LCL Offerings

Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers means many things to many people. Ideally those that seek its services do so before their personal challenges result in professional problems.

I’m a regular member of LCL’s Professional Conduct Group, a group made up of attorneys who have been subject to some form of Board of Bar Overseers discipline. Members represent every stage of the disciplinary process: Most have already been subject to a sanction, be it suspension, or disbarment. Some are in the very earliest stages of the disciplinary process and may even still be practicing pending a temporary suspension or some other, lesser disposition of their matter. Others have already done their time as it were and have already been successfully reinstated to the practice of law. It’s a testament to the importance and power of this group that those lawyers, the reinstated ones, who are under no obligation or mandate to come to this group, continue to do so, in many cases years after they’ve returned to the practice of law.

Many lawyers went to law school hoping to make a contribution to justice by working on behalf of the unfortunate, oppressed, and vulnerable, inspired by figures like the fictional Atticus Finch or the real life Jan Schlichtmann. Some actually end up doing this kind of work, where the demands may be less about billable hours than about dealing continuously with human pain – cases, for example, of domestic violence, tragic events, tales of torture in those seeking asylum, child neglect, and more.

Like others who work with traumatized individuals (e.g., physicians, nurses, mental health professionals), these lawyers are subject to a particular kind of stress – hearing the details of traumatic experiences in the presence of the individual who has experienced them and is still reacting to them. Often compounding the situation is a degree of relative helplessness to fix the problem in the face of various entrenched systems, very limited resources, and having to repeatedly confront some very bad realities.