There is a slightly evil thing that happens when you start writing. You love reading other people’s writing. You want to be generous in your judgment because you know how maddening the craft can be. But inevitably you find yourself evaluating the work both as a reader and a writer. In some cases, this can ruin the pure appreciation of the work.
When I found Ruth Ozeki’s novels, however, I was delighted to enjoy the inverse of this situation. I loved her books as a reader and, as a writer and teacher of mindfulness, I felt nothing short of awe. Ruth Ozeki is a Zen teacher, author and filmmaker from California. Her novels tell tales of tragedy engendered by modern life and the unexpected beauty and hope that can be found therein. The key, as Ozeki shows us, is that we have to look closely and lovingly in the places we’d rather ignore.
That’s exactly what Ozeki’s novels do. She covers the isolation and alienation of contemporary life, including our throwaway and commercialist culture that leads to massive garbage patches in our oceans and hoarding in our homes. Her novels explore inhumanity in our meat industry, media outlets, modern workplaces, and even among well-intentioned educators, social workers, and medical and mental health professionals.
In doing so, Ozeki doesn’t teach the concept of what suffering means. She helps us feel it. Through her characters, we experience how suffering takes root, how we get embroiled in it, and how we overlook the habits that perpetuate suffering for ourselves and others. As any Zen teacher would, of course, she also shows us that there is a way out of this trap if we are willing to open up our eyes and see it.
For example, while reading Ozeki’s latest award-winning novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness I wanted to walk into the book and save the wayward Annabelle who couldn’t cope with all that life had sent her. She would frustrate and dismay me in one chapter with her refusal to face life and be the parent her son needed. Then in the next, she’d be positively brilliant in advocating for herself and her son and show that she didn’t need saving, but simple social support.
In our lives and in the world, we often look for the simple and quick answers and so the big, nasty problems may feel too overwhelming to address. One wouldn’t think that novels, a form of entertainment, could tackle the big problems of the world and still be enjoyable. Ozeki’s novels show that this assumption is wrong.
If you want to learn about mindfulness in a totally new way or you just want some novels that are as wonderfully strange as real life, check out Ruth Ozeki’s work, including:
Founder’s Note: There are a wide variety of reasons that witnesses may be afraid to testify. This blog post is about situations in which testifying will not put a witness in physical or significant or long-term emotional peril. Situations like those may require additional steps and even judicial intervention to manage appropriately. This post is not intended to suggest that all potential witnesses can or should be pushed to testify.
Let’s say you go to meet with an essential witness in a big case and they are visibly nervous. They may express concern about what they have done and show emotions like guilt, shame, or even defeat. Or perhaps they are just terrified about speaking in front of others. How do you react? Most likely, you may feel nervous too and worry about how this will affect your case and your ability to do your job. This is where you have to be really careful.
If there is anything that doesn’t help in a situation like this, it’s judgment. Sure, judgment is perhaps the most normal reaction in a situation like this. Even the best lawyers might react with a sigh and a “Really?” when they are dealing with stressful trial preparations and encounter a witness who is making their lives harder. But please resist the urge.
Judgment in this case may cause the witness to feel more shame and this could cause lead withdraw from the process, clam up, or even become hostile. As you work with the witness, remain calm and attempt as much as possible to show compassion for their situation. If you can do this, you can create open dialogue, potentially calm the witness down, and form the best plan for dealing with the testimony and the nerves.
2. Establish Trust
When people are scared, what do they often do first? They often look around to someone else for direction. If you have a witness who is scared and you have to call them to testify, you surely do not want them to look to opposing counsel for direction on cross-examination. This is why it is essential in prep to establish trust with the witness yourself.
Keeping in mind the warning against judgment just mentioned, be clear and honest with the witness about the process. Help them envision how the testimony and cross-examination will go, so they can process it before they take the stand. Help them understand their role in the case: just to testify accurately. Take responsibility for your part, which is the overall management of the case.
Once the witness takes the stand, it’s all on them. There’s no way around this and that’s perhaps why testifying for many people is so scary. In most situations, objections won’t be an effective way for you as legal counsel to protect a witness. Thus, at a certain point the witness has to protect themself. They have to listen attentively, not allow someone else to put words in their mouth, and articulate their view of the facts.
