Dear Advy,
With the current climate of economic uncertainty and increasing global trade tensions, it seems like every issue my clients bring forward is framed as an urgent crisis. While that is often accurate, the result is that managing expectations and prioritizing work has become increasingly difficult. Do you have any suggestions for how to effectively steward clients through periods of heightened pressure and uncertainty—while also maintaining healthy boundaries?
Sincerely,
Coping with Crises
Dear Coping with Crises,
The vicarious distress you experience from listening to your clients’ difficulties is real. The 2022 National Study on the Health and Wellness Determinants of Legal Professionals in Canada found a high correlation between high emotional demands of legal work and burnout. See page 70 and forward of that report if you need some confirmation of what you are raising in your letter.
One of the key skills that helps you manage the effects of your clients' distress is one that you are already aware of, i.e. creating and maintaining good boundaries. Yes, the distress your clients are bringing to you is real, and yes, it is something you need to factor into how you respond to them, but you help no one by taking on the emotional baggage associated with someone else's anxiety about the future.
There is another phenomenon that is closely related to maintaining boundaries between your personal needs and the services you provide your clients. We humans are terrible at accurately assessing how urgent something is for another person. There is robust evidence that we routinely overestimate the urgency of someone else’s request for information or for help. It is important to step back and assess how urgent the client’s problem really is. When you think someone is bringing an urgent problem to you, there is a good chance you’re wrong if you haven’t been given enough information to properly assess and understand the full context. That tendency to react to another person’s request for an urgent turnaround often results in over-estimating urgency and adding to your own stress levels. You are more likely to sacrifice your own needs, and compromise those boundaries you so carefully constructed, when you believe someone is bringing an urgent problem to you. Take a moment to pause, ask for and gather all the information you need to properly assess and perhaps ask the client about how urgent it really is before jumping headlong into solving the problem.
I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention that you can get excellent professional help in setting and maintaining healthy boundaries from the helpful people at your local lawyer assistance program. You don’t need to wait to be in crisis to tap into their expertise. They will be only too happy to help you develop robust self-care habits so you can avoid a crisis in the first place. You may also get some useful ideas about setting and adjusting boundaries in two previous letters to this column.
Boundary issues aside, your clients may well be bringing you real-life problems arising out of the current state of the world. Tariffs imposed by the United States have created havoc in certain industries and perhaps more importantly they create uncertainty about that country's economic policies. They also seem to shift as often as the wind. No doubt that uncertainty generates both concrete problems and anxieties among your clients. Recent volatility in the world's energy markets may also create problems both economically and psychologically for clients. We have been living with inflation after having had a lengthy reprieve from it, brought on not only by those trade uncertainties but also the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is important to remember the distinction between the concrete legal problems that arise out of all of this instability versus its psychological effects. You could be well-placed to help your clients with the former. However, you are almost certainly an amateur therapist at best. You don’t visit an engineer to get advice on how to manage your toothache, even if both of them work with bridges sometimes. It’s unlikely your clients expect their lawyer to provide psychological support either. Your clients probably can’t help bringing their stress - and distress - into their conversations with you, but they don’t actually expect you to solve that dimension of the problem. So, to that little voice you hear in your head that tells you that you should be soothing their distress, lawyers are generally very ill-trained counsellors.
It can be difficult to provide sound legal advice in many disparate areas. For many lawyers, on top of managing expectations and prioritising work, times of uncertainty carry an extra challenge of trying to provide sound legal advice in many disparate areas. It is generally best not to try to be all things to all people. If you are in a large firm, check what kind of "bench strength" your firm has which could allow you to bring expertise from a number of different practice groups. As a general rule, the greater one’s expertise in an area, the easier it is to provide effective, up- to-date advice on a timely basis.
If you are in a smaller firm or a sole practitioner, accomplishing this same task is a little trickier but here's where your CBA membership comes in handy. Attending section meetings, and especially attending cross-disciplinary meetings your section may put on during the year (tax law for family lawyers anyone?) will help you establish a network of lawyers whose expertise in a variety of areas can help your clients. Connecting with others who may be going through a similar experience as you can itself help you manage what feels like an ongoing fire alarm. Of course, there are other ways of building connections in your legal community, and although I’m making this recommendation aimed at lawyers in small firms or solo practice, even larger firms can benefit from knowing who out there has expertise in disparate areas.
However you find them, having access to people with different areas of specialization can help you more easily serve your stressed clients’ needs. A good referral to other people who really know their stuff can help you build your reputation among your clients even if you yourself don’t solve their specific legal issue. Be their go-to person even if that means referring them onward and they will be more likely to come back to you for the next problem that needs solving.
Of course, attending CBA meetings and similar events can also help you augment your own expertise and those of your immediate team. In fact, there is no limit to how you can creatively develop your professional skills and those of the lawyers you work with. Many firms hold “lunch and learn” meetings and may assign more junior lawyers to write bulletins or blog posts about new legal developments as a promotional tool. You can set up the continuing professional development equivalent to a book club, or you can arrange secondments that allow for cross-disciplinary learning. Learning can come from podcasts, from newsletters, from chat groups and any number of other sources. Professional development can even be as simple as showing up 10 minutes earlier at the courthouse when you have a matter in chambers and taking the opportunity to pick up a new book from the law library to read while you’re waiting.
It can be tough in a private practice environment to justify the time spent developing your skills and knowledge. To a degree that is much greater than in-house or government positions, there is so much pressure in a firm to apply skills and knowledge to client problems that will result in billings. Clients often expect that the lawyer or law firm will already have the required expertise in place and are unwilling to pay for lawyers to develop new skills or even just gain familiarity with issues.
There is no simple “fix” for this. Acquiring skills and knowledge versus applying them with mastery will always be a balancing act. This can be particularly difficult for private law firms where the firm managers tend to be more senior members of the group. It can be challenging for those more senior lawyers to recognize that they need to invest in the generations that will succeed them instead of simply drawing on juniors’ existing expertise as a source of billings.
The best solutions start with being aware of the problem. Remember that there will be practice areas and banks of knowledge that seem to be far removed from lucrative billings today but that could become critical someday. What’s obscure or arcane today may be a vital skill set tomorrow.
As Yogi Berra once said, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Look for ways to carve out the time and resources to build the expertise your solo practice/firm/network/legal department will need one day as opposed to just exploiting what is there already.
Be well,
Advy
