Holidays: Lawyer Perspective

I would be remiss if I only spoke about holidays from the perspective of the divorce client. I realize this blog is certainly oriented towards clients, but what I am providing here is hopefully a valuable piece of context for you when you interact with your attorney during the holiday season.

Holidays are hard for everyone. Stress, obligations, money, and all of your family dysfunctions rolled into one. This is just as true for a lawyer as it is anyone else. Just like anyone else, we have our own difficulties and pressures in our personal lives. Being a lawyer does not make us immune from those things. To the contrary, given the intensity of our work, we are often more prone to it than some.

For family law attorneys, however, it is a bit more than that.

I do not have any scientific data to back this up, but from oceans of anecdotal experience and talking to other lawyers about it, I can confidently say that the holidays are always the most stressful time for family law lawyers. The factors I laid out above make the season a pressure cooker for clients, and so it is a pressure cooker for us. More upset people, more emergency motions, more allegations of drug use, domestic violence, you name it. We will talk to more people who are deeply in crisis during this time of year than we will any other time of the year.

There is such a thing as secondary trauma. This is the term used for what people like lawyers and therapists go through when we sit with clients through their traumatic experiences. When we empathize with clients and connect with their circumstances, really feel what they feel, we get hurt, too. Secondary trauma certainly isn't anywhere close to being in the "eye of the storm," but when you sit with clients through crisis as many as seven times in a day... it takes a toll. It can be hard to open up and be with someone's pain when you have already had to do so several times in the day, all while fending off irritable opposing lawyers and unrepresented parties.

Inevitably, lawyers are trying to make miracles happen during the holiday season for our clients while preparing for our own holiday and worrying about our staff (most of us lose sleep worrying about whether or not the people who work for us are going to have a good holiday).

One of the things I learned through doing it wrong for years was the importance of boundaries. If I tell my family I am taking a day off to be with them and then cancel it because a client has a crisis... I'm tacitly telling my family where my priorities are. If I say I put my family first and mean it, it means I have to be inflexible about having some time off. One of my very wise mentors used to say that you have to treat scheduled time off with the same seriousness you would treat a trial.

Clients can struggle with that, but let me assure you-- it is absolutely critical that your lawyer have time to rest, reflect, and be human just like the rest of the world. I have been doing this long enough to see some colleagues I respect have some serious personal problems that impacted their professional work. Lots of this came from an inability to have work-life balance.

Your lawyer will do the best job for you if he/she is a mentally healthy, balanced person who has a solid support system, deep family roots, and enough rest to access the creative and artful parts of their brain. Realize that letting your lawyer have some time to recovers from the rigors of law practice is part of having a good lawyer.

If you have concerns about a serious emergency popping up during your lawyer's down time, do not be secretive about it. Make a plan with your lawyer. It is not at all uncommon for me to designate another lawyer in my office to be "on call" for a high conflict case if I will be unavailable.

Hopefully this will provide you with some valuable context (and reduce your frustration) if you reach out to your lawyer and he/she is out of the office for the holiday. To slightly bastardize a famous Stephen King quote, "Law is a support system for life... not the other way around." If your lawyer understands this, you are likely in good hands.