This program is brought to you by PLI, the Practicing Law Institute. To learn more about this podcast, visit pli.edu/probonopodcast.
For me personally, and when I talk to students, I talk a lot about the only true failure is an experience that you don't reflect on and learn from. We communicate to students that somehow the choice of your first job sets the tone for your entire career forevermore and can never be walked back from, which is just not true. There's really not a yellow brick road.
You've been sold this idea that if you follow this path, you're going to make it to Oz, and we just have to tell you that that's not real, but there's a real gift in that there's no yellow brick road, meaning you can forge your own path.
Dedicated listeners to this podcast have heard all the different reasons we encourage you to do pro bono work, and we have encouraged you to be thoughtful about what kind of pro bono work you want to do, about where you really fit the best. But recently, we've learned about a different approach to pro bono, an approach that uses pro bono activity as a design tool, as a prototype for trying something out, and sometimes as an opportunity to learn from failure.
In honor of wellbeing week in the law, we are going to pull back the lens and learn about a broader vision for how lawyers can learn to ditch the yellow brick road someone else laid out and design their own fulfilling life in the law, and how we can use our pro bono activity as a tool in the design process.
It can be very easy to just step into the next obvious pathway. And being intentional about your career, I think, it's really empowering, and making sure it's something you're choosing, not a thing that's happening to you, to both fulfillment and, I think, to your sense of self.
Welcome to Pursuing Justice-- The Pro Bono Files, a podcast from PLI, the Practicing Law Institute, in which lawyers and clients talk candidly about their pro bono experiences. I'm your host, Alicia Aiken, and for 15 years, I was a legal services attorney in Chicago. Now I'm a principal at Danu Center for Strategic Advocacy, a national organization supporting advocates and mission-based organizations in their own pursuit of social justice.
I'm also a faculty fellow at PLI, where I get to work on special projects like this podcast. Lawyers do not have a reputation for being happy, and much of the data supports that reputation. A recent Bloomberg Law survey found wellbeing declining and burnout on the rise. In 2017, the ABA's task force on lawyer wellbeing published some sobering numbers about how many of us are, well, not sober and also struggling with our mental health. And the problems aren't just in America.
The International Bar Association conducted a survey of attorneys worldwide, and the average wellbeing score for their respondents fell below the level where the World Health Organization recommends screening for depression. But there's also a substantial group of people with law degrees who were very happy, fulfilled, and engaged, and thriving. Is that just dumb luck? Are they the ones who got their dream jobs? Or is something different going on?
Are there lessons that other lawyers can implement in their own lives? What if all of us can learn to design careers that will sustain us and lend a sense of wellbeing over the course of our lives? So today, we're going to encourage you to do pro bono work because it can help you to figure out you. Try pro bono in a new area of law. Find out whether it excites you or bores you.
Do pro bono work to test out if you might like a different practice setting, a different group of colleagues, or a different pace of work. Don't get me wrong. You still need to be a zealous representative, bring your highest ethical standards to the pro bono client, and keep your promises. But it's not selfish to learn something about yourself at the same time. And since you will be testing something out, you don't have to worry about whether it's the right fit.
In fact, you might get the most out of it if you wait until after the experience to figure out how it fit you. Why am I suddenly telling you to dive in and don't worry about whether it is the right fit? Because I just had a conversation with law professors Bridgette Carr and Vivek Sankaran.
They're breaking new ground by teaching both law students and practicing attorneys how to use the principles of design to intentionally create a fulfilling life in the law, and they gave a whole new way to think about pro bono work. Let's meet the professors and learn more about their project.
Vivek Sankaran. I teach at the University of Michigan Law School, and my primary directing the Child Advocacy Law Clinic, but over the past few years, I've been coteaching a class with Bridgette Carr called Designing a Fulfilling Life in the Law, where we really help law students figure out who they are and how they can make law school more fulfilling for them, but really how to lay the foundation for a really successful legal career.
My name is Bridgette Carr, and I teach at the University of Michigan Law School, and I think if there was a title for a professor of helping people feel seen and heard, that kind of encapsulates all the things that I do, whether it's representing survivors of human trafficking in the Human Trafficking Clinic, or teaching Designing a Fulfilling Life in the Law with Vivek.