This takes courage. What helps most people find courage in difficult circumstances? A purpose. In this way, as you go through steps 1 and 2, listen as much as you talk to understand what matters to the witness. If the witness is scared, there likely is something they care about that causes the fear.
If you can help the witness understand how their testimony relates to an important purpose, for the case or ideally for them, it may help them find stability in testifying. Be careful, however, in crafting this purpose that you don’t emphasize it so much that you put extra pressure on the witness. As in all things, balance is essential.
At the end of the day, nothing can make the task of testifying in a litigation matter easy. Being put on the spot to answer questions, including those that can be personal or feel invasive, is hard. With some awareness, thought, and compassion, however, attorneys can help witnesses care for those nerves and reclaim their agency which may help their cases in the process.
As a teacher of mindfulness and compassion, I have learned that a big part of the job is addressing assumptions. When it comes to compassion, this is even more critical since it tends to get less attention than mindfulness. In addition, though compassion is essential and can be incredibly powerful, many people assume it’s just like empathy or no different from being warm, soft, and nice. Even those who have felt the power of a compassionate response may think it’s impossible to cultivate it or show it when needed because we can’t train ourselves to feel a certain way on cue.
I get these concerns because I struggled with them in the past. That’s why I am writing this post to help you identify the things to look for when you practice compassion in your own life. In truth, compassion is not an emotion and does not require a specific bodily response. With time and experience, however, you can identify the experience more clearly so you can understand it better and cultivate it.
A common area of confusion when it comes to compassion is the idea that it is an emotional reaction. The reason that this presents a problem is that people often assume that compassion requires them to respond with certain emotions. In reality, the clinical definition of compassion is the response to suffering coupled with the willingness to help. This means that emotions that are often involved but they don’t have to manifest in any specific way.
Even when physical sensations and emotions are present, you may also find that they don’t stay the same throughout the compassion response. Since compassion is about suffering, the first reaction may be one of pain, discomfort, or concern. In many cases, though, these difficult emotions can shift or transform into something closer to love or connection. This means a variety of bodily sensations are likely to occur, including sensations in the belly and chest and changes to breath and heart rate.
At the end of a compassion response, many people report (and I have personally experienced) feelings of wellbeing and serenity. This is because the compassion response causes the release of the hormones oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin which are associated with love, rewards, and satisfaction. The most common place to look for these sensations is in the area of the heart, but those can range from feelings of fullness to a sense of expansion or lightness or even warmth or tingling throughout the body.
So, what does all of this tell us about what compassion feels like? First, compassion includes present and embodied awareness. Critically, this is an awareness rooted in your own experience that is not entirely absorbed by the situation of a suffering third party. In addition, the compassion response may not be a singular response at all but could by a dynamic unfolding from discomfort and concern into opening and, where necessary and appropriate, action.
For all these reasons, I can’t tell you what compassion feels like because compassion is not merely a feeling and the details of its manifestation may vary. Because compassion is a response to suffering, the particular suffering at issue may affect how it appears. The way to understand compassion best is to pay attention to how it manifests in you as you cultivate it. In short, the big question isn’t how compassion is supposed to feel, but instead how it tends to feel for you.
It is perhaps the most commercialized and made up of all that holidays, but I have a special place in my heart for Valentine’s Day nonetheless. As a February baby, I always loved taking in pink cupcakes to share as my birthday treat for the class.
In addition, February in my home state of Kentucky tends to be a tough month to survive. By the time February rolls around, the mystique and motivation of the new year has worn off and the cold grey weather can pull even the sunniest of dispositions into the doldrums. For this reason, any excuse to spread kindness and cheer is a good idea.
This year, though, Valentine’s is extra special to me and so is my birthday. This February, I’ll be turning 40. Some people might be sad about that but I’m not. One reason is that I get to celebrate this birthday knowing I accomplished a big life goal.
