A panel at the American Bar Association House of Delegates on Aug. 5 at the Annual Meeting in Chicago explored how the legal profession is changing at a program called “ABA 150 and Beyond: Tradition, Values and Evolution.” The ABA will turn 150 years old in 2028.
The panel batted around several topics — new developments in artificial intelligence, different styles of communications, incivility on campus and the legal generation gap.
But the most highlighted and personal issue was mental health. A compelling story came from panelist S. Collins Saint, who was just 29 when he almost died because he couldn’t stop working.
Saint was two years into private practice and felt very sick. He couldn’t carry groceries into his house without stopping to catch his breath. At one point, his resting heart rate was over 120. But he didn't go to the doctor “because I felt like I couldn't stop billing.”
When he finally went to the emergency room, he discovered the truth: His left lung was collapsed and his right lung was two-thirds collapsed. He had a tumor the size of a cantaloupe in his chest.
“And I didn't know because I didn't go to the doctor,” said Saint, currently an associate with Brooks Pierce in Greensboro, North Carolina. “The ER person who was treating me said, ‘Why did you wait so long?’ And the only answer I had was work.”
The problem, Saint said, is that lawyers take on other people’s stresses — their legal cases — but no one takes on lawyers’ stress. “We have a mental health crisis in our profession and it is getting worse, not better,” Saint said. “And I was close to being a victim of our mental health crisis.”
Therapy helped, he said.
“I went through a lot of therapy because of this, and I thought my therapy was going to be focused on grieving the life that I had and dealing with my mortality…. But what it turned into was therapy about the importance of appearing competent. That was what I was focused on, was appearing competent. The perception of me and our job is performing. We perform for a living. And I think that's the root of our mental health crisis in our profession.”
Saint said many lawyers still turn away when talk turns to mental health care.
“If we don't talk about these things, if we continue to bristle when somebody says ‘I have therapy’ or ‘I need to take care of my mental health,’ we're going to have a very short-lived profession.”
Leslie Kendrick, dean of the University of Virginia School of Law, said she sees this a lot among young students. “What I witness,” Kendrick said, “is a group of students, a generation that really wants to display competence.”
She called it “the myth of the ducks.”
Many students, she said, think of their colleagues as ducks gliding along easily while they paddle furiously to stay afloat. In reality, of course, all ducks paddle fiercely.
“Nobody's actually gliding easily,” Kendrick said. “But law students, especially first-year law students whom I teach in torts, have a tendency to feel they're the only ones who don't get it. They're the only ones who are sweating…
“This is not a profession where success is perfection,’ she concluded. “Success is resilience.”
David Lat, a legal journalist at Original Jurisdiction, said one secret to resilience and to increasing civility in the legal profession is slowing down.
When Lat was a student at Yale Law School, he said, there was a wall on campus where people could post messages to the community. “You had to write things, and everything had to be signed, and you had to tape it up there,” Lat recalled.
Then the wall moved online. “You could just respond in an instant with a few clicks and a return, and this led to a lot of very uncivil, very contentious, very unpleasant interactions,” he said. Eventually, the law school went back to the physical wall.
“In some ways, it slowed things down,” Lat said. “It made for greater deliberation. You need to actually think about what you're going to write instead of just hammer something out and hit send…
“When you see situations where lawyers got into some kind of trouble, sometimes ethical or whatnot, a lot of times the lawyer was responding in the heat of the moment. Slowing down and actually taking a moment to take stock can be very important to avoiding a lot of problems.”
The panel was moderated by Carolyn Sawyer, a former ABC News reporter and current CEO of the Tom Sawyer Company in South Carolina.