed it to be easy for people to reach out to me with whatever needs, fears, or questions they had. I set up a case texting service where clients could just text their questions right to us. If they're having a bad day and want to tell us about it, they can send a text message. The text saves right to their client file and routes to everybody who’s working on their case so we're all on the same page at the same time in taking care of them.
My clients LOVE it. There's no downloading some portal that everybody's going to forget about or not know how to use. There's no barriers to entry because it's just a text message. It also makes it so easy for me staffing-wise because our clients send us text messages and we can respond to them in order. It's not like I've got a receptionist who's managing six lines and going back and forth, putting people on hold and feeling stressed out all day.
How Did Your Emotional Journey and the Trauma of Your Brother’s Trial Influence Your Perspective on Criminal Defense Cases? Has There Been an Impactful Case That’s Stayed With You?
The individuals who shot my brother were ultimately acquitted of murder, but convicted of voluntary manslaughter. This verdict carried a lesser sentence, and therefore meant that they would be released at some point during my lifetime. In fact, one of them already has been. I remember thinking during the sentencing hearing, “Who in this courtroom is going to make sure they don't kill someone else's brother?” Obviously not the jury who rendered the verdict that would allow them to get out. Probably not the District Attorney who just spent weeks and weeks talking about the worst five minutes of their lives. Probably not the judge who just called them cold and callous and put them in prison. The only players in the courtroom left to make a difference in their futures were the defense attorneys. I realized it probably really meant something to these guys that somebody showed up for them every single day in court. Someone that stood in their corner and fought for their lives like they mattered. I wanted to believe that that was enough to make a positive difference in their lives. I now try to approach every case with that same mindset and hope that I can make that positive difference.
There's so many cases that stand out, and a lot for different reasons, but the one that comes to mind was a few years ago. I was appointed by the county to represent this kid who was charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit murder and assault with a deadly weapon. The murder was alleged to have been committed for the benefit of an MS 13 street gang and the case was very violent. My client had a really wild past and he’d confessed to it, so legally there wasn't a whole lot to be done. It didn’t look like a trial we could win, but I believed that there was something more that I could do to help protect my client. I wanted to show him that you don’t have to join a gang for someone to show up and fight with you and for you. We were just going to do a different kind of fighting than he was used to.
We had a language barrier as well because he only spoke Spanish which made things more difficult. He had also been raised in the gang from a young age, so his trust for anyone outside of that circle, myself included, was minimal. I finally told him that the way things were going between us wasn’t going to work, and I needed him to trust me. I vowed to show up every Wednesday to visit him in jail, whether that meant with a translator to talk about the case or to just sit and play Uno if I couldn’t bring a translator that day. I knew that no one had ever shown up for this young man consistently in his life, and I was determined to show him that he could trust me.
Sure enough, for about six months, I went to the jail every single Wednesday. He finally stopped hating me and began to open up. I learned information that I was able to use in court to work out a better sentencing structure and find a resolution that worked out a lot better for him. I spent three years working on this case and went through 20 terabytes of discovery looking for the thing that would help him most.
I ended up resolving his case for a 12-year term, a drastic improvement from the original exposure of 206 years between all of his cases. He was also able to serve his sentences concurrently thanks to the cooperation of his other attorneys assigned to the other cases. The real trick was arranging for his sentences to be served in an Arizona prison where no known active MS-13 gang members were housed so he was less likely to die in custody. Realistically, there’s not some legal genius that allowed me to do that. I just showed up and was willing to put my heart into it and get to know the kid and it clearly made all the difference.
How Does Seeing Your Clients as People First and Not Just Defendants Influence Your Defense Strategy? And What Changes Do You Want to See in How the Legal System Handles Traumatic Cases Like These?
The answer to that is in the question; I see them as people. They are people that have found themselves in a tough situation, and need someone that is going to see them as such.