Thanks to many friends from the internet, the book debuted as a #1 New Release on Amazon and has seen a great reception. As a new author, I am so grateful for the support and I want to celebrate it with my community. To do that, starting today I will be giving away 100 Kindle copies of my book on Goodreads. You can enter the drawing any time between now and February 14th. If you win, the Kindle will be automatically added to your Kindle library after Valentine’s Day.
There is a common idea that confidence is this feeling of empowerment. Some people define it in the negative as if it the absence of fear or doubt. I don’t like those definitions. Perhaps they are true for some, but based on my own experience they are incomplete.
I think confidence is more of a process than an emotion. Thus, the test can’t be how you feel in any given moment. It has to be based on what you do over time.
So, when Attorney at Law magazine reached out to me to ask for a guest blog post, it didn’t take long for me to come up with a topic. I knew I had to write about confidence and explain it is really. I also wanted to explain why mindfulness and compassion are powerful tools for building confidence.
To learn more, check out the full guest post here:
It should come as no great surprise that someone who loves writing enough to have written a book and founded a blog loves to talk about writing. But do you what’s even better? Talking about writing with another writer.
This week, I got to do that two times in one day. On Wednesday I recorded a podcast for The Write Approach podcast with my lawyer friend and fellow author, Jeremy Richter. (Stay tuned for that one. It should be released soon.) That evening, I also got to talk to coach, author, and former attorney Bob Levant for the Iron Advocate Mindset Virtual Book Club.
The conversation with Bob was great because, like me, he’s also a fan of mindfulness. He does yoga regularly and explores the concept in his own book, Finding Polaris. Since as Bob describes, he covers the topic in less of a “deep dive” than my book, we get into some of the finer points in this interview.
During the interview, we discuss things like loneliness, managing fear and anxiety, and break down why mindfulness and compassion can help with these things. I had such a good time talking with Bob and reading his book that I wanted to share the interview with you here.
If you’ve followed the blog, you probably know by now that I am a fan of Peloton. Historically, however, I haven’t really used the Peloton platform to support my meditation practice because I prefer unguided meditation. Late last year, however, one of my favorite yoga instructors Aditi Shah announced the new intro to meditation program. As a maven of meditation, I did the program myself so I could tell you about it here.
Here’s an overview of the program, a summary of what I liked and didn’t like, and a bottom line conclusion for those of you considering it for yourself.
Program Structure
The Intro to Meditation Program structure is available on the Peloton app or any Peloton device. You don’t need any equipment to use it, though some headphones and a meditation spot or cushion sure help. The program is designed to be completed over the course of 3 weeks and consists of short (5-minute) instructional videos to explain basic concepts and 5 or 10-minute guided meditations for practice. The concepts covered include mindfulness of thoughts, mindfulness of body, metta (loving-kindness), and them mindfulness of emotions.
What I Like About the Program
Overall, I think the Intro to Meditation is a good start for those new to meditation and mindfulness. Here’s what I liked most.
It Has the Right Stuff.
In my new book, I created a structure for creating a mindfulness practice in 30 days. It included basic mindfulness, body awareness, reconnecting with joy (i.e. mindfulness of emotions) and loving-kindness. The Intro to Meditation program has these same concepts, though the order is different and it is presented in a different way. Thus, in terms of essential ingredients, I think Aditi and the Peloton team ticked the right boxes for the program.
I don’t normally do guided meditations because I enjoy silence, so I was pleasantly surprised that the program meditations actually included some silent spaces. I have done some Peloton meditations in the past that I wouldn’t even call meditations because they were so infused with imagery or storytelling that there was no space for my own awareness. These were comparatively less filled with words and allowed some space to experience the concepts taught in the program.
Even though I am a fan of Peloton and adore Aditi, I have to admit that the program is not perfect. Here are the things that I didn’t love about it.
Aditi Sounds Rehearsed at Times.
Aditi sounds pretty natural when I take her yoga classes, but she sounded rehearsed for most of the explanation videos. And, though I understand that Peloton sells fitness apparel, I thought it was silly that Aditi was wearing a sports bra with no shirt or sweatshirt when she was teaching the passive activity of meditation. To be fair, this was likely the result of a new format and the fact that Aditi was teaching in a new way. In order to get the content delivered in a time efficient way, she almost certainly had to be reading from a script. In other words, the experience of watching the explanation videos lacks the connection you might get even from other prerecorded Peloton classes.
