Wellness – Law Society of Alberta

This competency requires a lawyer to maintain awareness of his or her mental and physical health and wellness and identify ways to maintain a healthy practice.

COVID-19 Updates

Resource	Summary
Assist	The mission of the Alberta Lawyers’ Assistance Society is to provide confidential help to lawyers, law students and their immediate families with personal issues.
CPD Tips: Wellness	Wellness is vital to daily living and a key component of competency, as we cannot be competent and help others if we are not well.
Ethically Speaking: Addiction	A lawyer who knows that a colleague is impaired bears the burden of ensuring steps are taken to protect client interests, and may carry an additional burden: worry for their colleague. Empathy, the ability to share or understand another’s experiences, can help the lawyer navigate the difficult path of addressing lawyer impairment.
Ethically Speaking: Civility and Burnout	Civility is a concrete tenet of practice. In R v Felderhof, the Ontario Court of Appeal notes that civility is not merely an adornment. It holds the legal profession together and contributes to a just society. Uncivil conduct, conduct that is abrasive, hostile or obstructive, impedes the court’s ability to resolve conflict in a fair, efficient and effective manner.
Ethically Speaking: Competence and Wellness	If competence means doing something successfully or efficiently, a lawyer’s competence includes additional esoteric components.
Ethically Speaking: How Do I Minimize and Manage Conflict With Clients and Other Lawyers?	Managing conflict with clients involves training clients to understand how the lawyer practises, educating them that not only is the lawyer not the aggressor they see on television programs, but that their interests are not served by such aggression for aggression’s sake. Taking steps at the beginning of a file to set out the lawyer’s practice style can allow the client to assess whether the practice style aligns with their values.
Ethically Speaking: Immune-Compromised Work Expectations	What should I do if I’m immune compromised or someone in my family is immune-compromised but I’m still expected to come into work?
Fostering a Healthy Workplace for the LGBTQ Community	Lawyers, law firms, and law societies seeking to create a culture of inclusion and to support LGBTQ colleagues, staff, or clients, may find these tips helpful
Get a Practice Plus-One	If you practice on your own, you may also have noticed how hard it is to take a vacation or just step back from the details of practice for a while.
Letter from Assist: Lawyers and Substance Use	While we do not have a current study of Alberta lawyers, or even Canadian lawyers, and their consumption of alcohol and other substances during the pandemic, other research suggests that it is likely that some Alberta lawyers are drinking more during the pandemic. What does this mean for us as a community?
Letter from Assist: Q&A on Assist Trends over 25 Years With Bob Philp, QC	Alberta Lawyers’ Assistance Society (Assist) has been helping Alberta lawyers for 25 years. Bob Philp, QC, who has served as a director of Assist through this entire period, talks about how the “lawyers helping lawyers” movement has developed during this time.
Letter from Assist: Trends in Assist Usage During the Pandemic	Individual circumstances have caused large variations in individual stress and distress levels. What can we learn about how Alberta lawyers and students are managing?
Letter from Assist: Unspoken Conflict and Boundaries	Burnout is a common issue faced by lawyers. We work long hours for extended periods of time, or chronically, and we postpone personal gratification because our professional commitments take precedence. Self-care takes a backseat because it is seen as an indulgence. This was true before the pandemic and has become even more embedded in our culture during our 24/7 remote work strategies.
Letter from the Law Society: A Year Into Working Remotely	The move to and continuation of remote working, and the other social restrictions with which we have become all too familiar, are focused on protecting our families, our work families, our clients and society at large.
Letter from the Law Society: Building a Stronger Team	With rising demand for good legal talent, and head-hunters routinely reaching out to offer big bonuses and salaries to our associates, now, more than ever, it is an absolute necessity to build a workplace where associates feel appreciated and valued.
Letter from Assist: “I am feeling burned out. Can you help me?”	Admitting that you need help is hard especially for lawyers who are used to being problem solvers. Assist believes in acting promptly when a lawyer or student reaches out for assistance. Self-assessing whether you are in crisis can pose an extra barrier. Many people are reluctant to “bother” the psychologists after hours, but it is important for lawyers and students to know that Assist does not screen for crisis situations or judge callers who may not be in full-blown crisis — we would rather just help them.
