Well-Being in the Legal Profession: You Are Not Alone

Episode Notes

Transcript

Dave Scriven-Young:

Hello everyone and welcome to Litigation Radio. I’m your host, Dave Scriven-Young. I’m a commercial and environmental litigator in the Chicago office of Peca and Abramson, which is recognized as the largest law firm serving the construction industry with 115 lawyers and 11 offices around the us. On this show, we talked to the country’s top litigators and judges to discover best practices in developing our careers, winning cases, getting more clients, and building a sustainable practice. Please be sure to subscribe to the podcast and your favorite podcasting app to make sure you’re getting updated with future episodes. This podcast is brought to you by the Litigation section of the American Bar Association. It’s where I make my home. In the ABA, the Litigation section provides litigators of all practice areas, the resources we need to be successful advocates for our clients. Learn more @ ambar.org slash Litigation. For many years, wellbeing and legal profession has been described as being in a crisis.

Despite much work and discussion on the topic, the problem seems to have gotten worse, especially since the Coronavirus pandemic. As litigators, we face our own set of stresses relating to deadlines, the competitive nature of Litigation itself and bad behavior by opposing Counsel. So what can lawyers do right now to improve our wellbeing and what can courts, bar associations, and other organizations do to help us to answer these questions? I’m pleased to welcome to the show three professionals who are deeply involved in the lawyer wellbeing effort in the Massachusetts, which is a leading state on the subject. So let me first welcome Mala Rafik. She’s co-chair of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Standing Committee on Lawyer Wellbeing. She’s a partner at Rosenfeld and Rafik pc, a law firm in New England, representing clients denied access to healthcare as well as individuals taking short and long-term disability life, and long-term care benefits from private insurance carriers. Mala, welcome to the show.

Mala Rafik:

Thank you so much, Dave. Thanks for having me today.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Our next guest is Gavin Alexander. He is also one of the founding members of the standing committee on Lawyer Wellbeing. And from 2020 to 2022, he served as its first full-time fellow. He practiced as a corporate associate in a global firm for seven years before pivoting into full-time lawyer wellbeing work. He’s a certified corporate wellness specialist and he currently serves as the firm-wide wellness director of Jackson Lewis pc, a firm with over 1000 lawyers and 60 offices in the United States. Glad to have you on the show, Gavin.

Gavin Alexander:

Thanks. Thrilled to be here, Dave.

Dave Scriven-Young:

And our third guest is Dr. Shawn Healy. In March of 2014, Dr. Shawn joined Lawyers concerned for Lawyers which is the sole lawyer assistance program in Massachusetts. The organization is exclusively dedicated to helping Lawyers and law students respond positively to the many personal and professional issues of life in the legal profession. Shawn, welcome to the show.

Shawn Healy:

Thanks Dave. Good to be here.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Gavin, let’s start with you. Give us an update on the most recent research and surveys on lower wellbeing. Have there been any particularly significant findings recently?

Gavin Alexander:

The research on lawyer wellbeing started pretty slow in the two thousands and early 2010s, but has really picked up in the late 2017 to 2020 and in the 2020s most recently, there’s actually been a number of reports and surveys that came out this very year that really impacted our understanding of lawyer wellbeing and wellbeing in the legal profession as a whole. A few highlights I wanted to note are here in Massachusetts lawyer’s concern for lawyers for whom Shawn works, our lawyer assistance program here in the state partnered with the SJC standing committee on lawyer wellbeing and a few other groups, including Newark at the University of Chicago, a public interest research institution to conduct a survey of all registered attorneys here in Massachusetts that went out through our board of our overseers. So it was received by every single registered attorney in Massachusetts. Not everyone responded, but our response rate was pretty high overall for a survey of its nature.

And some of the results we had highlighted I thought were really impactful, particularly consistent with some other recent surveys. It was really consistent in the results that lawyers were really struggling with mental illness and suicidal ideation at significantly higher rates than the general population for anxiety. The respondents reported around 26% satisfied the diagnostic criteria for high or moderate anxiety on our survey compared to the general population estimate, which is around 8% for depression, that was around 21% versus a general population estimate of around 8%. And for suicidal ideation, these were folks who reported thoughts of self-harm or suicide. Within the past two weeks, we had around seven to 8% versus a general population of estimate of around 4%. Now, what was really interesting, and this was somewhat of a new result in this research, was that for those lawyers who screened as positive for moderate to severe depression or anxiety or having recent suicidal thoughts, only around half of any of those lawyers had sought any care whatsoever for their mental health or wellbeing.

When we looked at alcohol use that got even worse, around 42% of the respondents reported that their alcohol use satisfied the criteria for hazardous or unhealthy criteria under the audit C, which is a standard tool for diagnosing alcohol usage. Of those 42%, only 2% had ever sought any care for their hazardous or unhealthy alcohol use. And the number one reason for not seeking care for any of those issues was perceived stigma. That was one of biggest results from our research along with we were one of the first studies to ask about significant demographic identities in the study as well. So we were able to also identify that all of these issues when it came to mental health burnout, satisfaction with life, all of those issues were being experienced at significantly higher rates among lawyers from underrepresented, historically excluded and systemically oppressed populations. So bipoc, lawyers, lawyers, lawyers from sexual orientations beyond heterosexual and female lawyers versus male lawyers.

