Lawyers Find Spirituality Can Help Careers

Lawyers Find Spirituality Can Help Careers

SOON AFTER American Bar Association Journal editor Steve Keeva began researching spirituality and law two years ago, he realized the subject was bigger than he thought. He found enough more to fill a book, "Transforming Practices: Finding Joy and Satisfaction in the Legal Life," sponsored by the Bar Association and launched at its recent annual convention.

"Transforming Practices" outlines serious problems, including the assumption that "spirituality and law" is an oxymoron. The book shows how legal education drains spirit, which contributes to the profession's high rate of dissatisfaction and substance abuse.

The book then reports how lawyers can transform their work through practices including prayer, yoga, Buddhist mindfulness and Christian monastic teachings. It shows how some clients are instigating change by insisting, "We don't want to nail the other guy to the wall. We want closure with integrity." Keeva says individuals can make a big difference. "This is a ground-up thing. Don't get caught up in the image that the only thing that matters is the law firm position. Just start the conversations; do your own practice; look for the opportunities every day to do compassionate things."
Individual attorneys have long known how to integrate work and spirit. Now their number seems to be increasing.

"We've talked about these issues for years under the heading of stress release, ethics or work-life balance," says Gary Gwilliam, a founder of Oakland's Gwilliam, Ivary, Chiosso, Cavalli & Brewer. "The deeper level of our questions is about being spiritual beings and understanding ourselves. Lawyers have been more dense about this because we have been so left-brained and intellectualized."

Gwilliam's spiritual studies, begun in 1985, have significantly enhanced his professional life, including a year as president of the California Trial Lawyers Association. "I am definitely a better lawyer since I got in touch with who I am. I try cases better; I deal with defeats and wins better."

Sherry Cassedy, a partner in Palo Alto's Lakin-Spears LLP, meets with other family law attorneys to find more effective and compassionate ways to serve clients. She's also one of four co-founders of Women's Experience, Law and Spirituality. Co-founder Lisa Pearson, a lecturer at Stanford Law School, helped WELS produce its first retreat last October.

WELS co-founders Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe and Eloise Rosenblatt represent two diverse paths to integrating spirit and law. Attorney Donahoe now studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley with a focus on the intersection of feminist jurisprudence and feminist theology. Rosenblatt, the union's former associate dean of faculty at its School of Theology, is in law school.

"Spirituality without knowledge of legal rights is vacuous," says Rosenblatt. "If we just seek spiritual life without integrating it into social and political change, without letting it empower us in real life, that is unworldly. Our common aim in WELS is to integrate women's experience with law and spirituality. It's also about the soul of law.
"As we massage the field of law, one of the things I think will come about is that the best in law will redeem us." Rosenblatt and others who are exploring spirituality and law see that the soul of law is about more than creating justice. It's also about offering enemies and friends the same rights, creating contracts to strengthen relationships, and developing the same kind of attentiveness that is necessary for most spiritual practices. This means that treating a legal practice as a spiritual practice (and vice versa) can strengthen both practices.

San Francisco attorney Brian Ripley found that losing a major client "opened up time and space to create a new vision. I've discovered that, to be ethical and honest in my personal life, I also have to be ethical and honest in my practice. The system makes it difficult, particularly if senior partners want you to be a Rambo litigator."
Many think aggressive tactics don't work. Jerry Braun, a founding partner of San Francisco's Farella, Braun & Martel LLP, recently presided over a complex arbitration where he was impressed as much by the civility of the attorneys as he was by the quality of their preparation. "They did a better job for their clients by being civil than if they were quarrelsome, haranguing, rude and all the rest."

Also Printed: Sept. 5, 1999
2000 San Francisco Examiner
originally printed by the Hearst Examiner

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/examiner/archive/1999/09/05/CAREER134.dtl