By day, Valerie Shelton-Tabor serves as an assistant public defender in the Dallas County Public Defender's Office. She represents indigent defendants who face felony charges, including murder. By night, she employs a different kind of fancy footwork as the director and co-founder of the Contemporary Ballet of Dallas.

In addition to currently juggling 61 cases (and her expectation, given Dallas County's budget crunch, that she will assume responsibility for another 35 cases each month), she leads the ballet company's rehearsals and prepared for the company's Oct. 29 season premiere at the Lakewood Theatre in Dallas, which included a piece she choreographed set to a musical collage by the Dave Matthews Band

"How does she do it all? That is the $64,000 question," says Marcia Taylor, a chief felony prosecutor and assistant district attorney in Dallas County, who worked with Shelton-Tabor when they were both prosecutors in the first half of the decade.

Shelton-Tabor, a mother of two, credits her successes at both careers to learning to delegate responsibilities.

"I realized I don't have to do it all myself. At the courthouse, I have investigators and administrators. At the studio, I have people I trust. I don't have to nitpick everything," she says, "That was huge."

"My nickname for her is T.D., tiny dancer," says Dallas Criminal District Court No. 4 Judge John Creuzot, in whose court Shelton-Tabor is assigned. Creuzot says in his courtroom, as on the performance stage, Shelton-Tabor "has no wasted movement." She is "very organized and extremely focused."

During her youth and through college at Southern Methodist University, where she graduated with a fine arts degree in dance performance, the 5-foot-4-inch lawyer did not dream of advocating for others, even though her father was an attorney. A Texas native, who grew up in Midland and Dallas and spent her last two years of high school in Oklahoma, Shelton-Tabor says as a youth she just wanted to dance. She attended SMU on a dance scholarship but also earned a degree in sociology.

As she approached her graduation date, she says, she began to feel "burnt out" after working so hard at dance.

"I wasn't dancing for the right reasons," she says. She considered but rejected the post-graduation option that many of her fellow dancers chose -- moving to New York, working day jobs, and living four to a flat to be there for auditions that more often than not meant walking away empty-handed. At that point, she says, she was not aware of alternatives such as dance administration. Her roommate was studying for the Law School Admission Test and dared Shelton-Tabor, who as a child had fancied becoming a Federal Bureau of Investigations agent, to take the test, too, and she scored well, she recalls. Suddenly, law school became a serious option.

Intermission

At the University of Oklahoma College of Law, she stopped dancing cold turkey.

"I didn't set one foot in a studio. I thought it was a done deal, the end of my dancing," she says.

She noticed at law school, however, that her dance training had given her time-management skills that made the studies easier for her than others. As a dancer, she says, you have to be completely present and focused at a rehearsal or a class in order to keep up with the repertoire. There was no time in rehearsal to let her mind wander.

With her childhood FBI ambitions still unrealized, Shelton-Tabor says, she studied criminal law and worked for the state Legislature as a criminal justice intern. An illness on the day she was scheduled to take the bar exam set back her bar entrance. She took the exam six months later and in October 2000 accepted an offer to start in the Dallas County District Attorney's Office beginning in misdemeanor court.

Taylor recalls that Shelton-Tabor's work ethic and effective approach distinguished her then.

"She is very good at being realistic and practical. She doesn't try to fit a square peg into a round hole," Taylor says.

In 2001, while Shelton-Tabor still worked at the DA's office, a friend and fellow dancer from SMU approached her about starting a dance company. Shelton-Tabor says she warmed to the idea since she had enjoyed choreographing opportunities at SMU and looked forward to leading a dance company.

The economic environment for fundraising did not bode well, but the budget figures weren't huge. Shelton-Tabor says the first year's budget amounted to $22,000. By going into some debt and writing countless grant proposals, the two women launched the company and later, when approached with space and an offer, an affiliated school.

At the DA's office, she advanced to prosecuting felony cases, including first-degree murder. In 2004, however, she left to start her own practice, in part to gain more flexibility for her dance pursuits. She focused her practice on family law with an emphasis on juvenile delinquency and child protective services cases. At this point in her career, she was also focusing more on dancing, teaching classes three times a week at the school.

But she found her time in the family courts unsettling compared to the criminal courts. Even though the stakes -- individuals' liberties -- seem higher in the criminal courts, Shelton-Tabor says, the tactics are sharper in the family courts. She wanted back in the criminal courts. She even applied to the FBI and was accepted to a training program, but she ultimately opted out.

"Sometimes, you work hard to get what you want only to find out you don't want it," she says, noting that applies at some level to both her New York dance and FBI ambitions.

In November 2007, she began working part-time in the Rockwall County District Attorney's Office. She stayed there until January 2009. That's when she reorganized her priorities. She sold her equity interest in the dance school and kept only her equity interest in the dance company. She now only works twice a week in the evening at the dance school as an employee. And she accepted the full-time job in the public defender's office.

In the past year, she also has been offered, she says, opportunities as a prosecutor, but so far, even though her homicide detective husband prefers when she represents his side, she has not chosen to leave the public defender's office.

To make her life manageable, she has set some rules. She always finds a substitute to teach for her in the evenings if she knows she will be in trial that same day. Only about every three months, she says, do her clients wind up going to trial. Otherwise, she helps her clients make a deal with the prosecutors. She manages her docket effectively, she says, "talking to your clients, making sure you are getting the truth out of them, getting them to understand that you may be able to work things out." Her familiarity with the prosecutors also helps, Shelton-Tabor says, because the opposing side knows they can trust her when she cites facts or precedents.

Creuzot says he has confidence in her representation of her clients because as a prosecutor and as a defense lawyer, "she understands the underlying reasons for criminal conduct."

Tim Jeffrey, a Dallas solo, who has opposed Shelton-Tabor when she was a prosecutor and worked beside when she was in private practice, says her clients get good representation. About her work ethic, he says, "Good Lord. It's blinding." Jeffrey says, "She has a really good presence in front of a jury, and she is always prepared," he says. "The public defender'soffice is lucky to have her."

For Shelton-Tabor, similarities exist between dance and the law. "You have to learn to let some of it go," she says. "The fact that an officer didn't testify well, you have to recognize you can't control that. The fact that a technician didn't turn on a lighting switch, you can't control that."

A dance is a performance, and a jury trial is a performance, she says.

There are limitations even for Shelton-Tabor. Since she had her second child, she has not gotten up on the stage herself, staying behind to choreograph. She says getting her body into performance-level shape would require too much time and effort for her schedule.

"I would love to get into that kind of shape, but I cannot put that on my plate. It's already a delicate balance," she says.