So we were able to highlight that lawyers from these populations were seriously experiencing these issues of burnout, anxiety, depression, and low satisfaction with life. So that was some of the big highlights. New Jersey released a study from their state bar associations putting lawyers First task force that was pretty consistent with our findings as well. And a few other reports have came out recently, particularly one from Patrick Krill and a few other researchers highlighting that lawyers and that was collecting data from California and DC lawyers and his data showed that lawyers high or moderate or actually high stress were 22 times more likely to report suicidal ideation than even low stressed lawyers, let alone the general population. So really a lot of this research has been finding that what we’ve suspected for a long time but haven’t been able to really put those numbers on, which is that lawyers really are experiencing these significant mental health issues, alcohol and substance use issues at really serious degrees even compared to the general population. And we need to be doing a better job to actually address those issues now that we’ve been able to really show in concrete data that it is happening.

Dave Scriven-Young:

So really troubling statistics coming out of your organization and the research that you quoted. Shawn, I wonder you’re on the ground doing a lot of these, I dunno, treatment maybe of lawyers and working with individual lawyers. Are the numbers getting worse? It sounds like we’re just kind of getting new data. Have we seen this getting worse over time and has the pandemic made this issue even worse?

Shawn Healy:

Yeah, I think to Gavin’s point, there’s both a greater awareness of sort of the struggles that law students and lawyers and judges are having with their wellbeing because of research studies like this. For those of us in the field of directly responding and supporting the legal community, that’s sort of like information that we’ve already known. There’s definitely been some changes due to the pandemic. We’ve seen increases in burnout across lawyers. We’ve seen a lot of issues around vicarious trauma, people leaving the profession because of the stress and the demands of trying to juggle home responsibilities with work and career, trying to adjust to that transition of being in person and then remote or hybrid and sort of trying to juggle all of that. It’s definitely adding to the stress. We’ve also seen an increase in the request for services for our services in particular. I used to tell people that there’s some yearly cyclical changes in terms of when we’re the busiest.

And so one of the things that used to be true is in the summertime people were less likely to call us because nice out, they’re feeling better, they’re on vacation. That trend sort of disappeared in the pandemic. So the demand has been higher in terms of accessing care. There’s been this interesting dilemma or interesting situation where providers of care went remote during the pandemic, which allowed them to be accessible, which was great. People from across the state could access a therapist at any time of day in front of their computers. So access became greater, the demand was greater as well. And then the result of that was a lot of providers filled up and couldn’t take new clients, and so we were getting a lot more requests to help find therapists, and then we were having a much harder time finding available therapists. So that trend was very evident during the pandemic. We’re seeing that change a little bit now. And so you’ve got those timely influences on the whole wellbeing experience in the legal community. And we’re also seeing some changes, some positive changes in terms of the generational shift, the newer lawyers coming in in terms of their desire for prioritizing wellbeing, their acceptance of the importance of taking care of themselves, and also changing that stigma. So that’s encouraging. So you’ve got both the alarming statistics that some of these research studies are crystallizing for us as well as some hopeful changes as well.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Well, and Gavin, you mentioned that there was a troubling statistic about folks not seeking treatment, and that relates to the stigma of asking for help. Are we seeing any change in law firms and in the legal profession in that area, or is it still as bad as it was in terms of stigma that relates to seeking treatment? And I guess a follow-up question would be is it something that you’re actually seeing in the profession or is it more that individual lawyers think there will be a stigma as a result of seeking treatment?

Gavin Alexander:

I’ll start by sharing a little bit about my own experience. So when I was a junior law student and then lawyer, I did not see anyone in the roles. I aspired to talking openly about how they’d struggled with mental health or wellbeing during their careers or having sought any care. And because I didn’t hear about any lawyers in the roles I aspired to seeking care, I took that personally as an implicit signal that if I sought care, I would have limits placed on my career ambitions, my trajectory, and it would impact my long-term developments as a lawyer if there was a paper trail of my having received any mental health care. So I didn’t, and I experienced very serious depression, and I kept not seeking care because I thought having any paper trail of receiving care would be damaging to me. And I didn’t seek care until it was too late and I attempted to end my own life while I was in practice.

I’m incredibly grateful I survived. But since then, one of my soap boxes that I try to advocate on all the time is that we need to see more lawyers in senior positions in leadership positions, in these amazing roles like partners and law school deans and professors and judges talking about the struggles they’ve faced and how they’ve gotten through it. I think we very much are seeing a change recently. I don’t think it is global, and I don’t think it is universal, but this is a long-term movement. But we are seeing change. The very fact that I exist as a full-time wellness director at a major law firm, and there are a number of other law firms probably around 30 at this point that have full-time wellbeing officers of some kind is really impactful. And a lot of our work is really trying to break down that stigma.

