New York Times Money & Business Section Sunday, October 10, 1999

An Epiphany About Lawyers
By Steven Keeva

The first time I saw a lawyer cry, something shifted inside me.

John A. was a litigator, perhaps 55, with silvering hair and an air of contained kindness. I met him last year at a meeting on the unlikely topic of law as a healing profession. In introducing himself, he said he had always enjoyed his work-until recently.

"In the past, I wouldn't have even considered coming to a gathering like this," he said. "But now I've come hoping to find some tools that lawyers and judges can use to look into themselves and once again find the grandeur of the law."

My reason for being there wasn't all that different, except for one thing. It wasn't so much the grandeur of the law that interested me as it was the inner life of the lawyer, and how it related to the widespread malaise that gripped the profession.

At the time, I had been a legal journalist for the better part of a decade. Like John A., I had started to feel uneasy, troubled by what I heard - and didn't hear - in daily conversations with lawyers and by a growing sense that what I did for a living didn't matter. I yearned for the kind of work that justified a capital W. What I had was a job - a good one, but not Work.

John A. began describing his career. But he soon fell into a story that seemed in particular need of telling.

It concerned a child whom he had represented early in his career. The boy had been institutionalized for behavioral problems, and after many months was desperate to go home. His parents were ready to have him back, so John A. was hired to handle the legalities. He did so, he recalled, with great passion, commitment and success.

As he described the day when the child was reunited with his family, John A. turned inward, his eyes relaxing their focus. "He was so excited, so emotional," he recalled, "and he asked me, `Do you mean I really get to go home?' I told him yes, that's right, and he smiled and said, `You are the greatest lawyer in the whole world.'"

John A.'s voice broke. His jaw trembled. As the tears came the room snapped to a higher level of cohesion; suddenly, we were all there with him - and for him.

Each of us was a witness to his glimpse through time at buried meaning.

Something fuzzy had become absolutely clear to me: those same tears had been there, sub rosa, in dozens of the lawyers with whom I had talked. They were there in the comments about how much faster the money was coming in compared with the satisfaction; in stories about how "a friend" fantasized about natural disasters that would make it impossible for him to reach the office, and in grotesque jokes about how sad it was that so many billable hours were lost to family events.

John A. helped me understand what those suppressed tears were about. Like so many of his colleagues who could not hold fast to a vision of what the profession could be, he was seeking a way to reconnect with a sense of purpose.

The subsequent years, with their technical, pecuniary and adversarial overlays had blocked out the warmth of those early days and left him in the cold. He'd become wealthy, but alienated from his chosen profession, and from himself.

I'm grateful to John A. His tears helped me acknowledge the grief that came from having lost my way professionally so that I could then find real Work.

* * *

The psychologist Abraham Maslow said that when a hammer is the only tool you have, you tend to find that every problem looks like a nail. Lawyers have fashioned effective analytical methods for flushing legal issues from thickets of facts. Work, for me, now involves exploring the many tools that can complement and enhance these legal hammers - tools like compassion, mindfulness, deep and committed listening, intuition and re-visioning the law as a healing profession.

When such tools are available, clients are seen for what they are: not just legal problems, but multifaceted, whole people.