Working Toward Well-Being

• Author: Anna Marie Kukec
• Pages: 62-63

62 || ABA JOURNAL JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2019

PHOTO BY DANE_MARK/GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY OF TERRY HARRELL

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EDITED BY LEE RAWLES

LEE.RAWLES@AMERICANBAR.ORG

Substance-use disorders and menta l illness

can tear apar t families. But those issues have

united many entities in the A merican Ba r

Association to work toward one goal: improv-

ing the well-being of legal professionals.

Since a 2016 survey on substance-u se disorders among

lawyers revealed t roubling outcomes, many entities,

including the ABA Working Group to Advance Well-

Being in the Legal Profes sion, the ABA Commission on

Lawyer Assis tance Programs, the National Task Force

on Lawyer Well-Being and others were jolted into act ion.

They launched campaigns, pledge s and a toolkit—with

more to come.

“We want lawyers to get help to move from ‘doing OK’

to thrivi ng, as well as get help when there is a serious

impairment,” says Terry Harrell, exec utive director of the

Indiana Judges and Lawyer s Assistance Program and

chair of the ABA Working Group to Advance Well-Being

in the Legal Profes sion.

Of the 12,825 attorneys w ho responded to the survey,

20.6 percent reported problematic alcohol or other sub-

stance use, and 36.4 percent qua lifi ed as problem drin k-

ers. Respondents were impacted i n many ways by

substance -use disorders, inc luding missed dead lines,

inappropriate behavior and fam ily concerns.

The survey led to a ta sk force and the creation of the

ABA Working Group to Advance Well-Being in the Legal

Profession. They presented Resolution 105 at the 2018

ABA Midyear Meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia,

asking all st akeholders in the profession

to review the national t ask force report to

improve well-being throughout the pro-

fession. The resolution was adopted.

The group had also worked on a res-

olution proposing a model impair-

ment policy for legal employers, which

it planned to introduce at the 2019

ABA Midyear Meeting in L as Vegas on

Jan. 23-28. But it will be held for fi ne-

tuning based on feedba ck from various

stakeholder s.

“In our e orts, we have discovered that it is di cult

and may not even be useful to d raft a one-size-fi ts-all

policy,” Harrell says. “There are too ma ny di erent kinds

of legal employers of vastly di erent structu res and dif-

ferent sizes. We have decided that it may be more helpful

to legal employers if we simply create some guideline s to

assist them in dra fting their own internal policies.”

TAKING THE PLEDGE

That’s why the ABA Working Group instead decided to

launch the Well-Being Pledge Campaign in September,

Working Toward

Well-Being

ABA entities partner to o er lawyers

and legal employers tools to deal with

substance-use disorders

By Anna Marie Kukec

Terry Harrell