Information Was Conveyed But Real Teaching Was Rare.
Along the same lines as the point above, the Intro to Meditation program provides information about meditation but it doesn’t really teach the subject. Clearly, this is a result of the forum and the intent for the program to only be an introduction to meditation. Even so, the explanation videos could have provided a few more stories or examples to give the content more life. The few that Aditi offered in the videos appeared heartfelt and were effective, so I hope future Peloton programs will dig a bit deeper on this point.
The Order of the Program Felt Scattered.
As I experienced when writing my book, it can be hard to identify the “best” starting point when teaching meditation. Though meditation practices often select a single focal point, our experience is rarely so isolated and usually includes a mishmash of sensory information, body sensations, thoughts, emotions, and external stimuli. Though I like that the Program included the right topics, I found the order somewhat confusing and scattered.
The Structure May Not Be the Best Tool for Establishing a Habit.
The Intro to Meditation Program is an accessible tool to help the millions of Peloton users worldwide learn the basics of meditation practice. Though the Program doesn’t stand on its own to support a long-term meditation practice, that may not be a bad thing. It will likely leave users wanting more but meditation practice is to some degree about exploration. Because the Program makes trying meditation simple and easy, it is a good start for anyone new to meditation but hopefully not a final destination.
This post contains references to suicide. It is published with permission from and deep respect for the family of the affected attorney. It is written by my dear friend, Robyn Smith, who I met in law school. Though we have handled cases on the opposite sides of the “v” for much of our practices, we have remained friends and benefitted from sharing our different experiences. We recently shared a post from Bob Coursey, an employer-side employment lawyer. This post from Robyn offers a different perspective but I think you’ll find that both Robyn and Bob think humanity and decency are essential to law practice.
Just in time for Christmas, Ryan Reynolds, Will Ferrell, and Octavia Spencer star in Spirited, a musical comedy adaptation of A Christmas Carol. It’s a fantastic story of human struggle, self-loathing, and redemption. If you have not yet seen the movie, go watch it right now. We’ll wait.
[INTERMISSION]
Finished? You’re welcome. It was great, wasn’t it?
And there could not be a better cinematic explanation of people struggling with something called moral injury – a concept that describes the price paid by people like us, attorneys who work as we are taught, and who exist within a system that tests our personal senses of right and wrong … and who are hurt by it. Moral injury, according to Veterans Affairs, is a psychological injury that comes from perpetrating, failing to prevent, or witnessing events that go against a your deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.
These injuries have been studied in the instances of combat veterans who have had to inflict harm on others, as well as health care workers who have had to turn away people in need of care. Scientists have noted that it changes the brain, but not in the same ways as PTSD. Spirited depicts several folks struggling with their own pasts, presents, and futures, as their choices and career paths have consequences.
The Spirited character to have watched was Octavia Spencer’s. She does as she is told. She conducts the opposition research. She works up the facts. She discloses the truth. She knows how it will be used. She is hurt as the fruits of her efforts are used to destroy other people’s lives. She knows that’s how it will go. But she is just researching, like we do. She’s just portraying facts, like we do. She’s just doing her job … like we do.
I believe that the law industry is designed to subject lawyers to moral injury. We are trained to work in our clients’ best interests and to keep their confidences. We are permitted to withdraw from representations most of the time – but not all. We may only raise an alert when a client is about to inflict certain types of injuries on other human beings. We have knowledge that can weigh on us. We have to argue things that we do not admire or respect. We are complicit in systems that oppress and injure. And whoever structured this industry decided that was okay, at our peril.
Not all of us, and not all of the time, of course. But our ethical rules do not allow us to prioritize our own morality – ever. I don’t think I’ve met a lawyer who has not had to take a position she abhors, or oppose a person she truly believed to be in the right. In those circumstances, we are told, we have to consider our clients’ best interests, the integrity of the tribunal, and a handful of other things that are not our own precious peace of mind.
