2024-04-20 Enhancing Attorney and Law Firm Wellbeing Through Integral Resilience — The Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage
by Julian Gresser
I had my first taste of lawyer mal-being in my first assignment as rookie clerk in a large and prestigious law firm. I was instructed by a senior partner to write a memorandum for an international bank client, advising it on how to discriminate in hiring minorities. I refused. The next assignment followed soon after: develop a strategy for another bank client to escape liability and pay nothing to a poor Hispanic borrower who had a paralytic attack after the bank repossessed his car, containing his prescribed medicine, for delaying payment. I demurred. Later in mid-life while I was practicing in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the firm’s clients requested a legal memo on how to escape liability for dumping toxic waste into the Bay. I was able to duck that assignment. The challenge continues now that I’m in my 80s. Just last year in our negotiations on behalf of a gravely ill patient with multiple myeloma, our legal team requested a telecom company to make a modest and reasonable accommodation to our client under the Americans with Disabilities Act in adjusting the placement of a small cell antenna across from our client’s home. The opposing counsel refused, explaining to the effect that, if we save your client’s life, we will need to save other lives. I submit that such cases occur daily in the practice of law today, and perhaps long before; and further, that they lend insight into why there is still a crisis in lawyers’ health and wellbeing; why six years after the publication of the ABA Task Force’s 2017 National Report on Lawyer Wellbeing, so many lawyers hate their work, hate what they do to others, and hate what they have become. But practically, what can be done about it? This article charts a practical adaptive path for law students, lawyers, and law firms through the dark wood of how law is practiced today, particularly at many of the large and established corporate firms.
The central thesis of this article is the principles and practices of Integral Resilience offer a systematic and holistic path toward enhancing lawyer health, wellness, and wellbeing. Put simply, Integral Resilience is a state of wellness and wellbeing. The article advances several further hypotheses:
Integral Resilience is an Art that can be mastered with diligent practice supported by expert coaching.
Each move is holographic, meaning that it is closely allied with and reflects many other moves and principles. Thus, each advance or incremental improvement compounds the power and effect of many, if not all, other moves.
A small and seemingly modest advance may deliver unexpected multiplier results of Integral Resilience. I refer to this as the Resilient Multiplier Effect (RME).
The entire process is further compounded by continuous exploration, discovery, iteration, and collaboration in teams and cohorts. Progress is advanced by live coaching and through a Collaborative Learning Platform, assisted further by an interactive AI program, “Themis,” made available in the online live course described in Section V.
The principles of Integral Resilience apply equally at all levels: individually, in teams and cohorts, within the firm, extending to its clients, professional networks, and the communities it serves, where each advance at one level builds and enhances the resilience of others.