So for example, on World Mental Health Day of this year, I was proud to circulate a communication that went out to all around 1900 employees at my firm where three equity principles recorded videos sharing their own experience with lived experience of mental illness, mental wellbeing challenges, and the treatment they’d received to get better at various points in their career. I cannot tell you the response we received. And I similarly recorded a video where I shared my story shortly after joining the firm, and we’re really focused on this sort of storytelling component to try to break down that stigma and say, Hey, we know this job is really hard and we want you to know that seeking help is not a sign of weakness. Rather, it shows us that you’re willing to take advantage of every tool at your disposal to succeed. And I think a lot of the work that the SJC standing committee on lower Well doing, and Mala will talk about this, I’m sure is getting out there and talking about these issues and encouraging schools and employers and the ABA as we’re doing right now to talk about these issues and have people share their stories so folks can know that seeking help is not going to harm them or we hope not going to harm them.

And I would say in most states and many, many legal employers, we’d much rather someone get the help they need than burnout and fail or worse.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Well, and Mala, let’s bring you into the conversation. I know the standing committee on Lawyer Wellbeing is addressing a lot of practical issues relating to stressors that lawyers are facing all the time. Tell us a little bit about those practical issues that the Standing committee is working on.

Mala Rafik:

I think that when we talk about wellbeing, a lot of lawyers and law firms think it’s like a checkbox, right? So we offer yoga, we offer meditation. There’s a safe space or a quiet place in the firm where you can go and take a break. Those are literally check boxes, but they don’t really address the underlying problems of wellbeing. And one of the issues that has been brought up already on this podcast is access to mental health care. So one initiative that the Lawyer Wellbeing Committee in Massachusetts focused on was getting lawyers access to health insurance through Massachusetts Health Connector that was created prior to the A CA, but it’s part of the a private insurance policies. We created a relationship with the connector where lawyers now have a dedicated place that they can go speak to agents and access discounted healthcare policies for small firms and mid-size firms.

That was a huge initiative. There’s also been loan, a loan forgiveness program, which has really taken off and as finances are a significant cause of stress and anxiety, the loan forgiveness program is addressing that. In part, we’re really trying to focus on practical ways to address the problem in addition to practical ways to address stigma. I want to just tack onto what Gavin just said, which is this. I do think it’s incumbent upon us, those of us in leadership positions or those of us who have been practicing for a long time and have already established our careers or our reputations to speak out about the anxiety, the stress, even the burnout that we’ve felt as lawyers in the profession. I have an anxiety disorder. Everybody I know knows that I have therapy at 9:00 AM on Monday mornings, and that includes other lawyers I work with that includes everyone at my firm that includes clients. And if the more we normalize it, the more we talk about it, the more other people. It just becomes part of our lives. Other people feel safe talking about it, and hopefully what Gavin went through will not be repeated again for lawyers in our profession. So I really think it’s really a two-pronged approach, practical ways to address the problem, increasing access to care, as well as talking about it and addressing the stigma around it.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Well, and one of the issues I find in my own life is work as a lawyer often involves things that we are not trained for. One example would be talking to clients and doing what Shawn does on a regular basis, which is acting as a sounding board, maybe a therapist for clients. So Shawn, can you tell us a little bit about how Massachusetts is dealing with that issue in particular and what we can do about it as lawyers?

Shawn Healy:

That’s a really important thing to bring up, which is, as I’ve often told groups of lawyers that I’m talking to, I make the comparison between the work that they do with the work that I do as a psychologist, the clients, the stories, the emotional material that clients bring to lawyers is the same stuff that they bring to a psychologist. It’s the things that are concerning them. They’re looking for help. They’re looking for some guidance, and the repeated exposure of that material takes a toll on you. The difference between a psychologist, one of the differences between a psychologist and a lawyer is as a psychologist, I was taught from day one in grad school about how to recognize the importance of the impact of that, the weight of that material. And I was from day one, reminded that you got to take care of yourself. You have to be talking to supervisors, you got to be using supervision in your peer support to make sure that you can sort of navigate that difficult material that people are bringing to you in a way where you’re not going to get burnt out.

And one of the most important things that a professor told me years ago was just a simple idea that rang true to me, and obviously I still remember it. And she said, you can’t save anybody. And that was that idea that my responsibility as a psychologist is not to save somebody was so helpful to take off that responsibility because one, I can’t, and this is true for lawyers, when your clients come to you as a lawyer, you have a specific job to do. And whenever you start to feel like I need to do something more, I need to save my client, I need to make them feel better. Or if you’re under the impression that that repeated exposure of that emotional material isn’t going to affect me in any way, that is a great recipe for burnout and stress and anxiety. So when I’m talking to lawyers, I often encourage them to think about, one, it’s not your job to save somebody, it’s your job to focus on the work that you’re doing.

Obviously there’s ways of doing that that are compassionate and caring that are very different than sort of taking on ownership of someone else’s issues. And so there’s this big discrepancy there when a lawyer feels like it’s my job to take care of my client in every single way. I can’t have a boundary. I can’t protect myself. I need to make sure they feel better. I need to make sure my client is happy. Those sort of things are directly outside of our control and leads to a lot of stress. One of the things that is encouraging is in law schools, there seems to be more emphasis in terms of certain classes on professionalism, sort of highlighting this stuff. We’re often asked, myself and my colleagues are often asked to come into law school classes to talk about the effects of the work on a lawyer’s wellbeing.

