November 2004

Shannon Morrelli did not take the direct route from undergraduate to law school. After graduating with honors from Marquette University in 1991 with degrees in communications and French literature, she joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to Guatemala where she worked with the Guatemalan Ministry of Agriculture to develop and train 4-H programs in rural communities. After completing her two year tour, she decided to move to Key Largo. "When I was nearing the end of my stay in Guatemala, an old friend who was putting together a crew for a sailboat called me up and asked me if I was doing anything." Shannon spent the next year in the Keys working on a forty-seven foot sailboat and working as a Spanish/English interpreter for the Monroe County Courts. While she was learning to navigate and to sail in the Keys, she became interested in maritime law.

"In my first summer of law school, I worked as a ship visitor for Seafarers Rights out of Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale. I would interview crews, investigate alleged violations of crews' rights and if their cases had merit, I would refer them to local law firms." During law school, Shannon also clerked with a couple maritime firms and served as the managing editor of the Business Law Journal. She graduated cum laude in 1998.

Shannon returned to her native California after finishing law school and initially worked with a large firm in Los Angeles for a year, but did not find the job to be a good match for her. "One morning I saw an ad in the paper for a position with a company called Young and Associates. At my interview I met with the company's founder who had a JD and was recruiting other attorneys."

Shannon spent three years with Young and Associates managing contract work from Nextel, hiring on as an amployee to Nextel in 2001. After industry wide layoffs in 2003, she partnered with Strategic Real Estate Services, Inc., a consortium of contractors, where she is currently a project manager for a team of ten contractors to Nextel. "I negotiate property leases and contracts, obtain land use authorizations, make sure that we are in compliance with zoning codes, and handle billing issues. I regularly stand before city planning commissions, which is similar to going to court. I find my job to be a lot more fun than the legal environment, which can be extremely competitive. The work environment I'm in now has more of a family feel to it and it's concentrated around getting the job done. In the legal culture there is so much emphasis on the procedures and the process. In business it is about results and I'm a results-oriented person. While I do not practice as an attorney, the skills I acquired in law school have served me quite well and I encourage people to invest in the education since it is a superior tool for all business applications. The legal education I received at the University of Miami was the most valuable asset that I received in my life."

Shannon has not forgotten her two years of pure happiness sailing in the Florida Keys. She lives on a forty-five foot sailboat with her husband and they have no plans of ever living on land again. "I had to get rid of a lot of stuff when I moved onto the sailboat, but it was a very liberating moment to shake off the chains of consumerism and consumption." In 2008 she and her husband are setting off on a circumnavigation of the globe.