I honestly don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about changes to the criminal justice system because I have very little, if no, control over that. Instead, I spend a lot of time thinking about MY systems and procedures and what I can do to take care of my clients within the greater legal system. I can't fix how other lawyers handle their cases or the laws that judges apply to these cases, but I can do things that are within my control to the absolute best of my abilities.
So what is that? What’s within my control? Every case on my calendar, my systems, the people that I put into place, my staff - that’s all within my control. I can make sure that those are running at 100% so we can protect people within this smaller system and get them through it.
You Work With a Lot of Tough and Emotional Cases in Both Criminal Defense and Personal Injury. How Do You Balance the Emotional Toll of Dealing With Those Cases While Providing the Best Legal Representation for Your Clients?
I have a great therapist, a great psychiatrist, and a great team. Realistically, I take on so many people's emotional burdens, stresses and fears with every case I take. So, I have learned that I need to have a support system for myself that takes care of my emotional burdens which allows me to take care of others.
For example, the murder case I mentioned earlier was particularly triggering for me in the beginning. Seeing the crime scene and autopsy photos took me right back to hearing the pathologist testify at my own brother’s murder. I worked with my therapist through those triggers and protected my own emotional well-being in order to be fully present for my client. It is not always easy, but I don’t regret a single bit of it.
How Do You Feel Knowing Trauma Law California is Making Such a Big Impact on People, Especially in a Diverse Community, like the Central Valley?
I love it. I feel like Fresno and the Central Valley as a whole has been very underserved in terms of legal representation. We have a lot of great lawyers coming out of San Joaquin College of Law and it seems like the only path that folks seem to want to take is either working for the government or for big insurance defense firms. I don't know how much that does to take care of people on an individual level.
When people like me get in car accidents, it takes a lot of effort to find a lawyer that's willing to fight for you and it can be a difficult process. So Fresno has, in my opinion, been hugely underserved. A lot of attorneys are also operating as if the internet doesn't really exist. A lot of people are doing things the same way they did in 1993 and Fresno deserves better than that old school process. I know everybody thinks Fresno is just full of farmers so we do things the old school ways, but even the farmers are using newer means to put food on our tables. Shouldn't we be able to utilize new methods to take care of them when they need representation?
Methods like building out automations, digital marketing, explaining things to clients in a way that they can actually understand to make communication as easy as possible, and systematizing things to be able to take the best care of everyone is what they deserve. When I started my firm, I knew I wanted to automate everything we possibly could to free me up and free my staff up to do things that technology couldn't. Tech can’t strategize, it can't care about my clients or reassure my clients that they're safe and that we're working on their case. Technology can't do any of that. But you know what technology can do really, really well? Work on tasks, calendaring and save things to their file better than I ever could because it can do it immediately. It does all the everyday mundane tasks to free you up for the tasks that actually require human connection, human empathy and the legal knowledge you have.
What Advice Do You Have for Law School Students Who Are Interested in Personal Injury or Criminal Defense? How Did Your Education at San Joaquin College of Law Prepare You to Start Your Own Firm and Do the Impactful Work You're Doing?
I would tell them I learned about this the hard way by being stuck in the middle of it. Zero stars, definitely do not recommend that.
I would say to find lawyers whose career and whose life within that career you would want to emulate and find a way to work for them to gain that actual experience in that field. Learn how they're doing things, find what you’d want to replicate, what you’d want to tweak or change, etc. Start thinking about this now too. There’s a person I follow on Instagram, Roots in Refuge, who always says “turn your waiting room into a classroom.” Even if you're not ready or able to launch your own law firm yet, you can turn that waiting time into your classroom.
I was a lawyer for 4-5 years before I launched my law firm and during that time, I had a running iPhone note of things I wanted to do, software I wanted to use, tech I wanted to implement, people I wanted to hire, systems I wanted to put in place, things that irritated me about other law firms that I was working for that and how I would fix those things. Once I had the funds available to start the firm, I printed this iPhone note and it was 70 pages long. I went through and highlighted the things I could implement now and organized it so I could figure out how I was going to do this. Because of this, I already had a good framework to start with just from the little things I'd heard of in the years prior and I was able to actually start putting those things in motion instead of putting them in a note. We've only been open for a year now, but we've already changed so much of what we're doing just because as things weren’t working, we would tweak them.