And so that law students are getting this message earlier. We’re often in orientation programs talking about the effects of what it’s like to be a lawyer and things to keep in mind at the beginning in terms of taking care of yourself in law school as well as when you’re a practicing lawyer. And I think the more that message gets out there, Tom’s point, the more that it’s just normalized and valued, then stigma starts to drop off. The more that people just talk about it, it’s like, you know what? Yeah, this is what my experience is like. I’ve experienced burnout. This is what led to my burnout. This is what I did about it, right? Instead of that being a mark of shame, suddenly it becomes a mark of resilience, an indicator that you know what you’re doing. You know how to navigate that difficult stuff because you can talk about it.

So whenever somebody is struggling with something, I encourage people to think about it in a way where you can, instead of hiding it, instead of trying to minimize it to own it, to hold onto it, to talk about it in a way that it can describe your resilience. So for example, oftentimes Tamara’s direct point talking about her experiences with anxiety and how she values therapy. If I was a young lawyer and I felt that if I told anybody that I was struggling in any way that would reflect poorly on me, that I’d have this fear that one day someone might find out, and that fear increases my sense of helplessness when instead I just decide I’m going to tell people I’m going to talk about this as part of my story. I no longer have the fear that someone’s going to find out because I’m telling them. And when I take control over that message, I feel more in control. I feel more a greater sense of power. And then again, that sense of stigma starts to go down. So yeah, I forgot what your original question was, but I’m going off now, but I’ll get off my soapbox.

Gavin Alexander:

Actually, if I could jump on one thing Shawn said, going back to the question and tying it to something Mala said, I think the question originally was about skills we’re not trained at and how those affect our wellbeing as lawyers. And one of the things Mala said really struck me of highlighting that, and she talked about yoga and all of these things. I could not agree with her more that all of those yoga programs and mindfulness programs and wellness rooms are absolutely valuable ways to help improve individual’s wellbeing, but they don’t address some of the causes of poor wellbeing in the profession. And one of the other skills that I wanted to highlight that we just, we as a profession have never focused on significantly, is training lawyers on how to be effective managers and supervisors of other human beings. Most of the time, lawyers are elevated through their careers based on experience and seniority alone or based on ability to bring in revenue or high profile matters.

And very little emphasis is placed on actually developing their skills and evaluating their competencies at effectively managing each other as people and inspiring each other to succeed and achieve excellence instead of, a lot of times we default to systems of management that have been used on us, which oftentimes are critical and criticism based and making us all feel terrible every time we make a mistake or feel how bad it is every time we do something wrong. And I’m not saying there’s no place for that at all, but I do really encourage, and one of the things I’m focused on at my firm is trying to create more leadership and management skills training to highlight the way that the lack of those skills really does impact the wellbeing of our entire teams and our relationship with our clients.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Well, one of the things that we have not talked about is kind of the Litigation aspect, and I know that there are very specific lawyer wellbeing issues relating to judges and how judges deal with litigators and the parties before them. Mala bringing you back into the conversation. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s going on with judges these days?

Mala Rafik:

I think there’s really two aspects to what’s going on with judges. I think judges in and of themselves feel the compassion fatigue that Shawn was speaking to, especially since the pandemic. They’re seeing so many people that are suffering. I recently heard from a judge who hears a lot of landlord tenant cases and goes home every night and just internalizes what he sees. These people who are losing their homes or losing are now homeless because they don’t have the money to maintain their homes, and he feels helpless to be able to do anything. So there is that element that we very much forget. Judges see the very saddest worst parts our lives and take that home with them, and they need to learn how to, in the same way we do learn how to take care of themselves. The other side of it is judges are in this incredible powerful place to call out the bad behavior that results in so much of our personal anxiety, burnout, lack of wellbeing as lawyers judges are in this unique position when they see something to say something.

So if you see a lawyer in the Courtroom who is being diminished or treated poorly by an opposing Counsel or by anyone else in the Courtroom, the judges in this unique position of power to say no, to call it out. And we have this, the state court here in Massachusetts did this wonderful program, which is essentially based on see something, say something, and it’s being brought to the federal court as well, but it really just focuses on calling people out on bad behavior of any kind, truly any kind. And I really admire our court system from the Supreme Judicial Court, which created our committee to the judges in the Superior Court in the district court who really worked on this, on the Say something, say something program, because it really again highlights what so many lawyers experienced in the Courtroom. I think one of the hardest and most profound experiences I had on this committee was listening.

We did a lot of listening sessions, town halls with various affinity bar associations and listening to lawyers of color, especially talk about what their experiences in the Courtroom have been, where they have been mistaken for defendants or interpreters or anything, but who they are and what they’ve worked so hard to become and how that really made them feel, I can’t think of a better way to put it. And to hear them speak about, I keep using the word diminished, but it really is being diminished in a way that has nothing to do with their skill, but what they look like. That is such an enormous part of wellbeing in my career. One of, we talk about many ways we harm ourselves as lawyers, alcohol and drugs being a significant part of how we harm our ourself in other ways food, which was my personal drug of choice, that was just how I coped for many, many years with my anxiety.

