Lawyer Wellness Workshops

Lawyer wellness is a topic near and dear to my heart. I’ve watched so many colleagues suffer from the adverse consequences of our profession. A few years ago, I was having lunch with my colleague, Elliot Hicks when we were presenting workshops at a retreat with the West Virginia Bar Foundation. Our conversation turned to the attorneys that we know who suffered depression, alcoholism and the large number who died from suicide.  We did some preliminary research and learned from a 2015 study of 13,000 American lawyers that 21% of lawyers surveyed engaged in problematic drinking. The study demonstrated that 28% experienced symptoms of depression.

Since Elliot and I both have worked as litigators and mediators, we explored the differences in the two and what could be imported from the mediation practice into the law practice to improve the way lawyers feel about their work? We decided that such a change could deeply improve lawyer wellness, maybe even beyond other efforts that involve meditation or yoga. We decided to work towards a change to improve the way we work to 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.” 

Over the next few years, we developed interactive workshops to help lawyers locate places within their own practice of law to decrease the toxicity that may impact their well-being. In doing so, we can follow the advice of Bishop Desmond Tutu. “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.” Perhaps we can find ways to improve our work so that the rescue becomes unnecessary.

We formed Upstream CLE, LLC and now provide our workshops nationwide in both an on-line and in-person format. We have launched a website at lawyer-wellness.com that describes our efforts and look forward to finding more ways to improve the lives of lawyers as they work to improve the lives of their clients.