What Are Some Challenges You’ve Faced in Starting Your Own Firm and How Have You Overcome Them?
I started the firm right after being in a third car accident where I had a mild traumatic brain injury. I was in a brain injury rehab facility for six months learning how to exist again safely. I got my settlement money from that car accident and realized I probably wouldn’t be able to work in a traditional law firm. I needed to be in a space where I could set my own everything, where I could determine what support and resources I had, where I could make that happen for myself and set systems up in a way that worked for me. Most of the problems we experienced early on were because of my brain injury.
This was really my first year back in my career after the brain injury. I worked through a lot with the first two car accidents while I was in law school and when I got my career started. Then I had that third car accident a month before the pandemic hit and the world shut down. So I was suffering at home by myself with brain fluid leaking out of my nose wondering what I was going to do. For a while, I couldn't speak in full sentences, I couldn't see the floor, I was falling over constantly and I couldn't read because I had such bad double vision and I honestly didn’t know if I would be able to keep lawyering.
I was at a very reduced capacity and I was working from home doing what I could, when I could. But I didn't really know if I was going to have a legal career after that. At one point, I started like an Etsy store because I wasn't sure that I could keep lawyering and pay my mortgage. That's how much doubt I had at that point in time. I've always felt very confident that I was created by God to do this work and then when that brain injury happened, it just kind of shattered that whole purpose and that belief. Then I started my law firm in July of 2022 and spent the second half of 2022 getting that going and off the ground.
I started off with staff and set the expectation that we’re starting a new thing completely from scratch. I let them know there would be issues and problems that we'd have to overcome, but we’d face those when we got to them. I knew if we encountered the same problem repeatedly, we were going to spend more effort to solve it. Basically, there’s always going to be problems and we'll tweak as necessary until we have less or different problems and that’s been our process. We knew we weren't starting out with a 100% perfect firm right out of the gate and had to put in the time and effort to figure out what was and wasn't working so we could make changes.
Our goal for every quarter is to work on a new big project. The first quarter was focused on social media marketing and building that foundation online to get our name, message, mission and our heart for that mission in front of eyeballs on the internet. From that quarter on, we worked on something new and looked at where a process was taking a lot of time and asked ourselves how we could do better with it. Now most of what we're doing each quarter is onboarding new people. For example, I hired a new in-house marketing director last quarter instead of using an outside company for a lot of things and lo and behold, our firm grew 25% in three months.
My law clerk also handles our intake clients and let me know he was very bogged down and thought we needed to do something about it, so we hired an intake coordinator to come on and our project now is getting her trained and up to speed. Once she's familiar with our processes, then she can work on innovating other processes and things as she sees opportunities to do so. I love that everybody on the team is very much on the same page and on board with the mission that we have for the firm.
How Did Your Legal Education at SJCL Prepare You to Go Into Criminal Defense and Personal Injury Law and Eventually Start Your Own Firm?
It's hard to say because I do personal injury, which is torts, and criminal defense, but I was very, very injured and on a lot of pain meds during my time in law school and damn near flunked those two classes. Realistically, I didn't get everything out of my law school experience that I would've liked to because cars kept running into me.
I think the big thing about law school isn't necessarily what I learned from the books or anything, but more of the mindset I gained that showed me I can do hard things. Getting all that reading done with part of your spine poking on other parts of your spine that it shouldn't is very hard. Showing up to class when you've got all these things going on in your personal life, that's very hard. But you know what, showing up to court when you also have 20 other things that need to get done for your cases, that's hard too. And I know that I can do hard things because I have a proven track record of getting them done.
