Being a Lawyer is like running a relay race… so what will you pass on? (What have you received?)

Our work as lawyers is a kind of relay race. We try to create solutions to overwhelming problems & pass them on to keep our clients’ rights and freedoms alive.

But do we know (or admit) what we’re really transmitting in our work? When we pass the proverbial torch of our legal solutions, do we share the full picture of what it took to get there?

Including how we & our clients each face the many kinds of adversity inherent in advocacy, …which so often make demands of us beyond the cognitive & intellectual training we received?

If we listen closely to what our clients, colleagues, students & community say, we can clearly hear they’re affected by adversity in legal work.

They tell us when they say these words:

-“The lawyers made a bad situation worse”; or

-“I didn’t go to law school for this” ; or

-“I never want my kid to become a lawyer”; or

-“My case was worse than the original injury and damage.”

Yet it’s within our power to transform these statements. To meet with resilience skills adversity or trauma and their many relatives (like loss & grief) that the majority of lawyers and clients will at some point experience in life.

(Statistics Canada says that 64% of people in Canada are exposed to a potentially traumatic event at some point in their lives. Trauma is an event that overwhelms our normal capacity to cope & creates a fear response in the brain.)

When using resilience skills, our work becomes a generative relay. Where we pass on as many benefits as we can from lawyering. Even by making visible the (usually invisible) adverse impacts of advocacy.

We can hear the most important benefits of legal work made real when someone we work with says:

-“I haven’t told anyone this but I’ll tell you because I know you’ll understand”; or

-“I’m so grateful you were involved. No one else saw what would help”, or

-“I wish I talked to you sooner”; or even

-“Now that I’ve talked with you, I have hope.”

These beneficial experiences are the best successes of our work as lawyers, no matter what practice area or client type.

And these beneficial advocacy experiences can be built with resilience tools.

I offer some of these tools through coaching, training, consulting and writing.

And I’m proud to be part of a team sharing this approach in a new book published this past week by the American Bar Association (Practice Management division) called “Trauma-Informed Law: A Primer for Lawyer Resilience and Healing”, which I’m excited to have co-created with Marjorie Florestal, Myrna McCallum & J Kim Wright and numerous amazing contributing authors.

I look forward to sharing more here about our book.

Today I wanted to explain the book’s context. Many of my colleagues and network connections know me from prior conventional legal work, and I wanted to share that adversity & resilience factors including trauma can affect (and benefit) all types of legal work. While some areas of law can definitely be affected more than others, none are exempt. All are included in this relay.

You can find me here, or follow me on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helgimaki/