Pro Bono Contributions
Jacksonville Area Legal Aid (JALA) is proud to announce the selection of Jacksonville attorney Rebeccah Beller as the Pro Bono Attorney of the Month.
With gratitude, JALA recognizes Beller’s past and ongoing pro bono contributions:
• During Spring-Summer, 2009, taught three Elder Law Continuing Legal Education classes at JALA, supporting new pro bono attorneys representing JALA clients
• Puts in countless hours of pro bono legal representation to help low-income clients in the areas of dissolution of marriage, wills/estates, probate, consumer law and guardianship
• Provides guidance to new JALA pro bono attorneys
• Provides expertise and guidance to JALA as a member of its board of directors
Engineers don’t leave too much to chance.
So when Rebeccah Beller’s father, a NASA engineer, saw his teenage daughter looking out into the world and searching for a path to follow, he found a logical, scientific way to help launch her career.
The elder Beller sat Rebeccah and her two siblings down in front of the Myers-Briggs personality test to find out exactly what kind of work future would suit each of them best. Fate would not be an accidental meeting for the Beller children, but rather, as much as humanly possible, it would be discovered and explored with all the empirical data that a trained engineer could possibly provide.
“My father is very strong-willed,” Rebeccah says.
When the test numbers were crunched and matched with possible careers, the law came up atop Rebeccah’s list.
Today, Rebeccah Beller is a happy and successful Jacksonville attorney who shares a practice (Beller & Bustamante) in the areas of estate planning, probate, family and consumer law. That doesn’t mean dad’s Myers-Briggs analysis didn’t face some real challenges along the way.
“I really hated law school,” Rebeccah says, recalling the massive 200-800-page daily reading assignments. “Realistically, no one could do that … it was all very foreign to me. And, for the most part, the people there were pompous. And the professors tended not to be the most supportive of people. I was very disillusioned.”
So when she graduated, Rebeccah got as far away from the law and her law school as possible – all the way to the other side of the world, in fact: New Zealand.
“I’d met some New Zealanders during a summer law program in England,” she remembers. “So I decided to go over there and stay with them for a while.”
That “while” turned out to be two full years – a period of discovery in which Rebeccah found two things: work as a university education coordinator and the man who would eventually become her husband, Richard Wolfe. The couple now lives in Jacksonville and have two children: Ethan, 6, and Kate, 4.
Rebeccah, who spent seven years in the public defender’s office prior to opening a partnership with a law school friend, said she now very much enjoys practicing law, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t continue to challenge the old Myers-Briggs assessment.
“I really think a part of me actually wanted to be a teacher,” she says. “I think I have a natural inclination for it.”
That inclination recently led her to volunteer to teach three Continuing Legal Education classes for Jacksonville Area Legal Aid.
“It was my first real teaching experience, and I just loved it,” she said.
Obviously, her CLE classes were nothing like the law school classes that nearly chased her from the profession.
“It was wonderful,” she said of the Elder Law CLE Series. “We had new lawyers there, but we also had experienced practitioners, too, so there was a lot of interaction and shared experiences. It wasn’t just me talking.
“The most promising thing was hearing people say that they were going to take on a few pro bono cases and that they would consider adding this area of law to their practice.”
As rewarding as teaching is for her, Rebeccah says the daily challenges of running a law practice and raising a family will likely keep her on the exact path that Myers-Briggs seemingly laid out for her all those years ago – at least until Ethan and Kate are ready to take their own personality tests.
Jacksonville Area Legal Aid offers pro bono opportunities that are manageable and rewarding. Interested attorneys are encouraged to contact Kathy Para, JALA Pro Bono Development Coordinator at [email protected] or 356-8371 ext.363.