I don't know that my law school education really prepared me to be a firm owner because nothing really prepares you for that, especially when you're starting something from scratch like I did. Realistically when you're in law school, you're learning black letter law, and not necessarily learning what you're going to use on a day-to-day basis. But having that mindset of “I am capable of solving problems and if I can't solve it myself, I have people I can lean on and ask for help,” that piece was invaluable.
You’re Definitely an Inspiration for Going Through all of that During Law School and Still Being Able to Graduate, Take the Bar, etc. What Was Your Experience With the SJCL Professors, Staff, and Faculty Like Through Those Experiences in Law School?
I had my neck surgery during my second year of law school and I remember going into Dean Atkinson’s office and telling him I needed help because I was having surgery the following December to have part of my spine removed. I let him know that when I came back, I didn’t know what my life would look like or what I’d be able to do, so I wanted to take it easy the following semester and do things that made sense in my brain. He was like “Absolutely that makes sense, law school is traumatic enough on its own and you're also going through this surgery. What can we do to switch around your classes and help you through this?” They did all they could just to make it more doable for me.
It was little things like having the option to stand up and stretch in the back of the class when I couldn't sit anymore because my body was hurting while also listening to the lecture. Things like that and giving people a little bit more autonomy and control over even the small minute portions of the situation was incredibly helpful.
Your Firm Recently Celebrated Its One-Year Anniversary. What’s Your Vision for Trauma Law California in the Future and How Do You Plan to Continue Making a Difference in Your Client’s Lives?
I want to keep doing good work for good clients with good people by my side.
Any Advice for Students Who Are Interested in Going to Law School and Have Doubts or Aren’t Sure?
I’ve known that I wanted to be a lawyer since I was a kid. Then when it came time to actually go to law school, it was right after my brother's murder trial so I was going through a lot, then the car ran into me and I was going through more, and I just remember thinking “Is this really what I'm supposed to be doing? This all feels much harder than I want it to feel, so is this really what I'm supposed to be doing because I don't know anymore.”
I remember praying about it and saying “God, if you've got something else for me, flunk me out. I'm going to commit and I'll do the very best that I possibly can for this semester. But if this is not what you have planned for me, I want you to flunk me out. Make it very clear and close this door.”
When I ended up passing all my finals, I thought maybe I’d out-studied God's plan and I should probably stop that. So I didn't study for any tests ever again throughout law school and I kept passing, even though I was putting in very little effort with law school because I was also working full-time, cars kept running into me and I had major medical problems going on.
I realized this was probably for me then, so I took the Bar and I just remember thinking “This is the last opportunity to flunk me out of this. God, if you've got something else for me, I'm only taking the Bar once, so flunk me out if you've got something else for me because this is it. I'm only going to do BarBri and if this is meant for me, then that’ll be enough.”
Sure enough, I did 100% of BarBri, I took the Bar and whatever I did to prepare was enough. My advice when it comes to doubts is always to give it to God and let Him do what He’s going to do.
What’s Been the Most Rewarding Part of Starting Your Own Law Firm?
What’s been most fulfilling for me in starting my own firm and being my own boss is being able to be my fully authentic self. I am at heart a weirdo who hangs around with her dog in her pajamas and that is what I get to do for my workday. I'm a compassionate, empathetic person who spends way too much time working on cases, talking to people and helping them solve their problems. Now that I don't have a boss managing my time, I get to do that in whatever way I see fit and that authenticity has been incredibly rewarding both professionally and emotionally.
I think it's something that the legal industry, especially in Fresno, has really lacked. You could talk to somebody at the courthouse or at a networking event and then see them in their daily life later on and they're a completely different person. Everybody just puts on this front, everybody takes the same headshot standing in front of a bookcase with the same pose and I just think the market is tired of that. We as lawyers should be tired of trying to be that and trying to be something that we aren’t.
Want to learn more about San Joaquin College of Law, attend our next Law School 101 or set up an appointment to discuss your law school future? Contact our Director of Admissions, Diane Steel, today!