I represent workers, including attorneys. Some of them know what is happening around them is wrong, and they feel gaslit by the failure of others to speak up or break free. It’s a lonely feeling. Some of the people I admire the most are people who, astonished, have asked me “Am I crazy?” after recognizing a severe and unbearable moral injury and declaring the pain of it. And suffering the fallout. Speaking out against the machine is taboo, isn’t it?
I had an attorney friend who undertook a very important job overseeing Kentucky’s unemployment insurance agency in early 2020. When the pandemic set in, he went to work, putting every ounce of his energy into connecting newly locked-down workers with the money they needed to buy food, medicine, diapers, and medicine. He would call it “the most important thing I’ve ever done.” He saw problems with the system, some ethical, others legal. He rationalized what he could. He opposed the rest. My friend was fired.
He spent the next several months watching in horror as the benefits system crumbled, with workers spending endless months without benefits, hitting metaphoric brick walls in the agency, and having nobody in the agency empowered to advocate for them. My friend gave an interview to a national media outlet, and when the reporter asked how it felt to watch all of the people in pain as they waited for help that was promised but never provided, he responded simply, “It kills me.” A few weeks later, my friend took his own life.
For well over a year, I did what many people affected by suicide do. I talked with people. I raged against the people who hurt my friend and his family. I blamed myself. I researched and read, looking for something to make it make sense. I looked at studies. Everything I learned about depression, anxiety, PTSD, secondary trauma, and how they affected lawyers was really insightful, but never really a complete picture.
Then one day, I was in my car, listening to a science podcast about the “invisible epidemic” of moral injury. I gripped my steering wheel and yelled, struck by the realization that this was the piece that fit. When a principled person leans into his moral fortitude at a time when very little else is available, and when that sense of morality is shattered … it’s a whole lot to come back from. And we are made of flesh and bone, not iron and steel.
I had been staring into the same abyss as my friend. Because the fact is that I truly believed that I had let him down. And I carried with me every cut from every point in my career when I had helped people advance their own interests against my own sense of morality. In recent years, I opened my own firm. I represent only people I want to and do a lot of pro bono.
While I don’t represent people I don’t want to represent, I am still at risk for moral injury every time I see the justice system (that I prop up) hurt people who don’t deserve it. I’ve watched my opposing counsel wince as they open old wounds in my clients in depositions because it is their job. I’ve heard a government lawyer lament, “Robyn, I have no discretion here” when a person’s ability to feed a family was at stake. I’ve seen it, I’ve felt it, and I know that it’s real.
You are reading this piece on a blogsite where my dear friend Claire gives you tools to process, understand, and heal. You are here to learn about the tools to help you work within the sphere of your own control. But in case nobody has told you this lately, it’s okay to conclude that the things outside your control might be wrong. Real wrong. And you are not a freak for wanting to break free from it. It’s incredibly okay to leave. To adapt. To grow.
My favorite scene from Spirited is a deleted scene showcased in the credits. Will Ferrell’s character wants to know what the everlasting effect of a single act can be – a “ripple.” He wonders, “I have to believe, inside the worst of us there is some decency there … we can achieve something miraculous if we only dare.” That’s true. It is. It’s true of our clients, and it is always true of us.
Because it’s not about winning. Or raking in money. Or having other people be afraid of you. That’s the old way of evaluating success in our industry. The new way, and the way Spirited has considerately reminded us of, is that you can take account of your own worth. And you can decide when someone has asked of you the unaskable. And you can say “no.” You can heal, and you can help others heal. And you can determine your fate from there.
Robyn Smith is an employee-side lawyer at The Law Office of Robyn Smith in Louisville, Kentucky. She chose the area of employment law to protect workers, who she believes are Kentucky’s greatest resource. Robyn has represented workers in litigation against massive institutions, both public and private. She is also a mother of two and committed to improving her community and the profession. Robyn has been honored for her pro bono work, is a coach for law school client counseling competitions, and teaches Law Practice Management at the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville.
The word “badass” may not be the first one that comes to mind when most people think of lawyers. Some people may not like the word. Though the term has been thoroughly adopted into contemporary slang, I’m aware some people may be mildly offended by it. Still, it’s hard for me to deny that being a lawyer is pretty badass.