And for those of you thinking it's too late because law school is in the distant past, don't worry. Bridgette and Vivek have also started a coaching program for practicing lawyers, helping people apply the same design principles that they teach to the law students, in a project they call LawLifeProf coaching.
And for so much of our work with our students and with our clients and our coaching business is just getting them to take a step back to identify who they are and what they want out of life, because for so many of us, we've never just slowed down to figure that out.
Let's dig into that thing Vivek just said-- "slowing down to figure out what you want out of life." That is such a different frame than the one I remember hearing in law school. In law school, it felt like a pretty narrow set of "shoulds." There's a track you get on. Choose the private firm track or the public interest track. Get the right summer jobs, do the right extracurriculars, get the correct first job, and you are on track.
When that public interest fellowship I wanted didn't come through as a 3L, I thought I was off the track. I had no idea what to do next, and I didn't know how to intentionally forge my own path, and I was scared, scared that I had already failed and I hadn't even started making loan payments.
So much of law school is built on the toxic scarcity mindset that there are sort of three positions that will satisfy people or that people should aim for. And the reality is that the legal profession is abundant. If you are trained in the law, there are so many opportunities for you. I was just meeting with someone and I thought, oh, I could work for them. I could do this. I could do that.
There are so many jobs that would be fulfilling and energizing and engaging for me that I will never live long enough to exhaust all of them.
That point about toxic scarcity really rang true for me. I mean, it can be so easy to navigate your law career as if you're still on some curve, as if there are still only a couple of A's to be had, and you're at risk of losing out. Vivek told us how that scarcity mindset was still impacting him even when he had a job he genuinely enjoyed, teaching the Child Advocacy Clinic at Michigan.
VIVEK SANKARAN: I reached a point where I was always focusing on the next professional success or outcome, whether that was the next case or an accolade or getting tenure. And in the process, I was missing the joy of the journey because in the end, the journey is the destination. If you don't enjoy it on the way, you're not going to enjoy it when you get there.
And we got to this point where we had sort of reached the pinnacle, if you will, of our jobs, meaning job security and promotion and whatnot, and we thought is this it? Is that all we got here? And we began a process of really talking to people we admired personally and professionally to figure out what brought them joy, what energized them, and how might Vivek and I be able to change our own lives to match that.
And in doing that, we learned so much about ourselves and our own journeys, but we also realize that these things we were learning really were just a toolbox of skills that can be taught, and that we wish we had been taught when we were lawyers. And so together, he and I decided that we really want to offer this toolbox of problem solving skills to Michigan Law students.
I still remember-- I don't know if Bridgette remembers this-- but we were on a panel together for the law school for admitted students, and I said something like, OK, so here's how you survive law school. And Bridgette cuts me off and goes, that's the wrong metric. This isn't about surviving. This is about thriving. That's the mindset that we need to embrace this with.
And at first, it was a little jarring because people don't use thrive in law school in the same sentence, but I've come around to it and that's my north star now for everything that I do both professionally and personally and in law school and outside is, how can we have fun while being challenged and being fulfilled?
Even if you finished law school decades ago, come on, let's be honest. Those messages that we got in school? We take them into the world with us. The emphasis on surviving rather than thriving, the pressure to be on the correct track, the fear of failing-- a lot of that can get worse after school is over because there's a fear we wasted time or a fear of the debt we took on. It just sounds so free to put away the "shoulds."
Let go of the idea of a right track, ask way more questions about who we are and what we really want for the journey-- it sounds great, but how do you do that? I heard you talk about the fact that you and Vivek started talking to people that you respect and tried to learn from them. And once you learned from them, then you've turned this into both a course for law students and also a coaching business for lawyers. What did you learn?
What were the big takeaways that you got from talking to people?
Well, I think that the biggest takeaway was just this overarching reality that Vivek has already mentioned, that this message that we have to be unhappy as lawyers, that everyone is unhappy, that no one is thriving personally and professionally-- which just wasn't true. And I think it's the dominant narrative, but it wasn't the reality that we were finding when we started talking to people. And I also think it was a reality that, yes, I think there are dream jobs out there.
But the more I do this work, the more the realization is you take yourself to whatever job you go to, and there are people who hold the exact same positions we hold who are not thriving, because it's so much the skill set that you bring to any job and how you can craft that job to match what your values are, what energizes you, and so I think that's what we were learning, was that it really wasn't job specific about the people who were joyful and fulfilled.
