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Episode 113
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Bullying and Harassment Practice Management and Business Skills Professional Skills
The Fortitude Project: Building a Mentally Healthy Profession
Law as stated: 30 January 2024
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This episode was published and is accurate as at this date.
Legal superstar and social media sensation Jahan Kalantar unites with DT to tackle mitigating and managing vicarious trauma among lawyers. Touching on personal and business strategies, support networks, and the critical importance of a mentally healthy legal profession.
Bullying and Harassment Practice Management and Business Skills
Professional Skills| What area(s) of law does this episode consider? | Vicarious trauma. |
| Why is this topic relevant? | Vicarious trauma – that is, trauma experienced by an individual after empathetically engaging with someone else’s trauma – is a pervasive concern within the legal profession, with our close exposure to our clients’ problems. Because, alongside navigating legislation, regulations, case law – and other lawyers – practitioners often find themselves at the forefront of some of the most difficult moments in the lives of their clients. |
| What are the main points? |
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| What are the practical takeaways? |
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DT = David Turner; JK = Jahan Kalantar; RD = Ross Davis
| 00:00:14 | DT | Hello and welcome to Hearsay The Legal Podcast, a CPD podcast that allows Australian lawyers to earn their CPD points on the go and at a time that suits them. I’m your host, David Turner. Hearsay The Legal Podcast is proudly supported by Lext Australia. Lext’s mission is to improve user experiences in the law and legal services and Hearsay The Legal Podcast is how we’re improving the experience of CPD. Vicarious trauma, that’s trauma that is experienced by an individual after they hear about, learn about, or otherwise engage with someone else’s trauma. It’s a pervasive concern within the legal profession with our close exposure to our clients’ problems. Because alongside navigating legislation, regulations, case law, and our colleagues, practitioners often find themselves at the forefront of some of the most difficult moments in the lives of their clients. Now, earlier this season we spoke with Dr Phoebe Norville about mental health amongst lawyers from the perspective of a medical practitioner. She spoke about the high conflict nature of the profession as one key driver of mental health issues and provided some strategies that lawyers can use to assist in maintaining their wellbeing. Now today’s episode is about the experience of vicarious trauma amongst lawyers and it’s a natural follow on to our earlier episode because today we’re talking with Jahan Kalantar. You might know Jahan from his LinkedIn posts about vulnerability and mental health, his TEDx talk about communication, his law firm, Executive Law Group, or most recently his new podcast, Sue ‘em or Stitch ‘em. We’ll have to learn a bit more about that a little bit later! Jahan’s experience in the profession and his focus on mental health make him the perfect guest to talk about the subject. So thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay Jahan! |
| 00:01:53 | JK | Thank you very much for having me. |
| 00:01:55 | DT | Now you started out in finance rather than law. How did you end up in the legal profession? |
| 00:01:59 | JK | So I guess let’s begin at high school. I was really interested in the humanities. You know, I had some understanding of mathematics and some understanding of other bits and pieces. But back in the day, and we’re talking circa I graduated in ’05, if you had a good UAI, the kind of place you wanted to be was at an investment bank or an investment firm or working in management consulting. That was the gravy train, the golden ticket. And if you didn’t know what you wanted to do as a young person, it made sense to go get those sort of jobs. So I went and got a commerce degree from the University of Sydney. Even though it didn’t come naturally to me, I worked in econometrics and did those bits and pieces and I got a job in finance. And I quickly realised, one, that I hated it, and two, the GFC happened. So one of the big incentives for me as a young person with no idea of what I wanted to do was, well, I wanted something that paid really well and that seemed, at least, on the surface of it, interesting. And with the GFC, the pay was not great and with the work itself, I personally didn’t find it intrinsically rewarding. And so it was kind of, well, I should probably go and reskill, get something else to do. And my family were always like; “look, you like to talk, you like to chat. What do you think about practising law?“. Which is a very naive way of looking at the world, but they encouraged me to go and get my JD. And so I went to night school while still working in the financial sector, eventually graduating with my JD, and I fell into advocacy not by design. I thought I would be working in banking and regulation because I had done that in my financial… |
| DT | … it makes sense, right? | |
| JK | Yeah, it makes sense, but there was no one hiring in that space. And so I started to get work and worked in smallish firms, doing little bits and pieces of court work, drink drives, simple traffic matters, and other things that sort of allowed me to interface with the general public. And I loved it. I loved it, and I still love it. It was really beautiful finding what I truly liked to do, and it’s just been on from there. | |
| 00:03:52 | DT | I love hearing these stories of unconventional paths into law. I think we’re richer practitioners when we have those other domains, those other lives that we bring into practice. I think it’s, these days, not enough to be a lawyer. You’ve got to be a lawyer, and something else to bring that full complement of skills to what you’re doing for your clients. But I love that your experience is not that conventional “oh, well, I was in finance, so I went into banking and finance law“. You know, I love that you’ve brought those worlds together. Now, I like to think that a lot of our guests have professional reputations that precede them. There’s not many of our guests that have such a following that precedes them, such a kind of media career. I was talking to someone on our production team this morning, and I was saying, “Jahan’s gonna be in the recording room today“. And he said, “Oh yeah, as seen on Netflix“. So how did you cultivate this following on social media, in television? |
| 00:04:47 | JK | I’ll begin by saying, and I say this with no hyperbole, nor with any false modesty, that no one is more surprised by this than I am. It is the weirdest thing ever. Look, one, it’s the quirky moustache. It gives you something to look at. I know it sounds insane, but it really does work in terms of branding. |
| 00:05:05 | DT | A bit like Samson’s hair, like if you shaved it off, you’d think. |
