From the Yld President
| Publication year | 2022 |
| Pages | 0010 |
| Citation | Vol. 27 No. 4 Pg. 0010 |
Don’t Lose Sight of the Golden Rule
ELISSA B. HAYNES
YLD President
State Bar of Georgia
haynese@deflaw.com
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” “Treat others the way you would want to be treated.” “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” We’ve all inevitably heard some version of the “Golden Rule” growing up and have likely taught it to our own children as well. Now, more than ever, I still find it necessary to reiterate the importance of the Golden Rule in both our everyday life and in our legal practice.
Take a moment and think about how many times you have been on the receiving end of an unnecessarily aggressive email from opposing counsel. Or, for my fellow young lawyers, the number of times you have heard some rendition of the “I’ve been practicing law since before you were born” line (which, in my experience, is even more delightful when it is uttered by your opposing counsel in open court). How many of you have witnessed a lawyer treat staff members or court personnel disrespectfully? If you are a female attorney, how many times have you been called “sweetheart” or “darling” in a condescending tone by one of your male counterparts? I would be willing to go out on a limb and bet most of us have witnessed or experienced more than our fair share of these scenarios.
Before the pandemic, we would interact with each other in the courtroom and take each other out for coffee, lunch or post-work drinks. We would go to each other’s offices for depositions and engage with the deponent, court reporters and videographers. But when the world shut down due to COVID-19, our in-person exchanges were replaced by constant emails, phone calls, and hours of Zoom or Microsoft Teams sessions. We started firing off terse emails while hiding behind our computer screens, not worrying about having to see the person on the receiving end of that email anytime soon. Our stress levels were off the charts as we were working from home without in-person learning or childcare for our kids. The extroverts desperately longed for human interaction and experienced an increase in anxiety and depression. We were angry about being unable to visit with loved ones and live our normal lives; and with all these heightened feelings came the unfortunate decline of kindness and professionalism, at home and at work.
As a millennial, I readily...
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