Bench & Bar January/February 2025

ABOUT THE AUTHOR DR. ERIC Y. DROGIN is a Norton Healthcare Louisville Hospitals Medical Staff member with clinical privileges in adult psychology. He teaches on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School, where he serves as the Affiliated Lead of Psycholegal Studies for the Psychiatry, Law, and Society Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and participates in the Program in Psychiatry and the Law at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center and the Forensic Psychiatry Service at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Proud to be a Kentucky lawyer for over 30 years, Dr. Drogin is a former chair of the ABA Science & Technology Law Section and a former president of the American Board of Forensic Psychology. Please contact him at eyd@drogin.net with your suggestions for lawyer mental health and wellness topics.

(https://tinyurl.com/invite-decline), mar keting and management experts Julian Givi and Colleen P. Kirk speak to some of our most deeply rooted professional concerns when they observe that: Sometimes we accept these invita tions, whereas other times, we decline. But saying no can be hard. We worry about the negative ramifications that might arise. Will the person who offered the invitation be angry? Will they think I do not care about them? These experts explain, however, that “invi tees—those who are invited by someone to do something—overestimate how negatively inviters—those who extend the invitation— react to invitation declines,” and that “this misprediction is driven, in part, by invitees overestimating the degree to which inviters focus on the act of the invitee declining the invitation as opposed to the deliberations that went through the invitee’s head prior to declining.” Rather than creating a rift in the attor ney-client relationship, this situation presents counsel with a perfect opportunity to take that relationship to the next level, as we share with clients our own attempts to maximize responsible accessibility while remaining alert, focused, well-rested, and mindful of their literal investment in the most efficient use of the time for which they are being billed on an hourly basis. Researchers affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco concur that such

openness “is also related to mental flexi bility, which refers to the ability to adapt one’s thinking and behavior to better fit with changing situations and contexts” (https:// tinyurl.com/accessible-open), such as those afforded by the ever-shifting obligations of legal representation. Accessibility is a concept that hand ily reflects the guidance proffered by the “National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being” (the “Task Force”), an entity “conceptualized and initiated by the ABA Commission on Lawyer Assistance Pro grams (CoLAP), the National Organization of Bar Counsel (NOBC), and the Associa tion of Professional Responsibility Lawyers (APRL)” and made up of several other “par ticipating entities” from within and without the American Bar Association (https:// tinyurl.com/ntflwb). The Task Force has identified six pillars or “dimensions” that combine to “make up full well-being for lawyers,” one of which is the “Social” dimension, expressed in part by “developing a sense of connection” and “belonging” (https://tinyurl.com/ntfl wb-report), that reaps dividends within the attorney-client relationship as well as the interactions that surround it. Although we may joke from time to time about clients “driving us crazy,” the opposite is often true, as there is much in the development and maintenance of a mutually supportive team that contributes to the wellbeing of all involved.

in the past, and who are then advised to call “the” number that guarantees the quickest accessibility, sometimes suspect that what counsel is really attempting to do is to hide a number in order to gain a respite from client contact. Some may believe that a “home” number is being shielded. Others, almost quaintly, suspect that counsel is guarding a “cell phone” number, many years after the distinction between mobile devices and “land lines” has essentially evaporated. This having been noted, an obsessive drive to be “all contact, all the time” and cast aside any limitations on accessibility may actually reflect an erroneous sense that clients will be too sensitive to these issues, particular when being reachable results in an invi tation to further, more time-consuming contact. In their article “Saying No: The Negative Ramifications From Invitation Declines Are Less Severe Than We Think”

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