But it’s just something we don’t talk about. It is something that has come up in our listening sessions. And I think that as lawyers, one of the things we don’t do as a group is listen to each other and listen to what we are experiencing and then try to address the problem. We go about it the other way. We think we know what the problems are, and then we try to address ’em, but we don’t really listen and we don’t hear. And I really credit our courts for trying to listen and trying to hear what the problems are and then looking for ways to fix them. And I wanted to say one thing about what Shawn said. He is so right that we didn’t learn how to these skills of how to be a lawyer and how to talk to our clients and how to empathize with our clients, but not internalize what their problems are. And among the sort of practical tips, the practical things we’re doing is what Shawn does. He goes out to firms and to legal services organizations and talks to them and trains them. And he has with our firm on how to deal with the compassion fatigue that we all feel or skills to talk to your clients who are suffering, who are going through difficult times. And that is such an enormously valuable skill to learn as lawyers and to help us learn to separate what our clients are going through from what we’re going through.

Dave Scriven-Young:

I wanted to ask Gavin about an issue that you raised, Mala, which is issues, wellbeing issues relating to diverse lawyers. Do you have any other thoughts on that issue?

Gavin Alexander:

Of course, I have many thoughts on that issue. I will practice a little bit of what I preach here and say that I do encourage folks not to use the term diverse, to refer to an individual because first off, just grammatically no one individual can be diverse, diverse as a adjective describes a group. And second, it sort of lumps everything together in a way that doesn’t acknowledge the impact of people’s different identities, the language. So when we as the SJC standing Committee on Lawyer Wellbeing started our work on sort of researching and investigating and trying to create solutions to the issues of wellbeing, specifically experienced by lawyers from these populations, we actually had a good long conversation about what language we were going to use to refer to these populations. And we brought in a consultant, and as Mala said, we wound up listening to the communities themselves.

One of our biggest projects was, as she noted, creating this project where we went to each separate, or at least many, many of the affinity bar associations here in Massachusetts and said, come, just tell us what you’ve been through and tell us how you like being described in terms of your own identities and tell us, speak your truth. And we will listen. We are not going to come here and pitch to you how we’re going to solve your problems or that we know what your problems are. We’re just going to listen. And for any organization or state that hasn’t engaged in that critical, critical step, I could not more emphatically encourage you to do so. It was, I think a sea change moment here in Massachusetts because we collected those stories, we aggregated them, we anonymized them, and we published them in a pretty brief but pretty impactful 16 page report that when we released it, I think it was actually around a Super Bowl weekend, I think we released it on a Friday.

And the trial court convened an emergency meeting of the chief justices of all of the court departments on that Super Bowl Sunday and said, we need to talk about this report. Because what it showed was, again, going back to what Shawn said earlier in this conversation, things that a lot of people in this world know and have experienced, but hearing it from their own words in a written report just was so powerful. And just as a quick highlight, I’ve got the report up on my screen right now, and some of the language we wrote to summarize what we heard was just that the general sentiment of the attorneys and law students who participated in the town hall meetings was that being a member of the Massachusetts bar from a historically excluded population results in significant to extreme challenges. On top of those faced by all attorneys and law students, many participants shared upsetting, discouraging, and deeply concerning lived experiences and highlighting that the committee repeatedly heard that attorneys from these backgrounds not only face challenges, getting to law school, getting through law school, passing theBar exam and completing the character and fitness review to be admitted to practice.

But once they conquer those obstacles and enter the profession, they must continue disproportionately to prove their worth to other legal professionals who assume their work will be of lesser quality. And we highlighted it sort of three categories of experiences that we encouraged the profession to focus on. One was the court experience. So talking to all those litigators out there, we heard from pretty much every Affinity U bar Association experiences of lawyers from underrepresented and historically excluded populations being marginalized in various ways. lawyers from black, indigenous and people of color populations repeatedly highlighted that they were mistaken for defendants or asked by court security officers to display multiple forms of identification when white attorneys could just walk through by flashing their bar card. We heard about similar attorneys repeatedly being asked if they were the translator. And we heard from lawyers from trans and gender nonconforming populations, the serious impact that consistently being misgendered and having their identity not respected, how that impacted not only their wellbeing but their clients’ wellbeing because it impacted their client’s confidence in their own attorney-client relationship, and whether the court would in fact respect their attorney as a powerful and impactful advocate before them.

So we highlighted the court system, we highlighted inadequate representation as that was an issue that consistently came up that lawyers from these populations by seeing so few of them in the true positions of seniority, leadership and power felt the implicit signal that it would be so much harder for them to reach those positions or that their voices would be continually marginalized and ignored or even that they would struggle so much harder to find mentorship and sponsorship and how that affected their wellbeing and their confidence and their ability to succeed in the profession. And then the third category was simply micro and macroaggressions, which these topics have been talked to death at length in the legal profession and beyond these days. But we heard literally of all of these little, both large and small moments and how the impact they had on attorneys and law students and judges literally, and both negative comments and positive comments, making comments about how articulate a black female lawyer was or law student was, as if it’s a surprise that that lawyer would have that characteristic or that skill.