It really was that they all possessed these three buckets of skills. All of the people we talked to were curious. So one of our mottos is be curious. Be curious about yourself, be curious about your values, be curious about the world around you-- and then try stuff. All the people we talk to are willing to try stuff, fail-- that word is a struggle for me, because it's not a failure when you learn something from it and you reflect on it, right?
Try stuff, fail, pivot, move, do something different, or keep going that direction because you realize it's the right thing for yourself, and then stay connected. That's the third bucket that we put things in, which is stay connected to yourself and your values, like what brought you here, and also stay connected to the people you love and care about in your life.
Bridgette and Vivek found inspiration from the work of professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, who are design educators at Stanford University. You can find many of the tools that we are discussing today in their best selling book, Designing Your Life, but the law profession is notoriously resistant to change.
Bridgette and Vivek rightly recognized that lawyers were going to need a specialized approach before they could lean in and apply the principles of product design to planning a career path. And their course is very much grounded in the world of design.
Michigan Law School's alumni magazine describes the coursework like this-- "students use iterative stages of design thinking, exploration, ideation, prototyping, and realization to consider how they can maximize happiness and success in their own life." But I'm partial to the simpler way of describing it-- be curious, try stuff, and stay connected to what matters.
And I think, as Bridgette said, what we learn is it starts with-- one is knowing who you are, what your values are, what brings you energy, and recognizing that all of us are different, and giving yourself permission to be different is so key to the process that we're thinking about. And then two is accepting the realities of where you are.
Some of us have debt, have families we need to take care of, and we can't go do public interest work right away because we have financial obligations, and not to feel bad about it, and that, in fact, you are serving the community by taking care of some of those obligations and caring for others in your personal life.
Another thing that we think about and have learned is I think lawyers in particular, and law schools do this a lot, is we assume that the law has to be your calling-- like that if you're in it, you can't just sort be kind of in it. You have to be like knee-deep, and you've got to love reading cases on weekends, and really giving people sort of permission for law to be a job. It can be a fun job, but a job to pay the bills, and your real calling could be in your community.
It could be coaching youth sports. It could be serving your church. It could be taking care of your parents. It doesn't have to be your job. It's a really giving people the language to think about whether it's a job, a career-- like something they want to advance in-- or a calling. And for lawyers across the map, they answer that question differently. And again, it's the idea that that's OK. We're all wired differently.
And so, so much of our work with our students and with our clients and our coaching business is just getting them to take a step back to identify who they are and what they want out of life, because for so many of us, we've never just slowed down to figure that out. ALICIA AIKEN: Vivek and Bridgette are obviously very excited about teaching these design principles. But what is it like to learn and try to apply them, especially if you are already midstream in your career?
We were able to find out by talking to Jessica Morton, Michigan Law class of 2013. Bridgette offered a Zoom book club version of the course during the fall of 2020. Jessica had already had plenty of traditional success in her career. She clerked for the Fourth Circuit and the DC district court, and at the time of the book club, she was a litigation associate at a prestigious firm in DC.
Long before Bridgette's book club, Jessica had already recognized the value of assessing her experiences to see what she liked or didn't like about them.
So when I went to law school, I wanted to be an international human rights lawyer. This, in the year 2010, was not unique. I was an absolute cliche. Everyone in 2010 wanted to be an international human rights lawyer, and I was right there with them. And I never even crossed my mind that I would go to a law firm when I was applying to law school.
And I think I had this idea, in law school, that is, now I know, deeply incorrect, that you're either a public interest person or a private law firm person, and that is who you are. It's something about you. And I think one of the things that I have really recognized in the years since, and especially with the work that Vivek and Bridgette are doing, is really divorcing the idea of your job being who you are.
And that is I think really hard for a lot of lawyers to do, and so critical to having a good perspective on how you're serving your job and how your job is serving you.
I love that phrase. OK, tell me more.
I did my 1L internship at an international rights organization. It was my absolute dream. I thought I'm achieving what I have planned to do, and I'm so grateful for the opportunity, thought my colleagues were amazing, the work was truly inspiring. It was everything I had been promised, but I realized, in the course of the internship, that was not a sustainable career for me over years instead of months. It was very emotionally draining.