Yes, we are supposed to be rule followers. In many cases, we are hired because we are experts of the rules. But anyone who has practiced law knows that there are times when the rules don’t tell us everything. Sometimes the rules shift suddenly. And there are instances when we have to blend creativity and ingenuity to chart a course around, through, or alongside the rules for clients.
This is why lawyers, steeped in rules as we are, are not mere rule followers. Instead, our jobs position us to be badasses. Our role is to help our clients shape the future for their lives, their businesses, or their families.
Much the same way, “badass” may not be the first word that comes to mind when you think about mindfulness and compassion. The popular image of mindfulness these days is a blissed out yogi sitting on a cushion. We are more likely to think of our grandmas than a superhero when it comes to the word “compassion.”
This may be hard for some lawyers to hear. I know we can feel like we need to look composed. I know it can feel awkward and vulnerable when you can’t control your emotions. Breathing strategies can help in these situations but at a certain point something else is needed too.
That magic ingredient is compassion. It’s a word that I have seen mostly absent from discussions of stress management for lawyers. I think some people have believed lawyers wouldn’t listen. Some may have believed talking about mindfulness by itself would cover the bases.
I wrote it as a short and simple guide to help lawyers (or anyone else) understand the concepts of mindfulness and compassion and build a meditation practice of their own. Having meditated now for nearly a decade, I understand that meditation can be a challenge so the book creates a four-week program for you to build skills and stamina for meditation. As you do the practices, you’ll cultivate mindfulness, compassion, body awareness, and emotional intelligence.
The book includes no metaphysical discussions, little complicated terminology, and is actively and ardently anti-perfectionist. Admittedly, it’s a self-help book but only in the sense that it may offer some new skills, strategies, and ways of thinking that may allow you to help yourself. Explicitly, the goal of the book isn’t to change you in any way. It’s to help you see how awesome you are because your clients, your family, your community, and the world needs it.
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by experienced employment attorney and friend of the blog, Bob Coursey. You’ll learn about Bob’s character and values just by reading this piece but for more detail check out his bio below.
I was talking with a fellow management-side employment lawyer (who is also a friend) recently and I made an offhand comment encouraging her to go out and continue doing the good work of protecting our nation’s employers.
She corrected me: “Actually, I feel like most of what I do when it comes to counseling employers is protecting employees . . .”
She was 100% right.
I told her I was glad she “corrected” my comment about our job being all about protecting employers. I further told her I felt a little silly that we were even having this exchange, because this is one of my pet issues: I believe there is a common misconception among many (including some of my close friends and family) that, as an employment lawyer who counsels and represents management, my job is somehow anti-employee.
That is so far from the truth. But convincing anyone of that is not the point of this article. Instead, my point is that by lawyering with intentionality we can make the world a better place. My life experience is as a management-side employment lawyer, so the specifics I discuss here relate to employment law.
I’ve been a lawyer for a long time now, and it’s clear to me that management-side employment lawyers are in a position to be a great force for good for employees. But being in that position and acting on it are two different things. I can look to my own 24-year career as a management-side employment lawyer and see that.
Early in my career (before many humbling life experiences, and before discovering meditation, mindfulness, and intentionality), I didn’t consider, at least not with any intentionality, the bigger picture of my counsel to and representation of my clients. Being a zealous advocate meant the client’s interest was my singular focus. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that philosophy. I was very effective and abided by all of my professional ethical duties.
Fast forward a couple decades. I’m a work in progress, like all of us, but I feel confident saying the years have made me wiser when it comes to how I advise my clients.
If you’re not interested in making the world a better place, this article isn’t for you, and that’s fine. But for those of you lawyers who want to be a force for good but aren’t sure how, let me remind you that our jobs likely provide us many opportunities to be a force for good–if we’re intentional about how we lawyer. By lawyering with intentionality, we can help our clients do well by helping them do good.
There’s a lot of suck in the world. To counter the suck, we need good people to act. For most people, the ability to do good is often limited to their own direct actions. But if you’re a lawyer, doing your job often means advising other people on how to act. There’s power there.
We wield that power whether we are intentional about it or not.