| 00:05:07 | JK | Oh, absolutely, I’m done. But it’s also my get out of jail free card. So one day I’ll shave it and then vanish into the ether. No one will know what I look like. But I also got the benefit of time. So COVID was the worst thing that ever happened to me at the time. But now I look back on it and there was some really powerful lessons that I learned. Essentially, my start with anything to do with social media was, when COVID happened, we were having those press conferences every day where; “hey, this many people are dead. This many people are in ICU. You’re gonna die, bye”. And it was just horrible. Government did such a poor job of providing information and keeping people calm. And a lot of my family were like, what is a public health order? What is this? What is that? And as a lawyer, I felt helpless because our practice with litigators, we make our money really only when courts are open. With courts closed, I had a staff that I had to stand down. I was very worried and we went from an eight figure business to zero overnight. It was really stressful. So I thought, well, what’s something I do have some agency over? Well, I understand the law. And I went and researched the public health orders in some detail and wrote a very detailed post on LinkedIn. And I think maybe 50 people saw it. No one cared. But at the same time, TikTok was this thing that I’d been hearing a lot about and people telling me that, look, TikTok’s a really interesting way. It’s changed from being just an app for kids to dance on to. There are some real creators on there. And so I just took the public health order information and I broke it down on TikTok and posted some things that I’d filmed for Instagram reels. And I immediately got a few hundred followers. Now that was a big deal for me because I’d been on Instagram for many years and to get a new follower was like pulling teeth. It was really difficult. Meta is not kind to new creators. Whereas on TikTok at the time, it was very easy. And so I thought maybe there’s something here and I had nothing else to do. So I kept thinking of ideas and posting them. And it was just consistency, just showing up every day and making content. And now it’s just something that I do, which is part of my daily life. And I think one of the things that people have to understand about building presence on any of these platforms is you have to be persistent and then you have to stay consistent. Those are the two pieces of advice I’d give anyone. |
| 00:07:15 | DT | And do you find that it’s really helped your practice? |
| 00:07:17 | JK | It has been on the way people think. People seem to think that it’s just this lead engine that has endless leads coming through the door. That’s not true. I will concede there’s been an increase in leads, but what it has done more so is if you look at the marketing funnel, in terms of consideration, it’s a lot more sound. So once upon a time, people would make appointments and would flake, they would show up ill-prepared, they would show up perhaps even with attitude. But now the people who show up at our office have usually heard about me or know about me. They understand what I’m about and who I am. And generally speaking, they come with a far better attitude and almost a connection with me. And that’s been really helpful because it enables us to get deeper into their case faster and help them on a more real level. So it has been very good for my practice, but primarily because it’s changed the relationship that people tend to have with me. |
| 00:08:07 | DT | That’s interesting. I would have thought it’s got that top of the funnel impact less so that kind of quality of conversions and even quality of the client relationship. |
| 00:08:14 | JK | Look, it does affect the top of the funnel, but not as much as you think. And I think the reality is, particularly with criminal law, it’s not something that you ever think you’ll need until you need it. And so generally speaking, a lot of the awareness that I’m doing, people know who I am, and then maybe eight months down the line, they need to utilise my services, or they know someone who needs to utilise my services. So it’s been very strange ’cause I thought you have a huge following and all of a sudden you don’t have to worry about any other form of marketing. It’s just not the case. |
| 00:08:42 | DT | Well, let’s talk about our topic for today, vicarious trauma. As you said, no one thinks they need a criminal lawyer until they do. And when you do need one, it’s often because something traumatic or at the very least very stressful is happening in your life. You said before that you started with drink drive and the small advocacy work at the local court. Your practice has definitely grown beyond that. You work in pretty serious criminal matters. What are some of the challenges of working with that kind of subject matter? |
| 00:09:12 | JK | Look, I still love the local court stuff and I still do a fair bit of it, but the reality of the situation is I stand beside people on the worst day of their life. That’s a consistent thing that happens. So five days of the week, I’m standing next to someone, where this is probably, if not the worst, one of the worst things that’s happened to them. And that’s really hard. It’s a privilege to be entrusted with that level of responsibility. But to say that it’s easy or that it doesn’t affect you is a lie, and it does. And cases stay with you. And I always work in crime, but very serious types of offences are generally more what I deal with. So crimes which you might go to jail for 20 plus years or that involve elements like sexual assault, maybe things like terrorism, those are things that the stories stay with you and they’re harrowing. And it’s never pleasant because even in the best case scenario, there’s a person who’s a purported victim and barring them being just a completely deceptive individual, you’re gonna have to really shake their world up. So it’s never nice. |
| 00:10:10 | DT | I suppose we also shouldn’t minimise the impact for someone with a traffic matter in the local court. That is still a very difficult time in their lives. I have always been a commercial lawyer, but when I was at the bar, I did a little bit of criminal advocacy, mostly in that sort of traffic part of it. And I do remember having a client who was charged with using their mobile phone while they were driving, very stressed about losing their licence, losing their employment, losing the opportunity to go out with their kids on the weekend. Even a small criminal matter has life-changing consequences. |
| 00:10:45 | JK | In Australia, good luck getting around without a car. It’s just one of the realities. And one story that stays with me is I was representing a truck driver. Now this poor guy was in a horrible motorbike accident and he had real serious injuries to most of his body. He had gone to a doctor and was prescribed medical cannabis. And the law says that if you have medical cannabis in your system, it’s not an excuse and you cannot drive. It’s a ridiculous situation because one can be on the most powerful forms of benzodiazepines or other things that knock you out and you’re allowed to drive. But notwithstanding that, this poor guy, he’s uneducated. He makes his living driving a truck. He has a fleet of trucks. And if his car goes off the road for the period of six months or so, he’s financially destitute. His life will fall apart. And he’s gone on and he’s Googled, “can I drive with medical cannabis?“. And he’s found some forum full of dingbats with no legal experience telling him, “of course you can. You’ve got a doctor’s note, and you’ve got X and you’ve got Y“. And the knock-on effect for him and his family, if we don’t do a good job in what is ostensibly a relatively simple matter of; “did you drive with cannabis in your system?”, is profound. It’s always profound. And the gravity of it should never be lost on you because you’re dealing with, what I say is, there’s two things that are the most precious to any human being. One is their reputation and the second is their liberty. And when you deal with those things, it’s important. |
