Bench & Bar March/April 2025

LAWYER WELL-BEING

BY DR. ERIC Y. DROGIN HOPE

H ope is a commodity that under the best of circumstances sits idly by, neither attracting nor accru ing interest. Why would we need to pine for greener pas tures when the most pressing of our worries is to remember to mow the lawn? Wellness

and vigilance are notions that typically go hand in hand, but there’s nothing wrong—and, indeed, everything right—about holding some capacities in reserve. This is not to suggest that as attorneys we only trot out hope under the direst of circumstances. For one thing, legal practice is imbued at every mundane turn with intangibles. Which judge am I going to get? How can I be sure what a particular juror really thinks about our client? Speaking of our client, am I going to show up alone, yet again, at tomorrow’s status conference? To think that we can prevail on the basis of skill alone is as delusional as banking on a righteous outcome just because the law of averages mandates a decision in our favor. When the time comes to invest affirmatively in hope, it’s a good idea to reflect that we’re not the only ones with a stake in the proceedings. Have the parties we represent been invited to share in our willfully positive perspective, buttressed as it is by realistic expectations? Just as we always race to share good news with clients, we’re well advised to convey—with appropriate caution—the reasonable likelihood that things will go our way. Getting clients to clamber on board the hope train expeditiously— for a journey they’ll eventually be more than willing to take—is often accomplished far more effectively by an outwardly upbeat demeanor than by a detached recitation of case-specific facts. Favor ing this particular approach is a psychological phenomenon known as “emotional contagion.” Described by Dutch social science researchers Carolina Herrando and Efthymios Constantinides (sorry, copy editors) as “a very effec tive and attractive strategy in communication” (https://tinyurl.com/ contagiondocs), emotional contagion occurs, according to an article recently published in Physiology and Behavior , “when one person’s positive emotional state simultaneously evokes—and is evoked by—another person’s positive emotional state” (https://tinyurl.com/ contagion-study). Instinctively or by conscious design, litigators bring this technique to bear with judges and juries all the time. Why not engage in some similarly benign modeling for our clients as well? When the chips are down, the absence of hope can be every bit as impactful as its deliberate invocation. As noted recently by an international team of American and European scientists, cogni tive behavioral therapists have long alluded with concern to the

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