Additional incremental changes to improve the quality of legal services and lawyer lifestyles.
In our last blog post, we discussed the potential for lawyer satisfaction by creating incremental changes within our work. We reviewed three of the approaches that may help improve both lawyer satisfaction and work performance: eliminating the fight-flight-freeze response at work, allow for natural, empathic responses, and integrate our work selves and home selves into a balanced and whole person. Today, we will examine two other approaches that make our professional (and personal) lives much better: considering our practice to be a way to improve the welfare of our community and recognizing the importance of relationship.
We consider our law practice to be part of a larger work to build social wellness and improve the welfare of the community. One of the critical dimensions of wellness articulated by Dr. Bill Hettler, co-founder of the National Wellness Institute (NWI) is social wellness.
The social dimension encourages contributing to one's environment and community. It emphasizes the interdependence between others and nature. As you travel a wellness path, you will become more aware of your importance in society as well as the impact you have on multiple environments…(S)ocial wellness follows these tenets: It is better to contribute to the common welfare of our community than to think only of ourselves. It is better to live in harmony with others and our environment than to live in conflict with them.
Lawyers are often initially drawn to the restorative practice because they want for their work to have meaning and contribute to the larger community. This dedication become part of the whole in creating wellness.
We recognize the importance of relationship and view most conflicts through that lens (rather than an isolated conflict to be resolved as a single transaction.) The adversarial approach to conflict tends to minimize the importance of relationship, developing a destructive way of interacting with opposing parties, opposing counsel, that often impedes relationships with colleagues, family, and friends. Lawyers Pauline Tesler and Louise Phipps Senft have written extensively about the importance of relationship to lawyer wellness. Millions of years of evolution have required that people be reliant upon one another, with that reliance being facilitated through relationships. Without positive, productive relationships, we suffer.
To understand a practice of law that values relationship, think of it as addressing conflict with a relational interaction versus a transactional interaction. The later focuses on maximizing individual, personal gain without regard to long-term consequences or the impact on the broader community. Some modern practices of law have become transactional not only as it relates to individual cases, but also as it relates to our colleagues and employees. Is it possible that lawyers have become commodities and their professional status is only as a part of a series of transactions for an employer’s gain? Have our client's cases become commodities? Is the sole question a transaction to maximize financial gain?
This transactional approach does not promote the social and emotional dimensions of wellness. It fails to provide a sufficient basis for social health at work. Lawyers who cultivate transactional successes over positive relationships may experience a lack of respect for relationships at work, and at home. An unwillingness to nurture relationship can contribute to the toxicity of our work.
Most fundamentally, the restorative lawyer is a well lawyer because he or she has switched from the adversarial, competitive approach to this broader relationship building and problem solving way to resolving conflict and promoting healing. What can we do to create environments that foster wellness? How can we work to change the toxicity we’ve come to accept? How do we create an environment with sufficient resources to combat the toxic environment? We need to proactively examine who and what we are in our profession and use that position to create an environment for healthy conflict resolution. When we are caught up in the whirlwind that most of our work creates, we can lose sight of the forest for the trees. Getting a response filed on time, preparing for an impending oral argument, answering a client's distressed email, and other day to day time sensitive tasks take precedence. However, until we slow down long enough to examine what we are doing, to introspectively evaluate how what we do impacts us, our families and our clients, we will continue to replicate a system that may not be as beneficial and may be harmful.
These two elements: making our practice part of something larger and cherishing our relationships, combine with the factors included in my post last week to summarize five approaches we’ve identified that help to make the incremental changes necessary to improve our practice. If you would like to learn more about our work in lawyer wellness and our workshops, please contact us and we will be happy to discuss this with you.