Page 18 - First Coast Vol 4 No 2
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I tell every client that we must build a relationship with one another of trust andcon dence and that once we do, we will become the kind of team that can withstand the hard knocks of litigation and win.”
had represented Time, Inc., and luminaries like Bear Bryant and Bob Dylan. Bill and the other partners were great storytellers and we o en gathered around the bar in the library to hear their yarns. Many important points of tort and commercial law were shaped by decisions handed down in the  rm’s cases. It was an exciting and fun place to work. Decades later, there are notable trial lawyers all over Florida whose nursery was that great  rm.”
SHEFTALL AS GEORGE WASHINGTON: TEACHING THE NEXT GENERATION OF AMERICANS TO CHERISH THE BILL OF RIGHTS.
twenty- ve separate and distinct areas of trial practice including defamation, auto negligence, maritime personal injury and wrongful death, Federal Tort Claims Act, products liability, negligent security, breach of contract, antitrust, international torts, domestic and international aviation disasters, class actions, premises liability, sexual abuse of a minor, Longshore and Harbor Workers Compensation Act, boating accidents, undue in uence, fraud, breach of international lease agreements, breach of distributorship agreements, insurance bad faith, medical malpractice and legal malpractice. His is a diverse trial practice, to say the least.
BEYOND THE COURTHOUSE
She all’s penchant for helping people extends beyond the courthouse and has gained him a reputation in Jacksonville and Miami as a respected community leader. He and his small  rm contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to help build two facilities which are named for him at the Batchelor Children’s Research Institute at the University of Miami’s Department of Pediatrics. For two years he chaired the inaugural Children’s Celebrity Pro- Am Golf Classic raising millions more for pediatric care. He also helped build new facilities at  e Boys and Girls Club of Miami. He earned membership in the Alexis De Tocqueville Society of the United Way, which marks the highest level of recognition for charitable contributions to community-oriented causes. In Jacksonville, She all chaired his Lee High Class of 1969 45th Reunion and currently serves on the Steering Committee for the North Florida Council, Boy Scouts of America’s American Values Dinner. Each year he plays George Washington in ABOTA’s courthouse presentations to Duval schoolchildren about the Bill of Rights.
She all’s path to marriage and children came a bit later in life. At 52 years old, he married the “girl I always wanted to marry,” his wife Regina. Happily, in 2009, when She all was 57, the couple welcomed into the world girl and boy twins, Olivia Telfair and Blake Gaillard. About a year later, the She alls decided to move back home to Jacksonville so that the twins could grow up around their living relatives. “What a blessing to have these sweet, intelligent and fun children,” She all says of the twins, who are now in fourth grade. “ ey are the loves of our lives. And, being back
A er 20 years at the Frates  rm, She all decided to go out on his own in 1996, with partners Rick Alvarez and Brian Torres. In 2009, following the birth of his twin children, She all and his wife Regina moved themselves back to Jacksonville where She all designed beautiful o ces for She all & Associates on the 32nd Floor of  e Wells Fargo
Building.
 e AV Preeminent-rated attorney touches on just a
few of the interesting cases he has handled that helped shape his career as a civil trial lawyer:
When just starting out, She all waged a Section 1 Sherman Act antitrust case for a small business against twelve industry-leading corporations defended by some of the country’s best anti-trust defense lawyers. He recalls that “they roughed me up wherever the case took us around the country, but I prevailed and settled my client’s federal court claim for a lot of money. I learned what else I needed to know about myself in that case.”
During his fourth year of practice, She all brought a complex international tort case involving a Jeep rollover in the Cayman Islands.  e defense had o ered She all’s clients—a couple from Miami—only $10,000 for a closed head injury, but the talented young attorney won a $2.6 million jury verdict, and then collected it only a er winning another trial and two appeals. In that same year, he recovered $1.2 million for a little boy who had severely injured his arm in an o ce building managed by a bankruptcy trustee. In another international tort case, he represented a Jacksonville woman whose husband had been killed in Haiti while there on business for a company headquartered in Washington state.  e defense had argued that the case had to be tried in Haiti under Haitian law, but She all convinced the courts to try the case in Florida under more favorable American law.  e  nal result was a $10 million settlement for the widow and children. In another case, She all became the  rst lawyer in Florida to get a class action certi ed against an insurance company in arbitration. In the area of defamation, She all has recovered substantial sums for public o cials, public  gures, private  gures and for businesses in cases from one end of the state to another.
Over the years, She all has secured substantial recoveries from six to eight  gures for clients in over
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