Be Well

• Jurisdiction: Wyoming,United States
• Citation: Vol. 45 No. 4 Pg. 42
• Publication year: 2022
• Pages: 42
• Year: 2022
• topic: Business of Law

Be Well Vol. 45 No. 4 Pg. 42 Wyoming Bar Journal August, 2022

Congratulations and Keep Going: Progress in Wyoming Attorney Weil-Being

Maryt L Fredrickson, J.

Attorney Jackson, Wyoming

Wyoming has come a long way in attorney well-being in the last decade. Nationwide, the well-being in law movement began with some vigor when the American Bar Association (ABA) released its Task Force Report on Attorney Well-Being in 2017.^[1] While well-being had been anecdotally recognized as an issue prior to that, and there had been some studies, the 2017 ABA Task Force Report was a call to action across the profession. It included recommendations for all sectors: lawyers, firms, bar associations, the judiciary, law schools, regulators, and insurers.

The Task Force Report refers to attorney "well-being" as opposed to "wellness." The term wellness is often affiliated with physical well-being like exercise or perhaps emphasizing the mind-body-spirit connection. By contrast, well-being is broader in scope and looks at the entire umbrella of areas that make a person whole. Well-being is a continuous process where lawyers, judges, law students, and legal professionals seek to thrive in each of the following areas—emotional and mental health, physical health, social connections, occupational satisfaction, intellectual pursuits, aligning with a sense of purpose in life, environmental health, and personal and professional financial health.

In response to the Task Force Report's broad charge to advance attorney well-being, states across the country leaped into action. Some states made their own state-specific task forces that then generated their own task force reports with recommendations. That process took a year or more and was followed by delegating the implementation of well-being initiatives to an entity such as the state's lawyer assistance program or a division of the state supreme court. Some states skipped the intermediate task force step and instead made...