| 00:12:09 | DT | Now, you said that these stories stay with you. Would you describe that as vicarious trauma? |
| 00:12:14 | JK | I think so. I think one of the things that’s important to understand is there are cases that stick with you for the positive. You remember the smile and the attaboy and the, “wow, thank you so much. You’ve changed my life” And I’ve got some messages that really, on bad days, they make me feel like what I’m doing matters. But there are also cases that are absolutely horrible. A lot of the mental health work I do, some of the factual circumstances are just horrible and you just go, “I cannot believe this“. It’s secondhand for you, but it’s still very awful. I remember a case that I was doing some years ago. I think it was in relation to the coroner’s court, if I’m not mistaken. But it was a young man driving so fast that he hit a barrier and he was vaporized. And I still remember the look on the parent’s face when you’re telling them that their kid’s been vaporized. It’s horrible. And you think about those things. I think it would be weird not to think about them. I guess the game is about how do you build your resilience sufficient that you can tolerate those things, learn from them, and not carry them with you to a dark place. But there is a lot of dark stuff that we deal with in our line of work, commercial or otherwise. |
| 00:13:16 | DT | Well, yeah, that’s true. I mean, speaking for myself, and look, it’s hard to compare this with that. But I was an insolvency lawyer for a long time, doing work in the insolvency space. People are financially distressed. They’re at a very low point in their lives. They’re usually going through that because a business has failed, or a marriage breakup, or they’ve lost their job. And even when you’re on the quote unquote good side of that, fighting for the people who are owed money to get their money back from the unscrupulous people who’ve wronged them, those people on the other side who owe the money, they’re going through an extremely difficult time in their lives, and often doing the best job for that creditor means them losing their family home. And I remember being screamed at by someone who I was presenting a creditor’s petition to make them bankrupt. They were very upset and very emotional about that situation. Unsurprisingly, they were self-represented. And yeah, I don’t think vicarious trauma’s limited to crime by any means. But it is, I suppose, an area where the instance of it is so tangible. And what you said rings true to me, that it would be strange if we didn’t carry these things with us. If nothing else, they’re memorable. It would be strange if we didn’t remember them. I suppose the distinction that we have to make and that we have to look for in ourselves is, well, when does something go from? it stays with me, it’s a memory, to I’m experiencing trauma because of my exposure to it? |
| 00:14:45 | JK | It’s a great question. I mean, anyone who practises in crime, you probably know your old KCs and QCs. And like, for them, I think many of the war stories are just a way of dealing with some of these really intense themes. And I think our understanding of mental health has changed as well. The stiff upper lip, get on with it attitude is now fading. And I think it should. We’ve got some rules at our firm, very simple things. Like we’ve got one where if you have a really horrific day at court, you don’t have to come back to the office. You just let us know. Because there are judicial officers that are cruel and mean and unfair and unkind. And I don’t think that’s a sign of weakness that if you’ve been truly battered into the ground, that you can take some time for yourself. I actually think that’s a kindness. Another one is if you become overly emotionally invested in the case, we will tap you on the shoulder and say maybe it’s time to give this to someone else. And so it’s little things like that which I think make a meaningful difference. But it is this very hard balancing act that one must walk. And I don’t think you’ll ever get it right fully. Because there are gonna be things that affect you in a negative way. There’s also gonna be things that surprisingly won’t affect you that badly. You say the story out loud and other people go; “wow, that seemed pretty intense”. You’re like; “no, it just didn’t connect with me for some reason”. We’re all very idiosyncratic. |
| 00:15:58 | DT | Yeah, that’s right. I think you can’t just predict that, oh well, from the abstract from this brief, this is going to be traumatic for someone and I have to look out. It could be, as you say, an entirely idiosyncratic connection between the person and the subject matter of that case. In our last episode about mental health with Dr. Phoebe Norville, it’s a fantastic episode. Dr. Norville’s a GP who works in the CBD, treats a lot of legal professionals with mental health presentations. We spoke about looking for warning signs in yourself, being aware of your own behaviours to try and pick up when you might need to see a professional or speak to someone. What do you look out for when you’re trying to identify whether you’re feeling some vicarious trauma from something that you’ve experienced at work? |
| 00:16:46 | JK | So I’m pretty self-aware when it comes to my mental health and there’s a few reasons for that. One is that I’m neurodiverse. So I have ADHD, inattentive subtype and I’ve also got something called cyclothymia, which is my ups are pretty good and my downs are pretty down. And it’s kind of bipolar’s cousin, if you wanna think of it that way. And so for me, a lot of what I do is an understanding of we’re all just boats held together with sticky tape. So for me, routine is critical and it’s really helpful. I make sure I do at least 10,000 steps a day, for example, that’s like a non-negotiable for me. I have a gratitude journal that I write in every morning. I do things that are somewhat woo-woo, like I’ll try to do some deep breath work three to four times a week or subject myself to some cold water therapy ’cause I think it really works for me. But I can tell when I’m starting to become, I guess, disassociated because I start to lose pleasure in things that I usually find quite enjoyable. You know, I love hanging out with my friends and my family and when I’m starting to pull away from that, I start to recognise that. And I have had episodes of full-fledged burnout in my profession where I’ve just been like completely disassociated with what’s going on. And often when you’re in those episodes, you will not realise it. It will take someone who loves you, like my wife or my family, going, “Jahan, we think something’s wrong,” and getting on the front foot. But I think the first thing is you have to know what’s normal for you. So some people run hot, some people run cold. What I’m saying sounds completely bananas to them. For others, it’s like, “yeah, that makes a lot of sense“. And I think it’s having that level of self-awareness and having a trusted relationship with professionals. I’ve got a great relationship with my psychiatrist, got a great relationship with my GP, got a great relationship with my psychologist, and just keeping those professionals in the loop and making sure that I check in with them on a regular basis. |
