Welcome, sadly, to the legal profession, one of the statistically unhealthiest out there. Pay attention to this, because the pull to sacrifice your own health and wellness for the work is strong, and it is culturally normalized. And it is not worth it. We need to acknowledge /1 https://twitter.com/joshhanson1530/status/1390446781331345408

that lawyering is fundamentally an act of caregiving. We take people’s fear, uncertainty, and doubt and help them identify & mitigate threats while navigating the complexities of our legal system. In many cases we literally take up their emotional burden and carry it for /2

them. But (broadly speaking) we don’t train lawyers as caregivers, we train them like we’d train an AI: spot the issues, click the fire hydrant, puppy or bagel. Then we teach highly logical if-then or but-for processes for how to navigate the problem through those /3

issues. We chuckle at the clumsy solutions that 1Ls come up with, just like we laugh at funny paint names or terrible songs from an early neural net. But they both get better at solutioning, to the point where we begin to trust them. They get good at the logic, but we don’t /4

teach the humanity, the “soft skills.” In the case of an AI it’s because we still don’t know how. But with lawyers, it’s because of a mistaken assumption that we don’t need to. Why should a law school use precious hours to teach humanity to a human? We treat these skills /5

as something people either have or they don’t. We lump them in to “character & fitness; we don’t seem to realize that empathy and compassion are teachable skills, which means lawyers can learn them. Not only can they, I’ll argue that they are essential to a sustainable and /6

profitable legal career—from the lawyer’s perspective and from society’s. Which gets me back to law school weight gain (or substance abuse, or other unhealthy behaviors): it is caregiving 101 that self-care is a necessary prerequisite to effective caregiving. The cliche that /7

you need to put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others is absolutely true. Unhealthy habits learned in law school can plague a lawyer for the rest of their life. One problem with the case law method is that it centers the legal work and abstracts it from the client it /8

was done for. We’re taught to remember the case names and holdings, but we strip away an sense of the real people with real problems the lawyers & judges were trying to help. Then, when we get into practice, with real human clients who have hopes and fears and foibles, we /9

are often poorly equipped to deal with them. Far too many lawyers treat dealing with clients as a distraction from their job instead of the central purpose of it. We think of the client as the vessel for our work; a something to be “managed“ instead of a someone to care for. /10

Training to be a good legal caregiver should start in law school, and it should start with teaching self-care. A 1L who learns to identify & manage their stress and emotion and physical health, to give themselves the tools and space to be healthy, will be a far more useful /11

and productive lawyer over the span of a career. (Law firms need to teach this too, but the seed for this thread was from a 1L). And legal profession full of trained caregivers will be much better for society as well. Not to mention it will be a lot longer /12

before the AIs are able to come for your job if you focus your training on the things they are still really bad at, e.g. humanity and emotion, in addition to the highly logical areas of legal analysis where the machines are rapidly gaining ground ;-) /end