Shanna Cramer has a national practice focused on health and welfare plans, including Taft-Hartley multiemployer plans. This includes counseling clients on mental health parity issues, HIPAA, ERISA and COVID-related matters. She also has experience in retirement and employment law, as well as paid leave, with a particular focus on compliance. Her clients include universities, hospital systems, technology companies, communications companies and global e-commerce businesses.
Shanna’s approach to her work is highly strategic. Earlier in her career, as a Senior Director for a global risk management, insurance and advisory firm, Shanna worked firsthand on enterprise-level issues, including the Family Medical Leave Act and employment law issues. Accordingly, she approaches her clients’ needs in the broader context of their overarching goals. Although she has a superlative technical grasp of the subject matter, she considers both short-term needs and long-term objectives, including evaluation and analysis of economic and legislative forces that can impact achieving those objectives. This consultative, holistic approach is a major force multiplier for her clients, and reflects the integration of her consulting and advisory background into her legal practice.
This three-dimensional perspective includes her working relationship with her clients. Shanna strives to operate as a partner and colleague rather than strictly as a problem-solver. Where many attorneys would simply answer a question, Shanna provides context, analysis, and whenever possible, presents multiple scenarios that aid clients in planning and risk assessment. For example, the mental health parity policy requires clients to provide benefits for mental health and substance abuse treatment that are no less restrictive than medical and surgical benefits. Shanna’s guidance will include a framework for measuring and comparing compliance, allowing the necessary apples-to-apples comparison. In other words, she both answers the question that’s asked, and analyzes the implications of her answer.
Shanna works with clients to understand their issues and challenges, and to assist them in developing an action plan and prioritizing tasks. She is particularly gifted at taking an exceptionally complicated subject and organizing it into more specific concepts that are more easily understood. Her goal is to help clients create and execute a road map to meet their specific challenges. She assesses the situation, categorizes it and builds an action plan. In doing this, she demystifies complexity and helps reduce stress, anxiety and distraction that arise from the issue.
In addition to helping clients manage the live issue in front of them, Shanna also helps them anticipate what’s coming, and stay on top of coming developments in, for example, the issue of paid leave. While absolutes are impossible, she can put upcoming issues in context, and help clients think about, and plan for, the future.