| 00:18:27 | DT | Yeah, yeah, absolutely. At the very least, having a regular GP that you can go and speak to, who knows you? I think this came up in the last episode, but if you don’t have that regular relationship, it’s much harder for a medical professional to identify when you’re off baseline. |
| 00:18:40 | JK | Absolutely. And I guess, look, it’s not the fault of the medical professional at all. The model is just, particularly in Sydney where we are, you’ve got these mega centres, you go to the mega centre, you see who you can see. And for me, one of the things that was really beneficial is my longstanding GP moved to Melbourne, so I found another one, formed a really good relationship with them, and I keep in pretty good contact with them. And generally speaking, GPs are some of the best human beings in the world. And I say that with a mum who’s a GP, they really wanna help people. And so you need to find them so that you go to them and say, “hey, is this normal?“. And they go; “well, for you it is,” or “for you it is not“. |
| 00:19:13 | DT | Yeah, and we should say again, we spoke about this in the last episode, but again, GPs are the front line in terms of mental health presentations and responding to mental health concerns and mental illness. I think a lot of people who maybe haven’t spoken to their GP about this before think, “oh, well, that’s psychologists, that’s specialists, the GP’s for my coughs and colds and flus and for infant health and these sorts of things“. Most presentations to GPs today are for mental health concerns. |
| 00:19:42 | JK | Absolutely, and you’re not unusual if you think you’ve got mental health conditions. Australia has substantial amounts of mental health presentations. It’s not unusual. It’s not unusual in the legal sphere. I think we have very high rates tragically of self-harm, of suicide, of depression and of anxiety. It’s also part of the nature of the work. And so it’s really important that people feel that your feelings can be mentioned and they can be managed. |
| 00:20:07 | DT | Yeah, I think, well, certainly when I was going through university and I remember the statistics then, it was us then dentists with those really high rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm. But you said that sometimes it takes one of the people in our lives to identify that we’re taking something on from work a bit too closely, that we’re not ourselves, that something at work is affecting us. Some of the people in our lives that we spend the most time with are our colleagues. Do you think that we’ve got a responsibility to look out for some of these warning signs in our colleagues at work and say something to them if we notice it? |
| 00:20:44 | JK | So at Executive Law Group, I use this analogy whenever somebody comes in. We are kind of like on a rocket ship and we’re flying through space. And the reality is that everything outside of the rocket is trying to kill us. Space is trying to kill us. Comets, aliens. In the law, fundamentally, particularly as a litigator, it is an unpleasant job. There’s no other career where, for example, a surgeon does a stitch and someone else is deliberately trying to undo that stitch. There is no job where you wake up knowing that today you will be yelled at. That is just going to happen. You’re gonna go to court and something that should have been done isn’t done and you know that this judge will yell at you. And so all of these things that implicitly make the job difficult, that the judge hates you because you’re wasting their time, that opposing counsel hates you ’cause it’s your job, the client hates you ’cause they’re paying you for your service and they wish they could do it for themselves. If you don’t have colleagues you can turn to and turn into, it’s not going to be sustainable. And so I always say everything outside the rocket’s trying to kill us, but we in the rocket, we are a team and I care about you, I respect you, and I want what’s best for you. And so if I come to you from a place of “hey, I’m worried about you, I’m not saying it because I don’t think you’re great, I’m saying it because I care and I would expect you to do the same for me”. |
| 00:21:54 | DT | I think there’s that moral obligation, but I look at it as an ethical obligation as well. I think we know that we’re not doing our best work when we’re suffering. I think there’s a reason why you might take someone off a matter when they’re too close to it, right? So I think it’s for the benefit of our clients as well, it’s for the benefit of the administration of justice to which we owe our paramount duty. There’s an ethical dimension to stepping in and acting where you see someone is being affected by their work and that might carry over. |
| 00:22:25 | JK | It’s so hard, right? I remember a situation where I had a colleague in the wider sphere who I think was having some pretty bad mental health stuff. And I talked to him and he didn’t agree. And I was like; “well, what’s my obligation here?”. To the extent that do I contact, I don’t know, ambulance services and say this person’s having what I believe to be an episode. I’m not a professional, I can’t make that determination. And if I do do that, will that hammer or damage their future prospects? Would they be labeled with something? It’s heavy and it really is a difficult thing to try to be a good person in the law because the situations we deal with are very grey. I’ve acted for many lawyers in my professional capacity. Some of them who have mental illness, others that don’t. In fact, many of the lawyers that I’ve acted for who come into contact with the criminal sphere have some sort of mental illness. They’re having some sort of episode. They’re doing something that just doesn’t make a lot of sense. And the shame that lawyers carry, they believe that their mental illness is some sort of moral fault… and it’s not. It just isn’t. You’re not responsible for what made you the way you are but you are responsible for your actions thereafter. And I think that’s the hard sort of line to take because you can be intelligent and crazy. We all know that counsel that’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but they’re awful or they seem damaged and they’re not mutually exclusive. So it’s a very difficult topic for us as lawyers. |
| 00:23:48 | DT | Yeah, and it is difficult, you’re right, to find the line where you would step in or where you wouldn’t. There’s this famous ethics question on the bar exam where you see your colleague in the room next door and you’re in your chambers, and you realise that they’re drunk and you go in to talk to them, and you discover that they’ve also recently been made bankrupt and they’ve committed an indictable offence… and all of these things they haven’t told the bar association. It’s nice and easy to say; “oh well, that’s a situation where you should step in and do something”. But in reality, the circumstances where we have an ethical obligation to interfere really, to intervene in the lives of our colleagues, it’s pretty unclear. |