And I thought I should look more broadly and see if there's something more sustainable. And so I have so much respect for people who have the emotional capacity to do that work full-time for years on end, but I knew it was not the way for me to start my career.
And so that's what led me to think about trying a law firm because once I had decided that path was no longer the path that I wanted, it really made me question what I wanted to do, and I had no obvious second choice that I was really invested in. And I really lacked that certainty, especially after my first idea was no longer the right fit for me.
And so I really liked law school, I really liked all areas of the law I was studying, and so I thought I should buy myself some time and to try to figure out do I enjoy being a [INAUDIBLE] I took clerk. I think I was afraid of closing doors.
Clerkship is such a good way to figure out from a generalist perspective what most interests you, and so I had two really amazing clerkships with phenomenal judges and was so grateful to have them and thought, maybe I will come out of this knowing what area of law speaks to me the most, and I came out of those clerkships thinking, I still like all of these areas of the law.
And so it really just enforced for me that maybe I'm not ready to choose an area and specialize, and maybe that's OK for where I was in my career. I really felt, in that moment, that I needed to do more personal professional growth to learn more skills and to see a broader array of litigation practices across these fields I was interested in to really know where to best commit my career in the future.
So where did you go? What firm did you go to?
I went to Paul Weiss in DC.
Jessica is clearly a very talented lawyer. She was literally on the traditional yellow brick road, federal clerkships, position at a great firm, and she was working hard to learn from her experiences, but finding value and finding success in the traditional career track is not the same thing as designing a fulfilling career that particularly suits you.
When you're really busy, it can be very easy to shunt aside hard questions about what you want your future to look like, and it's particularly easy because they are hard questions, and no one enjoys spending their limited free time going through a really difficult self-examination.
What did you do with Professor Bridgette Carr? JESSICA MORTON: So I-- as I said, it's very easy to not think about your future whenever you're very busy, and then the pandemic hit. And I was still busy, but in a very different way. And so I think, especially a few months into the pandemic the first fall, I was really sort of re-examining my values and re-examining how I wanted to spend my time, and in a moment the world felt like it was falling apart in some ways.
And I wasn't sure how to best do that, and very fortuitously, I saw that Bridgette was mentioning, I think, on Twitter, maybe-- on some sort of social media-- that she was running a book club for alumni who were thinking about how to find fulfillment in their career and transition steps. It was in this fall 2020 virtual book club that Bridgette talked with the alumni about those ideas of being curious, trying stuff, and staying connected to values and priorities.
I think it's so important to help people figure out where they're going to meet their financial needs and then where they're going to find meaning making, and I do think law school teaches us that we should find them all in our job, and we might not. And there are also many people who enjoy the thing they do to make money, but still want meaning outside of that, and that's where I think pro bono opportunities are such a fantastic way to do that.
Or even if you do find purpose in your own work, how can you keep doing that in your pro bono time? And so, I think, as lawyers, aren't we lucky that we have a pro bono requirement as part of our profession, so that we have a culture that says, not only is this a great thing for you to do, it's actually just part of our identity that we're going to spend part of our time using our skills to help others, and it can help us.
It can help us figure out things that give us meaning and figure out what we enjoy in different ways that might be different than our day job.
Where does pro bono fit in to your buckets of being curious and trying stuff and staying connected?
I was going to say it's in all three buckets. So I think for a lot of lawyers, they leave law school not knowing what brings them energy. And so I think the struggles that a lot of folks who are working in private practices that it's not-- they're not feeling fulfilled. And so one, pro bono cases can give them a sense of impact, and especially if they're representing an individual client somewhere, give them a chance to figure out what does bring them energy. I think it is a form of prototyping.
Many people who go to firms might not want to be there forever, but they don't know, again, what it is that they want to do next. And so it's a chance for them to try stuff and figure out whether they enjoy it or not. Some of my best clinic students learn at the end of the semester that they don't want to do litigation, and they're like, oh, I don't know if taking this clinic was the right decision because of that. I'm like, it was exactly the right decision.
And then, third, the community of pro bono lawyers is such a great way of building relationships with people doing interesting work. I think of my time at the Children's Law Center in Washington, DC, where we had this vibrant pro bono program, and I just got informed, deep friendships with many of the firm lawyers working with me. And so I think it really fills all three buckets in a bite-sized way, that you can try something, you're not committing to long-term.
