Well-Being for Lawyers (and everyone else)

What do lawyers know about well-being? Turns out, the American Bar Association produced a report on it in 2017. In 2019, the Hawai’i Supreme Court appointed a Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being, and in June, 2021, we published our report. We concluded that “well-being is an indispensable part of a lawyer’s duty of competence.”

This is true for non-lawyers, too. We can’t do good jobs for our employers or our customers if we’re not well. We can’t be good parents, caregivers, neighbors, and friends if we’re not well.

We also concluded that well-being is not simply up to individuals. Our employers and organizations can support us or sabotage us. Read our report–especially the part about legal employers–to get ideas of what your organization can do to support well-being.

Hawaii Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Rechtenwald said of lawyer well-being, and this can apply to almost any occupation, “My hope is that as a profession, we can learn from the experience of the pandemic, taking the advantages of flexible work options and applying them permanently to create a new model of a modern workplace, but with appropriate guardrails, so employees can still get much-needed downtime.”