Giving credit for ideas or arguments to white male attorneys when a female or attorney from a black indigenous or people of color identity said the exact same thing earlier in the conversation. And we heard about these things not just in large corporate private institutions, but in public interest organizations as well, legal organizations like legal service organizations, not acknowledging or taking concrete actions to support their own attorneys. When as Shawn and Mala have highlighted so well today, those attorneys, when they are experiencing sort of the racial trauma or the identity-based trauma of their clients that they are frequently representing, and they share a identity with those clients that informs that marginalization or that bias that their clients are experiencing. And it’s shared between them how much more impactful that secondary or vicarious trauma can be and how these legal services organizations and public agencies need to just as much focus on supporting their lawyers and standing with them and encouraging them to take the time they need to rest and recover, even if that means taking on a little bit less workflow for a time period if necessary.

Or frankly, and this is something I experience a great deal in my work. We are seeing more and more lawyers asking for mental health leaves, which I am very happy about because it shows that the stigma is breaking down a little bit to the extent that these lawyers recognize that they desperately need some time to recover and develop and get care and develop coping skills. But at the same time, I would hope that the organizations that are the employers, the courts, the systems of the legal profession that are contributing to the mental health and wellbeing challenges that these lawyers, particularly those from marginalized, underrepresented, historically excluded populations face, I hope the organizations invest in analyzing what the root causes are, how the organizations themselves are contributing to the harms these lawyers face and these legal professionals face, and whether they can be doing more to both stem the root causes of the issues, support the individual attorneys and legal professionals as they experience these issues of trauma and ensuring they know that they stand with them when they experience these issues so that we can create a legal profession that is sustainable, rewarding, and welcoming for all lawyers.

Because as repeated research has shown, the legal profession is at its best and most effective when it does represent and represent based on identity as much as skill the clients and general population that we are supposed to serve.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Well, clearly there’s so much more work to be done and Shawn folks listening to this podcast, we’ll be saying, okay, well, we know that now all of these issues are facing us facing the profession, but what happens if I as an individual have a wellbeing issue, a mental health and wellness issue? What resources are available that we can access to help us address those issues?

Shawn Healy:

There’s lots, there are so many ways of addressing your wellbeing, your mental health, your general health. I think it’s helpful to start with just valuing mental health, valuing your wellbeing, valuing yourself depending on where you are. Most states have a lawyer’s assistance program. They look very different state to state. So I would encourage people to get to know your local lawyer’s assistance program. If you’re at a firm like Gavin is exploring what resources are available there. There are ways of addressing your wellbeing that are sort of classic in terms of meeting with a therapist, talking to someone like me at a lawyer’s assistance program. There’s also ways of just increasing your social connections so that you feel like you’re not alone. You feel like you can talk to somebody and share the burden that you’re experiencing starting there, starting with yourself, starting to sort of value taking care of yourself as priority one, and then seeing yourself as a part of a bigger community and trying to encourage others to do the same thing.

Mala brought up a really important point that I wanted to return to, which is one of the reasons why I think wellbeing is such an issue among lawyers in the legal community is specifically because lawyers are taught to be problem solvers. It’s like, this is what I do. I’m a problem solver. I am issue spotting all the time. That’s what I get paid for. That’s how I get professional recognition. And it’s really hard to put that skillset on hold to then shift to doing something more like listening and just being with somebody to support someone. And I think that ability to recognize a skillset as being valuable in one area and then recognizing that you need to develop another skillset to be helpful in a different area, that’s really important. So one thing that sort of fits into that need is just to get a little more comfortable with the idea of talking with people and not solving their problems.

Because sometimes we feel like if I’m not providing a solution to this issue that I’m not being helpful. And it’s often the opposite, where if I can be validating, if I can be a safe listening ear, that often is much more helpful in certain circumstances than trying to come up with a perfect answer or the solution to the problem Related to that, one thing that we’re doing in Massachusetts and other across the country, it’s available is mental health first aid, just training people, laypeople, non-clinicians in skills on how to recognize symptoms of crises or mental health issues in other people, but also in yourself recognizing what resources are available in the community and practicing skills that will be helpful in conversations with people who are struggling.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Well, a lot of resources are available. So my question for each of you, and we’ll kind of do this in round Robin fashion, is what is one thing that each of you would recommend that lawyers do right now to make their lives better? That could be mental health and wellness, wellbeing, however you want to phrase your answer or perspective. Mala, why don’t we start with you?

Mala Rafik:

So this is going to sound probably a little crazy, but I think that so much of what’s wrong in our profession is how we treat each other. It’s an adversarial job, there’s no doubt about it, but how you have a choice as to how you’re going to treat the people that you come across, whether it’s an opposing Counsel or a client, but really it’s an opposing Counsel. So much of what we’ve heard in these listening sessions is how people have wanted to leave the profession or have left the profession because of how they’ve been treated. And it’s like poking at a wound, right? It’s just poking, poking, poking, poking, poking until one day you are so unhappy that you can’t do it any longer. So you have a choice. You have a choice on how you’re going to treat the people in your life and whether or not you are going to allow someone else to treat you in the way that they are. So I think exercising that choice and choosing to treat the people you come across with respect and kindness really, for lack of a better way to put it, is a great start to changing how this profession works in the future. So that would be my one piece of advice.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Love that Gavin. We’ll turn to you next.