But I think what Bridgette said is so important, that the only-- to the extent that we use the word failure-- the only failure is a failure of reflecting and paying attention to yourself. And we need to get the "should" out of it, like I should be liking this, and really own that our emotions and experiences are all valid, and let's lean into it see what we enjoy, and if we don't enjoy it, pivot and try something else.
Bridgette, what are your thoughts?
I completely agree. Thinking of my own career, I started off working at a law firm after graduation, and I did healthcare compliance work, and but I maintained my connection with Freedom House, a shelter for asylum seekers in Detroit, and did pro bono there. And then when I left the law firm, I started an asylum clinic. And so I was able to stay connected to a community I care deeply about, but I was still able to find meaning by staying connected with that pro bono opportunity.
And even now, I think sometimes people think because both Vivek and I have a calling and we provide free legal services for a day job that we don't ever engage in pro bono. But I do pro bono cases now, and sometimes I try them in spaces I've never practiced before to learn to see, is there something here that might be helpful in my day job?
I'm actually getting ready to start a pretty big expungement project, and it's all because of my pro bono work that I learned about and how it connected back with representing human trafficking survivors. And so, again, I think if you view it as a prototyping space, a space to try stuff and to learn more about yourself and what you want to do in other spaces, it's beneficial for the skills that you're donating and the time that you're donating.
I would not be doing appellate work right now had I not engaged in pro bono work in the space. I was a trial lawyer in practice, got to Michigan, but just kind of handled a bunch of appeals pro bono just because I wanted to see what appellate work was like. And A, it gave me opportunities to practice skills by paying attention to how I felt. I loved it, like I loved the brief writing. I loved the oral advocacy. I loved thinking about the law and the growth of the law.
I never would have realized that had I not just dived in. But the reason I dove in is because I wasn't marrying it. It was just a quick little try of doing this, and it's changed my life now that I'm teaching other law students how to do this thing that I love. And I never would have gotten there without engaging in pro bono work.
Jessica also reflected on the impact of pro bono opportunities in her career journey.
The piece of me that wanted to go to law school to be an international human rights lawyer never went away. It was still an animating force. It was really important to me that I be able to live my values through pro bono work. And I think that this was sort of the first moment I was coming to terms with that public interest-private law divide I felt during law school, where you really can do both things simultaneously.
So tell us more? How did pro bono fit into your tenure at Paul Weiss? JESSICA MORTON: So I always would tell more junior associates, when they were asking about how to do pro bono work, that you have to start right away, as you wait until you have time to do it, you'll probably not have time for a while. And I was so fortunate that my first day at the firm, a partner I'd interviewed with called me and said, I have a pro bono case doing criminal defense in the federal district court here.
Do you want to join the team? And, of course, I said, yes. And it was the first of many incredible experiences I had doing indigent criminal defense work at the firm. I was able to be part of a team working on a case on those issues in the Supreme Court, and there was one case that I worked on in the Fourth Circuit, where we had been assigned the case and were able to secure the release of our client from jail. And it was just incredible moment.
What did you learn about yourself and the kind of lawyer you wanted to be from doing criminal defense?
I definitely learned how important it is to me to really think about both individual issues and systemic issues together. I think anyone who has meaningful interactions with the criminal legal system can see how some issues faced by your individual clients are largely reflective of systemic issues within the system. And so I think that it really led me to think that impact litigation might be a place where I'd be interested in going in the future.
So what other kinds of pro bono did you do?
I was able to work on a case in North Carolina on a voting rights case, where the state had implemented a voter ID statute. I worked with a team litigating that in state court.
All right, and so the same question about the voting rights case-- what did you learn about yourself and about the kind of lawyer you wanted to be?
It really emphasized something I already believed, which is how critical a good team is to good strategy, and how much I enjoy working on cases with teams that are really having full, thorough strategic discussions.
I am always made a substantially better lawyer by having someone else read my briefs, someone else talk through strategy with me, and I think that was a case where we had a terrific team at the firm and really phenomenal partnership with a nonprofit organization, and having all of those brilliant people sharing and trading ideas made work so much better, and I found it both better work product, and also, professionally and personally really satisfying.
