Well-being programs for lawyers catching on with major firms

Listen to this article

Growing attention to behavioral health problems in the legal profession has prompted law firms to focus more closely on protecting and promoting their members’ mental health and overall well-being.

Increasingly, firms are adding well-being programs or taking steps to improve them. Two Twin Cities law offices with well-established wellness programs are Kansas City-based Stinson and Minneapolis-based Faegre Drinker.

In 2021, Krista Larson joined Stinson to serve as the firm’s first director of well-being, after serving in the same position in the Boston office of the Morgan Lewis law firm.

Larson said the well-being program she has developed at Stinson takes a holistic approach, meaning it “focuses on what it looks like to thrive in all areas — professionally, but also in relationships with family and friends, and wherever people find meaning and purpose.”

“It’s all those pieces that support well-being and help people show up and be their best every day at work, and with clients,” Larson said.

Her approach is tailored to personality traits often shared by attorneys, according to research.

“We know that lawyers, on average, tend to have a personality profile that can differ pretty dramatically from the general population,” Larson said. “Law school essentially trains you to be a skeptical thinker.”

Being a successful client advocate often means adopting a risk-averse mindset of skepticism and pessimism to protect the client’s interests, Larson noted. “So, it makes sense that we often see skepticism so prominently in the average attorney.”

Stinson’s program provides not only free counseling and therapy services (through referrals to therapists) and education, but also “supportive organizational policies that allow employees to take time off to adjust their schedules and attend to other areas of life,” she said.

One of the firm’s tools to support wellness is a monthly breakfast for associates to allow them to build informal connections. There is also a monthly all-attorneys lunch “with the sole focus of bringing people together to give them a chance to connect aspects of themselves outside of work and build connections,” Larson said.

Larson, who is not a therapist, stressed that her approach is grounded in the field of applied positive psychology, using data-based evidence “to understand what helps people thrive and be at their best. I use my subject matter expertise to talk about those lessons that can be applied in daily legal practice. We make sure that everything we share is very practical and actionable for attorneys, to support their well-being.”

The wellness program is part of a larger employee assistance program that the firm also makes available to employees’ family members.

Larson said the response to Stinson’s program “in general has been very positive and open-minded, with a little skepticism and caution. Many people at the firm are champions of the wellness program, while and others aren’t paying much attention to the work we do and the offerings. For the most part, people are somewhere in the middle.”

Not having had regular interaction with attorneys prior to becoming a service provider in the industry, Larson said she has been “pleasantly surprised at how open attorneys are to the program, on average. They have been really willing to ‘go there’ and take the time to really engage” with the wellness work. Stinson is a proud signatory of the ABA well-being pledge for legal employers, she noted, “a fantastic industry endeavor that requires us to take action on a lot of important things.”

In mental health and wellness terms, that presents something of a paradox, she said. “Where it becomes an issue is that pessimism and skepticism are often tied to emotional distress and mental health challenges.

“We know that a more optimistic mindset is going to be supportive of one’s health and well-being.” Larson strives to help her attorney clients find the right balance.

Last November, Faegre Drinker was selected as the winner of The American Lawyer’s inaugural “Corporate Culture and Well-being” award at an event in New York City. The award statement cited Faegre’s “gold-standard well-being program.”

Faegre has had wellness programs of some type for a number of years, according to partner and Minneapolis office leader Lica Tomizuka. The firm increased its investment in staff wellness in March of 2022, when Denver-based psychotherapist and clinical social worker Ali Schroer became the firm’s “dedicated counselor,” she said.

Schroer’s practice, Mental Scope Consulting, works with law firms, medical practices and corporations nationwide.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, Schroer was working with a number of physician clients, “who are similar (to lawyers), Type A, high-performer personalities. I was seeing a growing need to address more proactively some issues that high achievers are facing. We know that this is a difficult profession.”

To remotely serve clients at Faegre’s offices across the U.S., Schroer uses a HIPAA-compliant app called Simple Practice that is designed to protect client confidentiality.

As part of Faegre’s employee benefits program, Schroer provides individual counseling for up to six sessions; employees can also use Faegre’s employee assistance program.

Schroer said she provides an “upstream” approach to mental health. If individual circumstances warrant, she strives to “help legal professionals manage their energy and not just manage their time.” That includes “trying to help them find things that bring them joy but don’t interfere with the amount of time they do need to work.”

Schroer’s counseling work does not include attempting to mediate interpersonal conflicts, but she does provide coaching on “how to have a courageous conversation when something is going on within a team or practice group,” using techniques like therapeutic listening — “listening first and asking questions with an open-minded perspective.” The counseling program has helped Faegre’s EAP maintain a utilization rate of about 6.5%, compared with an industry average of 1% to 2%, Tomizuka said.