Gavin Alexander:

One piece of advice I have for any lawyer seeking to potentially improve their wellbeing is to always focus on or take some time to focus on an identity you have that is not lawyer. I see so many lawyers when they start struggling with their law practice in whatever way, shape or form, they receive critical feedback, they receive a judgment against one of their clients, et cetera. When if you have attached to your entire sense of self-worth and self-identity to being a successful lawyer, then when that one identity starts getting damaged or has any cracks in it, your entire worth as a person can fall apart. And that can be incredibly dangerous. It was dangerous to me. I had attached pretty much my entire sense of self-identity and self-worth when I was early in my practice to I must succeed, I must make partner, I must be the best of the best at all costs.

And when I received even the smallest amount of critical feedback, sometimes I would spiral into cycles of shame and depression. And worse, and this is a pretty common thing, two weeks ago, the ABA Journal published a story from a Kentucky lawyer named Bruce Simpson where he shared how he attempted to die by suicide earlier this year. And he is a very senior lawyer, very skilled and very successful. And he talked about how he made a very serious and significant mistake in an appellate matter for one of his clients. And literally the thought that went to his mind was, and I think I’ll quote his article, he literally said he thought he had to be perfect as a lawyer, and anything less was unacceptable. So when that giant mistake happened, he literally thought his most rational solution was that he should die, that he had no right to continue living and continue practicing law.

And this is similar in a previous story, multiple stories of lawyers who’ve experienced either actual death by suicide or attempted to die by suicide. A common thread I’ve noticed in the articles and experiences I’ve heard about is this sense that you’ve attached so much of who you are, if not the entirety of who you are, to the fact that you are a successful lawyer. And so I encourage every lawyer out there to find something, whether it’s focusing on being an excellent parent, being a awesome pet parent. I see Mala, we’re on our zoom right now, and she’s got an amazing picture of her and her dog. Being a video gamer, being a reader, having some sort of hobby or something that you enjoy and can take pride in that isn’t just law because if law falls apart or even just gets damaged in some way in your mind, if you don’t have something else, it can be really scary.

Dave Scriven-Young:

That’s a great tip. And Shawn, finally,

Shawn Healy:

Yeah, I’m really glad I get to go last because what Mala and Gavin have set are right on point. I think those are excellent things, excellent tips. What I’ll say is I would recommend that people just take a moment to think about any particular thing that they’re afraid of, because fear often influences us to make decisions that if your reason is fear, your decision is going to influence you in a different way. So what I mean by that is thinking about I’m afraid of making a mistake to Gavin’s example, or I’m afraid of what people would think of me if I disclose something about myself or I’m afraid of X, Y, and Z. So if you’re one, just getting aware, increasing your awareness of what is it that I’m afraid of, and then start to think, what if I wasn’t afraid of that? Can I imagine what it would be like if that fear just wasn’t there, right?

If I wasn’t afraid of making a mistake or I wasn’t afraid of people’s negative opinion of me, how would that improve my life? And then start to talk to other people about getting closer to that point. It’s not a recommendation to get rid of fear altogether because fear is a helpful thing, but oftentimes when our fears are significant, we feel constrained by them and not protected by them. So the more that we can recognize where we have fear and we can recognize that we have options for how to respond to that fear in a productive way, and suddenly we’re going to feel more in control, we’re going to feel more empowered to navigate some difficult situations. And the more that we feel that we’re in control or we’re driving the bus, so to speak, the road still might be bumpy, but it’s a very different experience when we’re driving the bus versus our fear is driving the bus.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Well, thanks for that, and thanks to all of you for this time together and your transparency and the ability just to help people really do appreciate that. Mala, one last question. We’ve talked a lot about the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court standing committee on Lawyer wellbeing. What’s the best way to find out more information about the work that you’re doing as well as any of the research that’s being conducted over there?

Mala Rafik:

So we have a great website that has all our reports and our findings on it and the work that we’re doing. And of course, I should probably know the URL by part, but I do not.

Gavin Alexander:

It’s lawyer wellbeing ma.org.

Mala Rafik:

I was just going to say, I bet Gavin knows it. Please go there. There’s a tremendous amount of resources. We’re also starting a mentorship program or just making it much more substantive, the mentorship program that we’re doing. And so there’s a lot of great ideas on there for other states to follow and for firms to embrace. So I really hope people do.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Excellent. Well, Mala, Rafik, Gavin Alexander, Shawn Healy, thank you so much for being on the show today. I really do appreciate it.

Mala Rafik:

Thank you so much for having us and for highlighting this topic. It’s so incredibly important.

Gavin Alexander:

Ruth, thank you so much, Dave. Thank you all.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Thanks to Litigation section Premier sponsor, Berkeley Research Group for sponsoring this podcast. BRG is an award-winning global consulting firm, composed of world-class experts in accounting, damages analysis, economics, finance, intellectual property valuation, data analytics and statistics who work across industries, disciplines, and jurisdictions, delivering clear perspectives that you can count on. Their guiding principle is intelligence that works. Learn [email protected]. Now it’s time for a quick tip from the ABA Litigation section’s Mental health and Wellness task force. And I’d like to welcome back Pilar Kraman to the show. Pilar is a partner in the Wilmington, Delaware office of Young Conway, Stargate and Taylor, LLP, where she focuses her practice on patent infringement, trade secret and complex commercial Litigation matters. Welcome back to the show, Pilar.

