How two lawyers developed a passion to promote lawyer wellness

Elliot and Brenda are co-designers and co-presenters on lawyer wellness. They met in 1990 when Brenda was a new legal aid lawyer and Elliot was on the board.  After decades of running into one another at bar meetings and in the hallway of the courthouses, in 2017, they were both presenting workshops for new lawyers with the West Virginia Bar Foundation. Fortunately, they were seated together at lunch.

As they talked, the conversation turned to the attorneys they personally knew who had suffered depression, alcoholism and the large number who died from suicide.  After some research, they realized that their colleagues were not the only lawyers suffering from dissatisfaction, illness and alcoholism.

Researchers in a 2015 landmark study of 13,000 American lawyers found that 21% of lawyers surveyed were engaged in problematic drinking and 28% were experiencing symptoms of depression. Most recently, a study published by the Harvard Business Review found that lawyers were the loneliest and most socially disconnected of all professions.

Must the practice of law be so stressful and alienating?  Elliot and Brenda decided to explore what they learned as mediators that made them feel good about their work. They decided to find what might be imported from the mediation practice into the law practice to better the profession. As mediators, they determined that this change could more significantly and more deeply improve lawyer wellness over independent activities that take place outside of work, such as yoga, exercise or mediation or finding ways to limit work such as time management and boundary setting.  They agreed that a change has to be created within the way we work, the way we practice law.

As Elliot describes it, “If we practice better, using broad skills that reach beyond the adversarial practice, we can feel better at work, and after work.  We can be better.”  Brenda adds, “We need to change how we practice law, relying on what neuroscience teaches us about stress and improving our practice in the art of communication.

Over the next few years, Elliot and Brenda developed highly interactive workshops to help lawyers locate places within their own practice of law to decrease the toxicity that often accompanies an adversarial approach to legal problem solving and replace it with a focus that improves the client’s satisfaction with outcomes as well as the lawyer’s well-being. One afternoon, while working on an article, they ran across a quote by Bishop Desmond Tutu that resonated with both about the work they had undertaken in lawyer wellness. “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

And that’s how Elliot and Brenda approach lawyer wellness! Trying to find ways that lawyers are becoming unhappy, stressed, and depressed. We want to determine why our profession creates a situation with such high rates of alcohol and substance abuse. It is not enough to create programs for impaired lawyers, refer lawyers to counseling, or encourage lawyers to meditate or do yoga. We must find the ways to remove the toxicity from the work we do every day and find ways to be happy lawyers.