Sherry Landry Schultz

I’m Sherry Landry Schultz, an attorney licensed in Louisiana and Texas who has always had a passion for research, writing, creativity and learning—in other words, a geek.

I started out as an elementary school teacher in 1986, teaching eager-to-learn second graders in a self-contained environment. A few years later, seeking a new challenge, I moved to the public middle school I attended as a child and taught seventh-grade English. Two years later, I was named the “Jefferson Parish Middle School Teacher of the Year.” The following year (with hopes of one day earning enough to buy a house), I took the LSAT and applied to law school.

Luckily for me, Loyola Law School awarded me a full scholarship. For the next three years, I drove my friends, family and classmates nuts by somehow steering every conversation to a discussion of “the law”—my new (and, as it turned out, lifelong) obsession. In my third year, I was named Editor in Chief of the Loyola Law Review and took great satisfaction in reviewing every word, comma and en dash in each published article. I graduated third in my class and received a clerkship with the esteemed Chief Justice Pascal F. Calogero of the Louisiana Supreme Court.

One year turned into two with the Chief (as we called him), and I left my position as Senior Law Clerk in 1998 to enter private practice in a New Orleans satellite office of a large Texas firm. This was my introduction to transactional law, and I loved it! I cut my teeth coordinating due diligence for mergers and acquisitions and worked my way up to drafting a myriad of organizational documents, contracts and bond documents.

In the spring of 2002, a classmate from Loyola Law School was named City Attorney for the City of New Orleans and recruited me to become the Senior Chief Deputy City Attorney in charge of the City’s transactional legal work. The following year, he was promoted to Chief Administrative Officer and I was promoted to City Attorney, where I supervised a staff of 96 employees, including 40+ attorneys. One of my proudest achievements was reducing the number of cases against the city from 5,800+ when I took office to about 1,500 just two years later. Then came Hurricane Katrina.

I wrote the first mandatory evacuation order in the history of the State of Louisiana, which remained in effect for more than twenty days after the levees broke, flooding more than 80% of the City of New Orleans. It was a time of great chaos. A week after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, I was named the liaison between the City and the federal support, where city, state and federal responders worked tirelessly to get the City on the long road to recovery. It was a very surreal, but inspiring, experience. I resigned as the City Attorney approximately sixty days after Hurricane Katrina when it became apparent that the Mayor, who appointed me, and I did not share a common vision for how to proceed with the recovery.

On January 2, 2006, I joined a small, but very well respected, boutique law firm in New Orleans that primarily represented real-estate developers engaged in the rehabilitation of historic properties.   Recognizing that New Orleans had one of the richest stocks of historic buildings in the United States, I viewed this as an excellent opportunity of continuing to participate in the recovery of New Orleans as a lawyer in the private sector.

Over the next eleven years, my practice focused, almost exclusively, on large-scale real estate transactions that utilized historic, new markets and/or renewable energy tax credits. During this period, I have represented investors, community development entities and lenders, but real-estate developers have always constituted the primary base of my clients. As any typical American, I do love the underdog! In my representations, I have drafted countless tax opinions, partnership agreements, loan documents, leases and other transactional documents, having the pleasure and honor to work with many of recognized leaders in the tax credit industry. I am fortunate to be able to do work that I truly love.

After years of representing entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurial spirit rubbed off on me, and I launched Schultz Law LLC on February 1, 2017. I’m excited to continue working with my existing clients and industry friends and look forward to picking up some new ones along this journey.