| 00:24:27 | JK | Yeah, absolutely. I remember the case from the bar exams, Thomas the Tank. I remember the case of Thomas ’cause he was drunk? And I remember Thomas the Tank. I don’t know why. It sticks with me all these years later but I remember that case. And it’s very easy if they’re doing 18 things wrong. Obviously you don’t let a professional roll into court drunk. But for me it’s less about their professional lives and more about we as a society are very, very good when someone is on the acute fringe of illness. If someone’s having a severe schizoaffective episode, they’re screaming obscenities into the sun, we know what to do with that, we actually do. What we don’t know what to do is this nefarious ennui and sadness and anxiety and generally relentless pressure that a lot of our profession is under. We don’t know how to deal with that. We’re not good at it. We tell people go see a doctor. The reality is for many people, particularly younger practitioners, seeing a GP, one, it can be expensive, particularly now that Medicare’s rebate is not where it used to be. It’s very intimidating and it’s easy for me, a 36 year old adult who’s done all of these things, I look back at 26 year old me, I would have been mortified to go and say, “hey, I need mental health help“. I would never have said it. It’s easy once you’ve said it, but until you say it, you have all this shame and this guilt built up. And then we say, “well, go see a psychologist“. Well, the waiting list for psychologists in New South Wales are huge. And so we tell them “oh, go do ABC.” And there’s no guarantee that they’ll have a meaningful relationship with that first psychologist. I had to visit about four before I found someone that was doing the kind of therapy that worked for me. So I’m very sympathetic, I’m very sympathetic. And I think that we need more investment into this area because there’s a lot of practitioners who are really struggling. |
| 00:26:04 | DT | You said before that we can’t control what happens to us, but we can control our response to it. That rings true to me, but it’s a little scary as well ’cause it sounds like we don’t know what cases are gonna stick with us, we don’t know what cases are gonna traumatize us. It’s hard to predict and we can’t control it. Is there anything that we can do to inoculate ourselves, to prepare for the trauma that we might experience vicariously in a case? Is there something that we can do to defend ourselves, I guess is really what I’m asking. |
| 00:26:36 | JK | It’s hard, right? I remember a case where the young man I was representing just looked so much like my younger brother. He was very little in common with my… but he had just had that look. And I sometimes stop and I think about him and there’s nothing you can really do to prepare for that. I think good mental health requires you to be honest with yourself. I just spend a lot of time journaling, meditating, doing all of these tasks that I think bring me a lot of value and help me be in a good head space, but sometimes things come out of left field and flatten you. One of the things that really sticks with me and really was very difficult for me is, do you recall the Lindt Cafe Siege which took place at… |
| DT | Yeah… | |
| JK | So I was at Frederick Jordan Chambers. So we were literally above the Lindt Cafe and that day in particular, I was on my way to… it was a Monday, I remember, because I used to sit in the Lindt Cafe every Monday and read my briefs for the week and prepare. That was just what I did. And I was on my way to work and I forgot my laptop charger. So I went back to the house and then at the house, my mom called me frantic; “are you okay, are you all right?”. And I was safe at home and I was watching that. And it was just awful and scary, but I remember Man Haron Monas, who was the horrible gunman, he was an Iranian and I’m Iranian by heritage. And I remember I became obsessed with the idea that if somehow I was in there, he needed a criminal lawyer, he needed an Iranian, I could get through to him and get him to put his weapon down. I just remember becoming very obsessed with that idea, so much so that when I spoke to a professional, I had something called survivor’s guilt, which is apparently quite a common reaction to pretty serious trauma because tragically, two people were lost in that and I actually knew one of them fairly well. He was very nice to me. The manager of the cafe, Tory Johnson, was lovely man. And so it really affected my ability to practice because one of the things that I always found really beautiful about our practice is you could lose yourself in a problem and then I would be sitting in my office at Chambers and I just didn’t feel safe. There was just something about that space that didn’t feel safe. And I think the only thing that helped me was, and I’m grateful to the Bar Association ’cause they had a scheme which enabled you to go and see a counselor and I spoke to a very good counselor who walked me through this process, but I just remember it was a very strange time and all they said; “is you just have to keep going through it and be kind to yourself”. One of the things that we’re not good at as lawyers is being kind to ourselves. We beat ourselves up over mistakes and the highs don’t feel anywhere near as good as the lows hurt. | |
| 00:28:59 | DT | Yeah, you don’t celebrate the wins as a litigator. You don’t celebrate the wins. There’s the expected result, right? That’s what you were meant to do the whole time, but the losses are a huge personal failing. |
| 00:29:09 | JK | Absolutely. |
| 00:29:10 | DT | I suppose there are some things we can do to try and limit our risk of vicarious trauma, right? I mean, one thing that comes to mind for me is trying to have that separation from work and home. It’s very hard. It’s much harder now after COVID. We “live at work” is one way I’ve heard someone put it recently and that really rings true for me. Living at work is the sinister corollary to working from home, but we can try and limit the encroachment of our work into our homes, right? |
| 00:29:41 | JK | We can. I’m so bad at this, speaking to the wrong guest, because I understand intellectually there are unlimited inputs. There is always more work to do than there is time to do it. That is just the nature of the law. There is always more to do than you will have time to do. And you could always tighten a brief up. You can always write better instructions and counsel. You can always research. There’s always something to do. |
| 00:30:03 | DT | There’s always one more case that you could read, yeah. |
| 00:30:05 | JK | And one of the good things about the law, one of the beautiful things about the law, and one of the things that’s really helped me in the law during some of my darker times is you can lose yourself in work and really ignore a lot of the problems in your personal life. And workaholism is not a healthy coping strategy. I don’t recommend it to anyone, but you can lose yourself in work, and it can be very cathartic and beautiful to have those realisations and revelations. I think that one of the things is there are many ways to be a great lawyer. For me, it’s always involved work. And so I love what I do, so I can work those absurd hours. I can work the 60-plus hour weeks, because I love it. I love it. And it’s something that I thoroughly enjoy. But it’s not healthy, and I think that I certainly appreciate that I’m not gonna make my staff work those type of hours, but that’s not necessarily the attitude everywhere. If you’ve got seven billable hours you have to hit every day, it is insanity to think that you’re not gonna have to work overtime to hit that. And there’s not gonna be some social obligations and other obligations and replying to this email, which you can’t bill for. It’s just not practical. And I think we’re heading for a cliff if we don’t do something to change it. What we do, though, is it escapes me, and it’s something I think about a lot. |
| 00:31:11 | DT | Well, I mean, do you time charge an Executive? |