I'm really not the kind of person who's made to litigate cases in isolation. That really reaffirmed that for me.
What I'm hearing is you had a strong sense of your values going in, but you're developing an even better sense of how you want to live them.
Yes.
As I said before, Jessica had some innate sense of the importance of being curious about herself and trying stuff, and that was before she ever did the Designing Your Life book club with Bridgette. But I wanted to hear more from Bridgette and Vivek about how people can be taught to implement the design methods and how they can make those insights actionable.
So I've heard both of you talking about the importance of reflecting on an experience, of paying attention to how you felt when you were doing it. What are the tools that people can use if they don't just instinctively go through that reflection process?
And I think even those of us who think we instinctively go through that reflection process probably could use some tools. I mean, I definitely know that I'm someone who, when I'm given a framework and forced to slow down and reflect, I'm a better reflector because I can be a fast reflector. And so one of the tools that we use is called energy mapping, and we ask students to write down all their daily activities and then put it on an axis that really says, did this increase my energy?
Did this decrease my energy? Sort of think about the rhythm of a day, and then we give them some frameworks to think about. This is how you might be able to do all the same activities, but put them in an order, or restrict time for certain things, or add in community to something, and thus up your overall energy.
So I wouldn't say that in either our teaching or our coaching that our advice is you just got to quit whatever you're doing and start it all from scratch and good luck and go find the unicorn. No, it's really let's pause, reflect on what's going on in your life, see where you're already gaining some energy-- how can we maximize those things? How can we help you lean into those things?
And then for some people, it may be like, oh, I'm learning that a different job would actually really fulfill me, and here are the three reasons why. But it's so much more important to do it that way than to just say, I don't like this, so I'm going to go get another job because you'll take so many of the habits that are probably not serving you well in your current job to that job. What did I miss, Vivek?
I think one of the things that we rarely do in life is have conversations about the things that matter to us. And so what we actually do in our conversations with our clients and our students is almost force them to have the talk about the things they really want to talk about. So what we do is we have assignments on defining your values as it relates to your place in the world, and what role you want work to play in that.
And I think one of the things that we do is not only ask people to write, but we ask them to share their writing with others, whether it's us or their classmates, and get people to reflect back to them where the energy is, and then we think about where there might be tension between what you want out of life and what you want out of your job.
One of the fun assignments we do is we call it journey mapping and we have people basically write down three alternate paths that their life could take if they have to leave the path they're on right now. And so path one is the thing that's kind of related to what you're doing-- that's probably the thing you would do. Path two is like a little bit off the beaten path, and then path three is like money, prestige is not an option is not a concern about that at all, what would you really do?
And we just love it because it brings out who people really are and gets them really excited, and in that process, they realize that their path probably involves some element of all three. So I think to answer your question, I think what we do is we provide sort of structure in asking the right questions, and then it's really creating a space and a community for you to share that.
This community space to discuss values and big ideas-- it left an impression on Jessica. Here's how she remembers the conversation in her book club.
And so being in a group with people and sharing your wildest dreams and your thoughts about whether or not your future aspirations and your values line up is really wonderful at creating a sense of meaningful community. And having those questions in isolation is never going to be as satisfying or as meaningful as discussing them with other peers.
That's a huge deal because exactly what you said, that there's this weird isolation in a group thing that can happen among lawyers, where we think, oh, I'm the only one who's doubting the path. Everyone else is on track. And that kind of group vulnerability is not a thing lawyers are known for. Can you describe anyone-- you pick which-- one of the guided discussion activities that you did that stands out for you was really impactful?
The one that stands out to me the most was a discussion about the mindset of abundance and really thinking in broad terms of what you would do if anything were possible. And I think that was really useful to me because as a litigator, a lot of my job is to issue spot potential pitfalls. And I'm very good at it now, and I am so good at it that I can now do it in my personal life. And it's very hard to turn that off.
I remember we had this sharing discussion where we all shared what we would be doing if anything were possible. I can't remember what my answer was.
I remember other people's, and seeing all the things that my amazing peers are interested in doing or maybe holding themselves back from was so revelatory, and really made me think about, one, how can I be more encouraging of people who had aspirations they're maybe not acting on, but also how to really develop blue sky thinking in my own life and look to see possibilities instead of potential problems in looking at the future.
