At the time, Neena Speer felt that going through regulation school turned into the worst hand she might have been dealt.
“I almost flunked out,” she said. “I went from honors student … to barely getting a 3.0 [grade point average]. … It simply messed with my psyche. … Then I was given out of regulation school, failed the bar, … [and] couldn’t discover a job.
“All those stories can occur, so I stated, ‘Why not write and tell [people] approximately a majority of these emotions they’re going to experience, all this stuff they’re going to go through? [Why not] tell any person exactly how they’ll sense in that scenario and how to use it?’”
Those stories led Speer to write down “Dear Future Lawyer: An Intimate Survival Guide for the Minority Female Law Student,” a e-book that walks the reader through Speer’s stories at some point of each yr of regulation college. She attended the University of Alabama School of Law from 2014 until 2017—and nearly didn’t make it through her first 12 months.
“I simply had to have a few ways to deal with the truth that I idea, ‘If God was sending me right here, why the heck could He have me almost fail out of regulation school?’” she said.
One of the troubles Speer confronted was that she had received advice from those who had experienced law faculty in another way than she had and that they were telling her she wasn’t doing enough.
“I was in every office of each instructor each week, asking [questions], doing my define, skipping football video games, going out maybe now and then, and I didn’t do enough? It put me in an area or a mindset I didn’t recognize how to recover from,” she stated.
Speer determined to write down a humorous manner of looking at what she was going through to address it all.
“I met such a lot of specific characters and went via such a lot of distinct feelings. Had [someone] informed me I was going to sense like this, I might have felt a touch higher knowing … ahead that this [was] all the stuff I [would] undergo,” she said. “So, I simply literally wrote down [everything from] my first yr of law school.”
It has become healing, and he or she despatched it to a mentor.
“It became just a ‘Dear Future 1L, [first year of law school], Note to Myself.’ That’s how [the process of writing the book] started,” stated Speer, 26.
The reception becomes so sturdy that she determined to jot down another chapter for her 2d (2L) and 1/3 (3L) years.
“By the time I completed regulation school and flunked the bar, I wrote a graduate bankruptcy,” Speer said. “Then I wrote a bar-exam-prep diary at the give up.”.
Speer’s mindset was that somebody goes to cope with what she dealt with and ask what regulation college become like for her. So, in preference to telling human beings, she determined to present them something to study and move through.
“I provide you with real-existence scenarios, actual belongings you’re going to come upon,” she said. “I wanted this e-book to be a reality check for humans like me—individuals who had in no way been to regulation school, folks who never had everybody in their instant own family visit regulation college, … [people who] don’t recognize what to expect.”
“Dear Future Lawyer: An Intimate Survival Guide for the Minority Female Law Student” is an “expectations ebook” that prepares law school students “for some of the humans they’ll meet; the distinctive mindsets, emotional mindsets they’ll go through, mainly within the first year,” said Speer, who added that she doesn’t sugarcoat her experiences. He or she needs people to have “the actual.”
The end of each chapter asks readers to “gut take a look at themselves.”
“Don’t just study this. Talk to me. Have a verbal exchange with me.” Speer said. “The e-book is written as a verbal exchange about expectancies, so it’s meant a good way to have a conversation. I need people to write on those pages. … This ebook offers you the information you need from me and offers me the records I need to make you higher.
“It’s a ebook wherein you could really explicit [yourself] and hear from any person without being interrupted. … It’s like a safe area so that you can be uninterrupted with something that happened for your life, your regulation school reviews, or your … truth without having any individual say, ‘Oh, wait, permit me to let you know about mine.’ This is an area wherein you can be placed down your innermost thoughts, similar to I placed down my innermost thoughts.”
Speer’s e-book is written for lady minority regulation college students “sitting in a lecture room, feeling, ‘I don’t understand a way to do any of this. Sometimes I sense, just like the humans here, suppose less of me. Sometimes I experience just like the human beings right here, don’t recognize how an awful lot I can add to the communique. I often don’t even sense like I need to take a seat on this seat.’ … It’s for that woman. It’s additionally for the same woman that was given up there and completed anyway.”
Speer graduated from Homewood High School in 2010 and attended Howard University, wherein she double majored in psychology and French; she focused on the 2 subjects she turned into inquisitive about during high school.
“I became fluent in French,” she said, “and psychology becomes just exact to apprehend human beings’ minds.”
After graduating from Howard, she attended the UA School of Law.
Start Your Own Business
Before starting her own company, Speer stated she could not find a process. During her seek, she recalled something a mentor stated to her: “I don’t, in reality, see you operating for anybody. I see you starting your own commercial enterprise.”
That’s precisely what Speer did. She opened Neena R. Speer Law Firm LLC in April 2018.
“By the time I got to January of this year, I turned into like, ‘I can try this!’ I felt so right that I could do it. … I just felt extra assured,” said Speer, who is also a motivational speaker and a mentor thru her mentoring program called Step 1-2-3.
