By Reita Pendry The Lawyer Assistance Program (LAP), through its professional staff and a large network of volunteers, provides free confidential assistance to lawyers, judges, and law students in addressing substance abuse, mental health problems, and other stressors that may impair the ability to practice law effectively. Robynn Moraites, LAP and Its Regulatory Purpose, North […]
By Anonymous To be fair, it wasn’t good news. But the partner was practically hyperventilating. By his account, the news that we’d just received would destroy our client’s case, embarrass us in front of a federal judge, imperil our relationship with the client, and pitch the firm into financial freefall. In short, it was, through […]
The ABA Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being (“Task Force”) was created in 2017 in response to the findings of the 2016 ABA Hazelden Study documenting the prevalence of impairment in our profession. The Task Force included the ABA Standing Committee on Professionalism; ABA Center for Professional Responsibility; ABA Young Lawyers Division; ABA Law Practice Division […]
By Robynn Moraites and Harold Hong, MD Consider this article a public service announcement based on the emergence of an alarming trend we’re seeing at the Lawyer Assistance Program: an increase in cases of drug-induced delusion and psychosis, not only in lawyers, but in children of lawyers. This article explains why. One case is too […]
We at the Lawyer Assistance Program write and talk about the fight/flight/freeze response in law practice all the time. As a result, many lawyers across the state have come to understand the ways in which we, as lawyers and judges, may struggle with compassion fatigue and secondary trauma from repeated exposure to client trauma. While […]
NCLAP publishes a quarterly e-newsletter, Sidebar. LAP volunteers regularly submit articles for Sidebar around recovery themes or slogans. LAP volunteers understand, as few others can, the sense of loneliness and isolation that are so devastatingly integral to depression and drinking problems. “You Are Not Alone” is a popular theme because it offers so much hope. […]
Trauma and Resilience Trauma is not necessarily what comes to mind when one thinks of lawyers and judges. Yet a surprising number of us come from traumatic backgrounds and childhoods. In fact, many folks who enter the legal profession do so precisely because of the historic trauma we have experienced. Maybe we want to work […]
There is a national effort underway to raise the consciousness of the legal profession. Individual stories, like Payal Salsburg’s, are being promoted on social media sites like LinkedIn as part of a #fightingstigma campaign. I encourage you to read her short story – one of super success, by anyone’s measure, and of the dangers and […]
I was talking to a friend from law school about a big project she had undertaken and recently completed. As she described the multiyear project that she worked on in fits and starts, she repeatedly used the word “slacker” when referring to herself and some of the paralysis she experienced while working (unpaid, in her […]
Think everybody else has figured out a special something that you have yet to discover? They haven’t. Worried secretly that you are, at best, deficient, at worst, a fraud that has no business practicing law, sitting on the bench, or holding your current position? You aren’t. And you are not alone. In fact, if I […]
And Covid! Continues. Really? Aren’t we in the home stretch yet? Apparently not. Breaking news (that surprises no one): vaccine rollout not happening as quickly as planned/predicted… B117 Covid Mutation Bomber now looms…blah blah blah. There is an adage in long-term recovery. “If you stick with the basics, you never have to get back to […]
Something interesting happened when the world screeched to a halt and the courts closed in mid-March. The lawyers we work with as volunteers and clients did not respond as everyone predicted lawyers would.[1] Were there, and are there still, fears of financial insecurity due to the decrease in new legal matters, reductions in salary, or […]