Pilar Kraman:

Thank you.

Dave Scriven-Young:

What’s your quick tip?

Pilar Kraman:

So what we’re talking about today is what makes a great leader. And to start, I ask you a question. What do you think of when you think of a quality of a great leader? I know for me, I used to think that to be great, I needed to be decisive, stoic, hardworking, tough, and I don’t disagree that those can be qualities of a great leader, but in isolation, those things are just simply not enough to lead effectively, nor are they qualities that really define what a great leader is. Instead, the key to really effective leadership and to being successful as a leader isn’t toughness or even brilliance for that matter. But it comes down to really just two words, and that’s emotional intelligence. I asked you to look at people throughout your life, people that you think of as a leader, people that you would’ve followed anywhere.

They can be somebody who motivates you to go that extra mile, a teacher, a coach, a parent, a supervisor, or even a friend. Sometimes that person might motivate through fear, but I would expect that many of us will identify a person who really saw us, took the time to know us, to know what we needed, who treated us with respect, who made hard decisions and gave you the agency to make hard decisions, who was comfortable expressing emotion and acknowledged your emotions and even encouraged you to express your emotions. Somebody who was direct with feedback and criticism and very importantly, who forgave freely. All of these qualities exemplify a person who is leading with emotional intelligence. And the question that probably comes to mind is why does it any of it matter? And it’s simple. Really, it’s because we all want to work more efficiently. We want to have our teams be more efficient.

We want to actually enjoy what we do for a living. We want to see the fun of it, even when the work can sometimes be anything but fun. And the bottom line is that as humans, we are all complex, and conflict between us is going to be inevitable and be able to diffuse or minimize conflict and motivate others to do the same is a skill that you can utilize all the time and anywhere, even if you just try to amplify your emotional intelligence, you’ll find that your subordinates will respect you and work harder frankly, because they know they can trust you and that you care about them in the end of the day. And you’ll find that your partners will respect and listen to you more because they always know where they stand with you. And you’ll also find, I think that you and your team will be more content at work because you are fostering an environment of mutual support and caring, and that will trickle down.

The best part about all of this is that at the end of the day, it isn’t that hard to be a great leader. You just need to start by looking within yourself and get to know yourself better. And I can’t understate how a good therapist is essential here because to improve your sense of self and to understand what motivates you as well as for you to be able to work through things from your own life and past that may drive your actions and reactions in the present oftentimes needs the help of somebody who’s trained to do these things. And so a therapist can be essential. But another thing to think about too, in addition to emotional intelligence, is that in order to be effective, you have to be able to give feedback and criticism in a way that people will be able to receive it openly.

And for you to do that, I invite you all to explore the concept of what it means to have a growth mindset and to help yourself learn how to do that, but also to teach the others how to have a growth mindset. And it basically just means receiving criticism with an eye towards how you can improve, rather receiving it negatively. That all feedback is good feedback, even if it’s sometimes challenging to hear on that topic of feedback, which giving it directly is something we all must do. Another thing to remember in your strive to be a great leader is that your ultimate goal is always to be helpful. And so when you think about when you receive feedback and what helps you receive it better, most likely it’s helpful when you know the giver of that feedback cares about their relationship with you. And so thinking about coming from a place of caring and even love, frankly, will help you excel as a leader and maximize your emotional intelligence. The bottom line is that this all might seem hard at first, but I think that you would seem surprised at how easy it really is once you start down this road and know that you don’t need to be perfect. We’re all works in progress and own any criticism, let it drive you to be better, be open and willing to change. Be direct and respectful. Be transparent and vulnerable, and you’ll be on your way to being a great leader and you’re going to inspire others to be great too.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Great tips, Pilar. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

Pilar Kraman:

Thank you for having me.

Dave Scriven-Young:

And that’s all we have for our show today. I’d love to hear your thoughts about today’s episode. If you have comments or a question you’d like for me to answer on an upcoming show, you can contact me at d [email protected] and connect with me on social. I’m Ad Attorney Dsy on LinkedIn, Instagram X and Facebook. You can also connect with the ABA Litigation section on those platforms as well. But as much as I’d like to connect with you online, nothing beats meeting you in person. In one of our next Litigation section events, please make plans to join us at the 2024 Environmental and Energy Mass Torts and Products liability Litigation Committee’s joint regional CLE program in Colorado, taking place January 31st through February 2nd, join us for eight plenary presentations on Hot Litigation topics including committee specific content, broader Litigation interests and ethics in addition to an agenda of diverse educational sessions.

There, of course, will be time to enjoy outdoor activities and network with your colleagues. To find out more and for registration information, go to ambar.org/joint. If you like the show, please help spread the word by sharing a link to this episode with a friend or through a post on social and invite others to join the show and community. If you want to leave a review over at Apple Podcast, it’s incredibly helpful. Even a quick rating at Spotify is super helpful as well. And finally, I want to quickly thank some folks who make the show possible. Thank you to Michelle Oberts, who’s on staff with the Litigation section. Thanks. Also goes out to the co-chairs of the Litigation Section’s audio contact committee. Haley Maple and Tyler, true thank you to the audio professionals from Legal Talk Network. And last but not least, thank you so much for listening. I’ll see you next time.

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