| 00:31:14 | JK | We didn’t, but now we do. But we try to keep the target extremely reasonable and well within the realm of reason to hit. So we used to do fixed cost. We still do fixed cost externally, but we do time bill it internally. |
| 00:31:26 | DT | Yeah, same. So I think the problem is it’s… what did Winston Churchill say about democracy? It’s a terrible system, and it’s the best one we’ve got. There’s very few other strategies to measure utilisation, to make sure that work’s evenly distributed, that there’s not someone who’s plugging away doing 70% of the team’s work while there’s other people sitting there twiddling their thumbs. There’s not a lot of great quantitative measures of how busy a team is. |
| 00:31:53 | JK | Absolutely, and it’s really hard because you wanna make sure your team’s efficient, but you also wanna make sure they’re supported in order to be their best selves. And I used to think that running a practice, I had this image, you sit there, and you just look out the window, and you have a coffee, and life’s great. Running a practice is awful because every problem that your subordinates and team members cannot resolve gets escalated to you. So you just have this pile of problems that are the hardest problems at the firm, and you’re just like; “great, cool, thanks”. Everybody else who’s as smart as I am and as diligent as I am and as awesome as I am couldn’t solve this, it’s my problem now, great. |
| 00:32:27 | DT | Yeah, yeah, it’s a very enviable life, isn’t it? But it does represent one strategy that lawyers, I suppose younger lawyers or lawyers who are employed in a practice can use to help mitigate the effect of vicarious trauma. And look, I think it can apply for principles of firms as well, is to bring someone else in. I think the kind of surefire way to carry too much of the emotional and mental load of a case is to work on it alone. |
| 00:32:55 | JK | 100%, and so for us, it would be very rare indeed to have only one person responsible for a matter from where to go, purely because I always say, “you don’t know I’m not gonna be hit by a bus tomorrow”. You just don’t know, and it would be unfair to our clients, and it would be unfair to you. So often we keep really good records. We have two people working on a matter. And there are things that you have to be conscious of. I’ve had paralegals who go; “hey, my mom was hit by a drunk driver. I don’t wanna work on those cases”. That is so reasonable. “We will keep you away from anything relating to that because I don’t wanna re-traumatize you”. But it takes courage. I think back on it now, and that’s pretty brave to come up to the partner of the criminal law division and go; “hey, I just wanna let you know that. I know I’m here and I’m new, but this would really mess with me. Please don’t let me do that”. And I like to think I’m one of the more reasonable principals. I’m sure my staff disagree. But for many people, the traumatic experience is dealing with their boss. They get bullied, they get belittled, they get humiliated. I mean, I can tell you, I practiced under a number of partners like that who were just awful, bullying, bellicose people. So I think we can control what we can externally, but you also have to be conscious of, are you gonna be the person? ‘Cause I know I’ve had moments where I’ve lost the plot and I’ve screamed out and yelled at a staff member because they’ve made a mistake that seemingly destroyed the case. And it’s not nice. And it’s a constant balancing act is I think what I’m trying to get at from my long-winded rant. |
| 00:34:21 | DT | It is. But I think having that second pair of eyes, it’s a bit of a trite phrase, but it’s apt. On a case, it’s also a second pair of eyes on your own mental state and how you’re handling it. You said before that if someone’s getting too emotionally invested in a case, that’s probably an indicator that they’re likely to experience some trauma from the outcome of it. Maybe they shouldn’t be working on it. It’s gonna be very hard to diagnose that unless you’re working in tandem. |
| 00:34:49 | JK | Yeah, absolutely. |
| 00:34:50 | DT | Speaking of that practice of taking people off matters, if it seems like they’re not coping with the weight of them, it sounds like you’ve got some well-thought-out strategies to limit the impact of vicarious trauma in your own practice. What recommendations do you have for other principals, partners who are listening, who want to implement some systems, provide some resources to their own lawyers to create a systematic approach, I suppose, to managing and mitigating vicarious trauma? |
| 00:35:18 | JK | Well, it’s challenging. I think that, look, there’s some quick wins off the bat. So making it very clear to any employee that mental health is respected here and that if you have an issue, you can raise it with us and you will not be in any way, shape, or form penalized and the law protects you. We respect the law here. It’s a really good place to start. Some people have really good employee benefit programs or external providers. That’s a fantastic resource that you should make available to people. One of the challenges for lawyers, and I find myself guilty of this, is I want a checklist of tick this, tick that, and go down the checklist to make sure someone’s okay. |
| 00:35:55 | DT | If I follow the process, then everything will turn out all right. |
| 00:35:57 | JK | And the reality is you can’t ever do that. So I think it’s having that open dialogue. In many ways, a lot of the stuff that I produce and share online is to show other lawyers they aren’t alone. And I’m sick of this archetype of the superhero lawyer who is completely unfazed by anything. And I don’t think it’s weak to speak. And I don’t think it’s weak for us to have a meaningful dialogue about this stuff. And I think there are many lawyers who actually, because of the stiff upper lip mentality, or perhaps look at people like me and think, what a softy, what a whatever, that are living vastly poorer lives than they could be if only they had this conversation. Just because you’re willing to have a vulnerable conversation doesn’t mean that you don’t have what it takes to be a litigator. It doesn’t mean you don’t have the iron in you. And I unfortunately have to, in my practice, have that conversation maybe twice or three times a year where I take a colleague aside and say, “you seem to mistake my politeness and candor for me being somehow afraid of you or for me being in any way, shape, or form, terrified to go toe to toe with you. Get that out of your head or I’m gonna show you what I’m capable of”. But these conversations need to be had. And I think the power of conversations like this, the reason I write those LinkedIn posts, the reason I share it is I think externally to the outside world, I probably appear to be very successful. And I just wanna let people know that the outside and the inside don’t always match. And that you can have a lot of things and still be a bit of a mess. And we’re all working on it. And that’s the other thing. It can and does get better, but you have to work on it. |
