Andrew Speer

Andrew Speer

Partner

Too many family lawyers don’t see their clients as people, but as a series of facts. I don’t take this approach. To me each client is an individual, with unique needs, wants, and goals. As a father and husband, I understand that each person has a unique and specialized form of justice they seek to uphold. Because of this, I believe my job is to use the legal system to get each client the personalized and specific outcome they deserve. This is a duty I have held myself to since I began practicing family law in 2015, when I graduated from Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law and passed the bar.

This passion has encouraged me to learn new traits and skills overtime to best help my clients, including becoming an expert witness in divorces involving cryptocurrency, an appellate lawyer, and a continuing legal education publisher and presenter. In the cryptocurrency world, I have been hired by clients across the country to help identify, trace, characterize, and value cryptocurrency, including assisting clients with determining whether their spouse is hiding digital assets, on occasion saving my clients hundreds of thousands of dollars. Cryptocurrency is complicated, and many attorneys – and judges – take an incorrect and avoidable approach to it in the divorce context. My goal is to help others avoid these mistakes, and to prevent my clients from being financially abused by an antiquated legal system that is slow to change with new technological developments.

I understand that on occasion one’s legal journey does not end in the trial courtroom, and sometimes an appeal is necessary. Clients from across the state have come to me with their trial court rulings, asking me to appeal them. This has allowed me not only to help people from a variety of backgrounds, but it has also allowed me to grow and practice before numerous appellate courts I normally would not have the opportunity to. Thanks to my clients, I have successfully had trial court rulings reversed and modified in the Second Court of Appeals in Fort Worth and defended against a petition for review in the Supreme Court of Texas.

This demonstrates how to me, the attorney-client relationship is a two-way street – I fight for my clients in every way possible – and my clients have allowed me to gain enough experience to become one of the few lawyers in the state who are Board Certified in Family Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization.

Not only do I believe I have a duty to my clients, I also have an obligation to the legal community I practice in. I enjoy contributing to the continuing legal education of my peers, having been published in the Dallas Divorce Law Blog/Texas Bar Today, the Boston Bar Association Family Law Newsletter, and the Dallas Bar Association Headnotes, and being a presenter for Stafford Webinars, the Tax Alliance Conference, and LawPractice CLE. In these courses and publications, I have taught others the techniques I use to trace, locate, characterize, and value cryptocurrency, how to determine if Venmo is being used to hide money, and how to master the digital courtroom that was born of the Covid-19 pandemic.