While working at the U.S. Justice Department, lawyer Katharine Manning helped victims of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida and the investment fraud case involving Bernie Madoff, who pleaded guilty to money laundering in 2009.
Now a consultant, she advises organizations, corporations and government entities on creating compassionate work environments where employees and clients feel comfortable sharing difficult experiences. According to Manning, when people are in trauma, they all need the same things. She advises listening, recognizing the courage of someone who shares their story, sharing information in return, providing the traumatized person with resources and ensuring they have a way to come back with questions or updates.
“It’s a formula to have a conversation with someone in trauma that doesn’t make it worse, hopefully makes it better and protects yourself along the way,” says Manning, who thinks it’s especially important to guide lawyers on how to lead with empathy, create spaces that are compassionate and elicit better information from clients or witnesses by using trauma-informed techniques.
“It’s really helpful for lawyers to understand how to lower the temperature in the room. Think of all the times they need that skill,” says Manning, whose consulting business is called Blackbird.
A 2021 book she wrote, The Empathetic Workplace: 5 Steps to a Compassionate, Calm, and Confident Response to Trauma on the Job, details her theory. It’s intended to provide managers and employees with the tools to handle with empathy crises that arise in the workplace, such as co-workers discussing domestic abuse at home, employees threatened with violence at work or clients revealing they have a terminal illness.
Inspiration for the book came from the #MeToo movement. Women were sharing their stories, but, Manning says, there was “all this pressure on victims to talk, but no conversation on the obligations of people listening about how they respond.”
She began writing notes on her thoughts about how to best help victims when they open up about their trauma, and she realized she might have the start of a book.
In January 2019, the federal government was in a partial shutdown, which meant Manning wasn’t allowed to work. During that time, she cranked out a book proposal and sent it to agents. She found an agent quickly, and by June, HarperCollins was offering her a contract.
Manning was stunned.
“I didn’t think it would happen so quickly,” she says. “I was a government lawyer. I didn’t have 3 million followers on social media, and I wasn’t friends with Oprah.”
With two years’ salary saved, Manning left the Justice Department in July 2019, after 15 years, to write her book.
The journey to helping other people talk about trauma started with her experiencing it. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, Manning’s first memory is of her father hitting her mother.
“That’s when my mother took my [half] brother and me and moved us into an apartment,” says Manning. Later, at Smith College, she volunteered at a domestic violence shelter, helping staff the hotline. Manning’s goal was to “give people a safe space to talk.”
“I learned then of the tremendous healing impact of being able to share your story,” Manning says. “I think that was the moment that my career path was birthed.”
Today, she says her decision to work in the domestic violence clinic was her “trying to process” her early trauma, but she didn’t realize it at the time.
After college, Manning went to the University of Virginia School of Law, intent on helping crime victims by becoming a prosecutor. However, she worked for a summer in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office and decided she didn’t want to spend her career putting people in jail.
Manning graduated from law school in 2000 and began her legal career as an associate at what is now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. She still wanted a job that would allow her to help crime victims. In 2004, she found a position as a senior attorney advisor working on victims’ rights at the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, which is part of the Justice Department. Manning and her wife moved from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., for the job.
Just as Manning started the job, Congress passed the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. She gave both political appointees and career lawyers advice on policy issues along with legal and practical advice on how to best serve crime victims.
“I quickly became the expert on the new law,” Manning says. “It was definitely trial by fire.”