| 00:37:28 | DT | Yeah, absolutely. There’s a bit of a theme coming out today, which is when we talk about this topic, mental health in the law, especially vicarious trauma, it’s tempting to look for vaccines, right? To say; “well, if I do this, if I do X, if I do Y, I won’t be traumatized”. And I’ll be able to handle really difficult, graphic, concerning, distressing material without any kind of impact on my emotional state. I’ll just handle it. I’ll be a consummate professional. I’ll win every case and I’ll walk away from it. And I’ll never think about it again. That’s just not how it works, right? We can’t prevent ourselves from having an emotional response to distressing material, to the things that we work on. We can’t predict what is going to have an impact on us. And so while there are things we can do and we’ve talked about some of the strategies we can use to mitigate or reduce the likelihood or the incidents of vicarious trauma, it’s unrealistic to suggest that we can prevent it. And what we really have to do instead is say, all right, well, when we notice it’s happening, how do we make sure that we get the help we need and that our colleagues get the help we need? And I think you’ve identified not only how we spot that, but also some great strategies to have those conversations and to divert either ourselves or our colleagues to the resources that they need. But what that tells me is that no matter how much we try to mitigate or prevent vicarious trauma, there’s gonna be loads of us in the legal profession who are experiencing it at one time or another. Do you think that has a kind of systemic impact on the justice system, on our profession? How does that change how our profession works, how we work as a professional community? |
| 00:39:11 | JK | I think you’ve nailed it on the head. I mean, it would be absurd if I said to you; “hey, you just need to exercise once a week and you’ll be fit for life”. Mental health, much like physical health, is a daily process. If you want to stay flexible, you need to stretch. If you wanna stay strong, you need to lift heavy things. You need to work on your mental health every single day and do the things that work for you. Ironically, with mental health, it’s easier to say the things that don’t work long-term. Drinking to excess or taking drugs long-term just doesn’t work. We know that. It works temporarily fantastically, but it’s not a good long-term strategy. Not talking about it is not going to work. And so I think we as a profession are at a turning point now where there is sufficient impetus that the way that we’ve always done things. I mean, as a litigator, I’ve even started to see a bit of a turn in that we can be litigators and be fierce advocates for our client without it becoming personal. We will never have the dispassion of two dentists discussing a mouth when we go through a case. It’s never gonna be that much, but it doesn’t need to be as bellicose and awful as some of our colleagues make it. And I used to, when I was a junior lawyer, see those long, scary letters as a sign that this person is like a fierce warrior. And now I see it for what it is, which is a pathetic attempt of someone going through a lot, and I feel sympathy for them. I never forget this one case. Essentially, it’s an apt analogy for this one. I was against this other person, and basically we had negotiated a deal. And the deal was, we will drop all cases in exchange for this amount of money. And they unilaterally changed the deal and said; “we will pay you less money”. And we said; “okay, well then, we don’t accept this new deal”. And not only that, one of the things that we had not pursued was a complaint to the regulator. And all I said in the email was, do you act in relation to that complaint? It was a legitimate question. I then, over the next four days, received a barrage of emails that were so unhinged, so abusive, and so toxic, that I was like, should I call the police? Like, this person’s crazy. Because clearly, I think they’d reneged on a deal that they had no authority to renege. That’s the only thing I could see was a trapped animal. Anyway, and I just wanted to respond, and then I thought, no, no, no, just wait. And after four days of sending these unhinged emails, they were fired by their client. That client called us directly and said, “I’m so sorry that this happened to you. Is the deal still on the table?”. I said; “yes, subject to all of our costs”. They said; “done, no problem”. And it just made me realize that there are people out there who are just unwell. I should never be subjected to that kind of abuse by a colleague. It’s crazy. And a part of me was like, well, do I report them to the Office of the Legal Services Commissioner? What do I do? How do I deal with this person’s behavior? And it’s easy for me, as a partner of a decade’s experience, to know that this is abnormal. But imagine this was like your third case. |
| DT | Oh, yeah. Well, that’s just how you communicate, clearly, yeah. And I think that story is the impact of trauma, of the distressing nature of the work, writ large, on the way our profession works. I’m sure everyone has received that letter, that email. I think some of us who are more experienced in the profession will probably have to admit that we’ve sent it, right? Maybe not to that degree, maybe not over four days. | |
| 00:42:26 | JK | Yeah, I’ve said things I’ve regretted. |
| 00:42:27 | DT | But I think we’ve all sent something in anger and then really wish we hadn’t. I’ve certainly done that. I think we’ve picked up the phone and said something that we wish we hadn’t. And I wonder if, this makes me sound very old and much older than I actually am, because of course I started practicing in this world… our older colleagues who corresponded by letter, who spoke at in-person meetings and didn’t have that instantaneous communication, I wonder if they had to deal with this less measured form of correspondence, this less measured communication a little less than us. |
| 00:43:04 | JK | Absolutely they did. I mean, one of the things that I always tell people to do, and what I try to do is I pick up the phone and call the other side. You’d be surprised how many times if you call the other side and speak to them like a human being. Sometimes you won’t. And sometimes you have to call up and say, “hey, I got your letter. Let’s go through what you meant when you said duh, duh, duh” – which is not a good approach. Don’t ever do that, young lawyers – but I think that back in the day, you sent your letter. Let’s say you got a crazy person letter. You would read it and go, “okay, well, I’ve got five days to respond“. You would take a day to breathe. And the caseloads were substantially less. The demands on people were far less than they are now. As soon as you enter a practice, there’s these expectations that are you gonna bill this many hours, you’re gonna work on this many cases. It encourages a sense of devil may cry, I need to get this out quickly. A lot of this dialogue and context is just because it was done the way that it was doesn’t mean it needs to continue. And I would feel very sad indeed if in a decade, the law continued to operate like it did a decade ago. I already see a bit of a shift in people wanting to do these things. But the law will not survive this. You’ve got record levels of dissatisfaction at offices like the DPP. You’ve got record levels of dissatisfaction for many lawyers. You’ve got people leaving the law in droves. If we don’t do something, the law will not survive. And it’s too beautiful a thing not to survive. And the only way that we can keep people going and keep them engaged and keep the system moving is by showing each other respect and courtesy. And by understanding that the biggest danger to us is mental health. |