I actually think that, in our profession, we often don't share the things that we really want to do. We hide them. We don't talk about them. And we're afraid about saying, I really want to be home with my kids and that's more important to me than being a lawyer. For me, and my law students have heard this a million times, I love coaching youth basketball. I do it a lot. I do it for my kids.
It's one of the most fulfilling things that I get to do every single week, and I love it, and I'm not ashamed to admit it and talk about it. And so I think it's creating a lot of space and freedom and giving people permission to share their dreams. And that's the space where the magic happens is when people are finally willing to open up and talk about it.
And so I think for me, it's just giving people the permission and the structure to have the conversations that matter, and to be honest and authentic about how they're feeling about things. And that's where growth really happens.
OK, so how do you help people think about balance? Because we're talking about a lot of ideas here. Your law job may be a job, and it fills your financial needs, and it's important to try stuff and to be open to new things and that pro bono is a way of prototyping without having to quit your job. We also want to value our whole lives, not just our professional lives.
And so I think what I'm leading up to, which is that, for a lot of people, the time pressures makes it feel like pro bono is not an option or that doing pro bono will actually just increase the stress and the anxiety. So how do you how do you think about it? I hear both of you saying you're clinical professors and your teaching nationally innovative classes and doing pro bono and spending time with your families.
How do you help people think about striking a time balance in their lives in a way that could include doing volunteer pro bono?
Yeah, so I think balance starts with what your values are first. What are you trying to balance? Because I think the reality is you have two people with the exact same jobs, and one person will feel like they are balanced and one may feel like it's out of balance, but in reality, it hinges on what it is that you want out of it.
And so I think the first thing that I would really get folks to articulate is what does balance mean to them, and that would require them to figure out, OK, I want to spend more time with the family or friends. But there are also people who are wired to want to work more, and I want to sort of own that, one, that we're all wired differently. The other thing I want to own is that there are different seasons in anyone's life as you think about balance.
I think about my first five years in DC, when I worked at the Children's Law Center, and by any traditional measure, I didn't have any balance. But that was because I didn't necessarily want balance at that stage of my life because I was a newbie, a novice who didn't know anything about how to do this new craft that I'm learning, and I needed to learn it. So I immersed myself in it and got good at it by just diving right in and having it be all-consuming.
And that's what I wanted at that stage in my life, but now my life looks very different as I have different priorities and values. And so I think first is really recognizing where you are and what you truly want. The next is that you might not-- I think once you figure out what your values are, you need to figure out where you're going and what are you trying to achieve.
And you are absolutely right, Lish, that for many people on this podcast listening to it, this isn't going to be like tomorrow, all of a sudden, they can achieve a balance. But if they feel like their job is truly unsustainable for the type of life they want to live then they need to start pivoting. And it could be a slow pivot, but they need to start pivoting, and that's where pro bono work, or making time to do this reflection, even if it's a short amount of time, can play a critical role.
And I think we've been talking about pro bono work and trying to fit it in-- pro bono work is such a big tent. It doesn't have to be representing a client for the next year.
So when I hear Vivek use the word magic, it makes it sound like this design process can be really transformative. But sometimes, even if you know you are looking for transformation, you really don't know how to get started. I mean, really, how do you begin the process?
I think the first thing I would say is start now. And this is what we say to our law students who all often come and say, OK, in three years, when I'm done with law school, I'm going to start doing all of these things. And then you talk to young associates at law firms-- OK, in five years, once I do this, this, this, or make partner, then I'm going to start working on those things.
There's always an excuse for not starting now what you should have started years ago, and it comes down to the three buckets for us-- really being curious and building space for reflection. And that could be a minute a day. Don't make it a bigger deal than it actually is. The idea of just trying and doing stuff-- the first thing that people do when they're like, OK, I need to look for a job is oftentimes they just start searching on the internet.
Or I want to do pro bono work-- I'm going to spend hours googling it. And yeah, maybe a little bit, but really the only way you're going to figure this out is by trying stuff and figure out easy ways to just try and see if you like something. And then the third is start now in investing in relationships. And think of it broadly-- not just your friends and family, but look for people you admire in the work at your job or in the community. Reach out to them.
