When not in court, attorney Shain Neumeier sometimes wears a pair of Bose or Skullcandy over-the-ear headphones that cut back on background noise. These headphones can even been seen in Neumeier’s LinkedIn profile photo.
Neumeier is a Massachusetts sole practitioner who does panel attorney work for the state public defender’s office, handing civil commitment and guardianship defense matters. Neumeier knows the lines to entire television programs and movies, as well as lyrics to musicians’ song catalogs, and is a big “Weird Al” Yankovic fan.
She was diagnosed with having autism when she was 3 and went public with classmates in the ninth grade, when proceeds from an art show she did were donated to the University of Miami-Nova Southeastern University’s Center for Autism & Related Disabilities, a state-funded group that does outreach and support. Haley Moss.
Haley Moss, a newly admitted lawyer in Florida who has autism, was billed by some earlier this year as one of the first attorneys to publicly identify as having the disability. But Neumeier and others say there are more attorneys with autism than people realize.
And even if Neumeier can’t, in real time, interpret answers, they can call on their knowledge of facial expressions and how the expressions match with certain emotions, and have a pretty good sense of how someone will react to a question before asking it in court.