| 00:44:38 | DT | Yeah, I think we’re already seeing the impact on the shape of the profession. More law students don’t practise than do now. But also I’m noticing a lot of people of our age, early, mid 30s, starting their own practices. I don’t know if that’s statistical or if that’s just anecdotal what I’m observing. But I think a lot of people who have a vast level of experience in the profession are starting to reject the ways of working and the environment that they’ve worked in for the rest of their career and are choosing to make that environment for themselves instead and hopefully for the people who will one day work for them. And that kind of decentralisation of the profession is actually a positive thing, I think. That less concentrated, less focused on a high volume of work to support high overheads. That can only be a good thing for the mental health of the people working those practices. |
| 00:45:28 | JK | I think so. I mean, then you open that can of worms of, okay, well, let’s say that I have less fat, so to speak. There’s gonna be stress on my juniors of, oh no, what do we do when the work runs out? Am I gonna be fired? Am I gonna do this? Which is a real stressor for them. When we proposed targets at ELG, there was a huge uproar in, well, there’s no capacity. Where’s the work gonna come from? I don’t have enough. You’re setting me up to fail. And I think it’s just a bit of a natural response to people thinking change is coming and it’s gonna be this, it’s gonna be that. And the rise of AI, AI can do a lot of the junior stuff way better than I can. I remember one of my first jobs when I was a paralegal is we had thousands of pages of brief and my job was to go and excise any mention of our client. I did that with a pen. Like you could do that in 10 seconds now with PDF Pro and within AI, you could probably excise it and give a summary of everything on every one of those pages. A lot of that thinking work will remain, but a lot of the grunt work will go. And it will be important to see what that means for lawyers, ’cause I would hate for this AI to come in and make our lives worse rather than make it better. |
| 00:46:35 | DT | Yeah, absolutely. Look, that’d probably take us another hour to talk about, right? I’m pretty bullish on AI personally. I’m sure our listeners know that. We’ve got a bit of a horse in the race ourselves at Lext so far as that’s concerned. And I firmly believe that it’s going to be a differential multiplier. It’s going to make great lawyers even better. It’s going to help us do the work that we enjoy doing. I think there is no avoiding the fact that some of that less strategic, less as you describe it, thinking work that typically graduates have cut their teeth on at large law firms is maybe less available. I don’t know that that work was ever satisfying, but it certainly produced roles for those people. So we’re going to have to have a better way of creating pathways into the profession because at the moment our profession is predicated on a pyramid of burnout, of people entering the profession and leaving it throughout their careers until we naturally end up with the senior lawyers who’ve stuck it out. If there are fewer young lawyers joining it in the first place because of a lack of opportunity, that’s not going to work. |
| 00:47:43 | JK | And look, I think I agree with you. I think there’s going to be lawyers who use AI and lawyers who don’t. That will be the case. It won’t be whether AI is in the field. It’s whether you use it or you don’t. And if you don’t, it would be like a surgeon not using the complete suite of tools. It would be insanity. You’ll have a copilot who will assist you. And you’re right, it was never satisfying. I remember, God, I wrote so many subpoenas that it was not satisfying. There was no value in it. I learnt as much by the second day. The additional four months that followed were of no value. It was simply generating fees and doing things. And I don’t think it tightened my thinking or made me a sharper lawyer. So I think that there’s going to be a lot more space for thinking work. And the reality is that there have been many cases won because of an eagle-eyed junior who just saw something I didn’t see. And wouldn’t it be great to give them the space to do that rather than have them fill out meaningless subpoenas? |
| 00:48:35 | DT | Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, Jahan, we’re nearly out of time. Before you go, as always, we always finish with a tip for our younger listeners, law students, and young lawyers just starting on their path in the legal profession. The topic of today’s episode’s been a little bit scary, right? It sounds like if they enter this profession, they’re going to be traumatised, they’re going to be depressed, that they’ve got a pretty grim path ahead. What would you say to them to turn that around? |
| 00:49:01 | JK | Well, the first thing is the law is a wide church and there’s a place for everyone. If you’re the human equivalent of a Labrador like I am, you like talking to people, you like being out there, there’s a place for you. If you are the kind of person who hates other people and wants to sit in a room and look at complicated statutes, there’s a place for you. So the good thing about the law is there’s a place for everyone and that’s pretty cool and unique. There’s not a lot of jobs where you can be any place, anywhere in the spectrum and still have somewhere to call home. So please don’t let some of my darker comments dissuade you from an amazing career. Secondly, it’s not weak to speak and feelings can be mentioned and managed. It is not normal, the work that a lawyer does. It is abnormal inherently. There is no profession quite like it. There is no profession where you need to be sharp, like I used to run big importation trials that would go for months. It’s not normal to have to be that sharp for that long on one topic. And so if you find yourself thinking this is really hard, it’s ’cause it is. And it’s okay to be like this is what hard feels like. So as someone who has got a little bit more seniority than you but certainly doesn’t have all the answers, don’t in any way, shape or form, think what you’re going through is abnormal and if it’s starting to affect you and if you’ve noticed it, great. If you don’t notice it, the people around it noticing you, please get some help, please speak to someone. You can always feel better. |
| 00:50:21 | DT | Absolutely, it is a tough gig but there’s more opportunity than there ever has been and there’s more support than there ever has been. Jahan Kalantar, thank you so much for joining me on hearsay. |
| 00:50:30 | JK | It’s been my pleasure, thank you. |
| RD | As always, you’ve been listening to Hearsay The Legal Podcast. I’d like to thank our guest today, Jahan Kalantar for coming on the show. If you’re an Australian legal practitioner, you can claim one continuing professional development point for listening to this episode. Whether an activity entitles you to claim a CPD unit is, as you well know, self-assessed but we suggest this episode entitles you to claim a Professional skills or Practice Management and Business skills unit. More information on claiming and tracking your points on Hearsay can be found on our website. Hearsay The Legal Podcast is brought to you by Lext Australia, a legal innovation company that makes the law easier to access and easier to practice, and that includes your CPD. Hearsay is recorded in Sydney on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and we would like to pay our respects to elders past and present. Thank you for listening and see you all on the next episode of Hearsay. |
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