Set up lunch or coffee and pick their brain about what it is that makes them happy. Create a community of people right now with a friend or two, or connect with us to talk about the things that matter to you. So I think, for me, the number one thing is don't wait. Accept where you are. Figure out the space that you might have and the realities, given your time pressure and commitment, and do something.
I know if Vivek's is start now, mine would be start small. There's a great story about-- if you are someone who does Peloton-- one of the instructors who's quite famous, Robin, she was a lawyer before. And she gave herself 10 minutes a day to dream a different life for herself. And she wrote down sort of like what we would call a head-heart exercise, like what did her heart want?
And when she wrote it down, you would look at it and think that job you want that combines your fitness and allows you-- for her, it was allows her to come to work showing her whole self-- that job does not exist for someone who's practicing law right now. And she had written down essentially the job she has, as the vice president for fitness instruction at Peloton. She just gave 10 minutes a day to that reflection, and what I think is really crucial.
So for start now, start small, be vulnerable-- because if you're spending those 10 minutes a day still sort of using other people's goals, other people's values, and not having a true conversation with yourself, then you're not really starting.
And what impact did this guided design process have on Jessica Morton?
It made me more open to possibility in the short-term, but I think the best long-term lesson for me was seeing what Bridgette was modeling, which is that this is not a sort of one time fix-it solution, that you will have this moment where you're thinking of the minds of abundance and you've done all this work, and you figure out your next step, and then you're set and you fixed yourself, and you've set your whole career up?
But that is a self-worth tuning up every now and then, seeing how important it can be to take your career in small, manageable chunks and constantly evaluate what makes sense. And so I think there's so much liberation in having the pressure taken off of making sure that every choice is the perfect choice that keeps the right doors open, and sometimes allowing yourself to think about next steps in a way that gives you future opportunities that may not be clear yet can be really liberating.
So you hinted earlier-- do you still work at Paul Weiss?
I do not. So during this book club, I really did a lot of thinking and a lot of thought about what I wanted my life to look like. And the other thing that I think this was very helpful for is really thinking about what you wanted your life to look like in all aspects, not just professionally, and what that meant for your time outside of work as well.
And I decided that I was so grateful for my time at the firm, but that I really wanted the kind of pro bono work I was doing to be my full-time job, and that was the right fit for where I am right now. And I was so fortunate to find a position at Democracy Forward Foundation, which is a non-profit legal services organization that does a lot of impact litigation and across subject matters with a focus on preventing abuses of power.
And so I felt so fortunate that I'm able to continue the things that I really valued the most, which are doing this kind of impact litigation, working with a tremendous team of people who are incredibly collaborative, and doing that as my full-time job.
But those are things that you learned were important to you, both during your commercial work, but also, you described, during your pro bono work.
Absolutely. I think had you told me, when I was a 2L, I would want to do impact litigation, I would have said, absolutely not. I really learned through my experiences how much I really valued that kind of work, and also how much I value the legal skills and strategic thinking that go into them. And that is such a wonderful gift of our profession that we're able to do that.
And I think that feeling empowered in a situation where other people can feel powerless is maybe one of the best mental health benefits doing pro bono work.
Designing a fulfilling life sounds big, but start now, start small, reflect on how your experiences make you feel-- that is doable. Pro bono can be one tool for getting started. How many other professions have built an infrastructure for you to try out a different version of the work without ever giving up your day job, and you get to help someone else at the same time? What a gift. In honor of Mental Health Month, I'm going to ask you to do something-- literally just something.
You decide-- something that indulges your curiosity, or something new to you, or something that deepens your connections. It might be something in pro bono, but it might not. But let that something be the first brick in the path that you design because it is the right fit for you.
Thanks for listening to Pursuing Justice-- The Pro Bono Files, a podcast from PLI, the Practicing Law Institute. This production is dedicated to the pro bono and public interest lawyers working to improve access to justice. A special thanks goes to our producer, Daniel Painitz, as well as our host, Alicia Aiken. Please note that the views and opinions expressed during this podcast represent those of the individuals being interviewed and not necessarily those of PLI.
PLI is a non-profit learning organization dedicated to keeping attorneys and other professionals at the forefront of knowledge and expertise. For more information about PLI's wide-ranging curriculum of pro bono programs, visit pli.edu/probono.