Let me be clear: Nothing I’m saying here should be interpreted as suggesting we lawyers violate, or even flirt with violating, our ethical duties to our clients. Our counsel to our clients should never put our clients’ interests or legal compliance subservient to the interests of others. What I am suggesting is that for lawyers to ignore the bigger picture, the broader community of interests, is often to do a disservice not only to those other interests, but to our clients too.
It’s easy for lawyers to fall into the trap of thinking of the much of the world as an us-versus-them environment. We rarely hear from our clients when things are rosy. The world can sound like a pretty troublesome place when every call you take, every email you read, is about disagreements, arguments, accusations, and various troubles between humans. For those lawyers who spend a significant part of their time defending their clients in litigation (like I did for the first 10 years of my career), it may be even harder to avoid falling into this us-versus-them trap.
Now 24 years and lots of life experiences into my career, my heart is softer, my perspective is broader, and at the same time I feel like I’ve never been a better legal adviser. I guess practice makes perfect, because I’ve spent thousands of hours counseling companies to:
-protect employees from harassers/bullies/jerks
-accommodate employees with health, family, religious, or other needs
-support or coach employees instead of imposing discipline
-communicate better with employees
-promote deserving employees
-allow employees to work from home for health or other personal reasons
These are some examples of the type of employee-friendly counsel that I offer when I believe it’s in my client’s best interests, which is almost 100% of the time.
It’s exceedingly rare that good legal counsel in a workplace situation calls for taking an aggressively antagonistic, anti-employee approach. When those unfortunate situations present themselves, we management-side employment lawyers should counsel our clients accordingly. But treating employees with humanity, dignity, and fairness should always be the default.
In my field of employment law, this philosophy yields good client results. How do I know? Clients tell me. I see the lawsuits that don’t get filed. I see the careers that aren’t ended prematurely. I see workplace relationships salvaged. I hear about workplaces where trust exists between employees and management. I could tell you about countless situations that had lawsuit written all over them, but because I worked with my client to take an intentionally employee-focused approach to handling the situation, litigation was avoided.
I believe the same philosophy can yield similar positive results in other areas of law. Regardless of the area of law, there’s almost always a broader perspective to consider than our clients’ specific interest. There’s almost always going to be others affected by our clients’ decisions and actions, for better or worse. For me, it’s my clients’ employees and those employees’ families and communities that I choose to consider with intentionality when I advise my clients. Who is it for your clients?
The world can look like a very dark place to a lot of people in 2022. Our clients and their communities are dealing with everything ranging from mental health struggles to hate and violence. As lawyers, the nature of our job means that we are sought out by clients when they are facing some of the hardest times in their lives, and they look to us for counsel through these dark times.
Are lawyers going to solve all of these problems? Of course not. But in my small part of the world, I have no doubt that my clients have a huge role to play in their employees’ lives, which means that as their employment lawyer, I’m in a position to do some good, not only for my clients, but often in the broader sense. And the world needs every single bit of good it can get. I bet you can say the same about your clients, and your role in advising them.
Our jobs give us the privilege of having a part to play in the lives of many people, which has ripple effects on the world. It’s up to us what we do with that privilege, whether those ripples are positive or negative. Today, I’m going to look for opportunities to do some good in the world. I hope you’ll join me.
Author Bio: Bob Coursey has been an employment lawyer for over 20 years. He spent his first 10 years of practice at Fisher Phillips, one of the most respected employment law firms in the country, where he defended companies in employment related litigation. He then spent 11 years at Employers Council, where he focused his practice on keeping employers out of trouble. In 2021, Bob started his own company—Modern Age Employment Law—where he counsels, represents, and trains employers who are looking for a modern approach to their employment law and HR challenges. Bob is licensed to practice law in Utah and Georgia. He’s also a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and SHRM Senior Certified Professional (SHRM-SCP).Despite all that very dry sounding info, Bob is actually a real person too. He’s a music lover, an OK drummer who still dreams of being a rock star, a daily meditator and certified meditation teacher, a Peloton enthusiast, a t-shirt re-designer, a lover of Utah’s outdoors, and a husband and father of four kids who bring him immense joy.