Letter from the Law Society: Let’s Not Return to ‘Normal’	Once our work environment returns to ‘normal’, however that looks for each of us, many of the same issues that contributed to the decline in our mental health pre-pandemic will continue to exist. Many of us will still face excessive working hours, high pressure and competitive environments, high-conflict situations, and be subject to both internal and external unrealistic standards of perfection. The transition may also come with its own additional stressors.
Letter from the Law Society: The Well-being Matrix – Why Equity, Diversity and Inclusion are Essential to a Healthy Legal Profession	Each day in addition to the rigors of practising law, some of us, because of who we are and how we identify, weigh our words, check our facial expressions, agonize over a hand gesture and, wonder if our setting an otherwise reasonable boundary is being interpreted as rude.
Mental Health in the Legal Profession: Your Obligations and How to Help	If you suspect a mental health issue is affecting another lawyer’s practice, what should you do?
Preparing for Parental Leave	Preparing for maternity or parental leave may be a cause of stress and anxiety for both lawyers and law firms.
Psychological First-Aid: Alcohol Use	Substance use is a major problem. For professionals, like lawyers, whose job is safety-sensitive and decision-critical, chronic alcohol use would put those they serve at increasing risk. On average five per cent of lawyers seeking assistance from Lawyer’s Assist present with the primary issue being alcohol and/or drug problems.
Psychological First-Aid: Helping the Stressed/Distressed Individual	The stress and distress that we experience is the result of many factors including work, family, finances, parenting, health, and fear about the future, to name a few.
Psychological First-Aid: Stepping Up to the Plate	Psychological First-Aid (PFA) is an evidence-based intervention designed to reduce an individual’s level of stress or distress and to foster short and long-term adaptive functioning and coping. It is a supportive intervention designed to help the individual help themselves.
Psychological First Aid: Stress and Burnout	Do you feel helpless, disillusioned and completely exhausted due to constant stress? If so, you may be on the road to burnout. Psychologists use the term “burnout” in work world contexts to define a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
Psychological First-Aid: Understanding Internal Conflict at Work	Workplace conflict is not just limited to conflict with colleagues, bosses and organizations, but can have far reaching implications not only for the practice of law but for the personal and mental well-being of lawyers and their families.
We Don’t Talk About Burnout – No No No!	Burnout isn’t necessarily something lawyers are willing to openly discuss or admit. It is one of many mental health challenges that we often just don’t want to talk about. But until we do talk about it, healing is difficult. Burnout symptoms can range from things like low productivity and loss of motivation to the more serious extreme of feeling of hopelessness. We know that burnout is endemic.
A Word on Wellness: Dear Advy: Well Meaning, Well-Being Advice	Dear Advy is an advice column by the Canadian Bar Association. Members of the legal community can submit questions anonymously on anything and everything related to well-being, dealing with stress and succeeding under pressure. If a question is chosen, Advy will respond with advice and helpful resources.
A Word on Wellness: Empathy in Practice	Empathy is a critical skill to help effectively meet clients’ needs. The notion that a lawyer’s role is to dispassionately focus on the facts ignores the reality that for most clients, emotions cannot be separated from the issues at hand. It is important to remember that being empathetic does not mean you need to agree with everything your client says or become emotionally invested in their circumstances. Nor should empathy be equated with attempting to be a counsellor for your client.
A Word on Wellness: How to Talk About Addiction With Dignity	Words matter and when it comes to talking about the disease of addiction, we can all do a little better and expand our vocabulary to those living with or experiencing the impact of substance use disorder.
A Word on Wellness: Preventing Conflict in the Virtual Office	Although healthy conflict is part of relationships, some conflict can be prevented by creating a positive virtual workplace. Here are three tips that might help you identify and prevent conflict.