Lawyer Well-Being Resource Center

Florida Lawyers Mutual believes that a good lawyer is a happy and healthy lawyer. Our team is dedicated to promoting lawyer well-being in all its facets — personal, professional, physical, mental, spiritual, social, emotional, and beyond.

As a Florida lawyers’ professional liability insurance company, we recognize that issues of mental health, depression, anxiety, and work-life balance are at the root of many of the Errors & Omissions claims brought against Florida lawyers. Even more importantly, those issues may be responsible for alarmingly high rates of loneliness and unhappiness in the field. In other words, these issues are personal and real. They impact the members and the communities we serve. It is our call to rise to the challenge, doing our part to bring on a new dawn in the practice of law, where success is defined by a whole person’s experience of life not by billable hours or by the metrics of their career.

Our team is continually at work on new resources to help Florida lawyers find peace, fulfillment, and happiness in their everyday lives. It is our hope that these resources will provide meaningful utility to our members, inspiring fresh perspectives on the “lawyer life” here in Florida.

Florida Lawyers Mutual Resources

Sounds Good to Us: Playlist for Florida Lawyer Well-Being: They say music moves you, and at Florida Lawyers Mutual we believe that’s true. We also believe that a good song (or a few dozen good songs) can help you take pause, turn your day around, and lift your mood.

Let’s Get Moving: Between deadlines, emails, hearings, and the never‑ending to‑do list, taking care of your body can feel optional, or like something to “get back to later.” But physical well‑being isn’t about training for a marathon or overhauling your life.

Engage and Grow – Find Fun in Your Work: Engaging and growing – is such a powerful opportunity to pause, recalibrate, and tend to joy.

Strengthening Your Spiritual Well-Being: Let’s take a look at the Institute’s three suggestions, along with some additional resources you can use to support mindfulness, spirituality, and alignment with your own personal values and goals.

Well-Being Tips to Help You Stay Strong and Successful: This year’s Well-Being Week in Law offers another opportunity to find and explore ideas for reducing lawyer stress, enhancing physical fitness, and improving overall well-being in a demanding profession. Read all about tips on staying strong and successful.

Ready..Set..Connect: As lawyers, there are so many kinds of connection that matter to our everyday lives.

Wheel! Of! …Emotion!: Emotions. They are the invisible driving force of humanity — ineffable, inescapable, and sometimes seemingly impenetrable. They reside within the very core of who we are.

Why a “Do Nothing Day” is Hard Work: I’ve noticed that a new kind of holiday has emerged since the onset of the pandemic, and perhaps fittingly, it’s catching on at viral speed: The Do-Nothing Day.

Walker, Florida Lawyer: What follows is not a litany of the ways that exercise is good for a lawyer’s body and mind.

The Sandman Is a Cruel Creditor: There’s a longstanding temptation in the legal field to associate zealous determination with chronic fatigue. But maybe it’s time to flip the way we think about lawyers, excellence, and sleep.

SHOCK— Florida Lawyer Claims to Have Social Life, Colleagues Remain Skeptical: Sound too good to be true? Studies reveal that a lot of lawyers are lonely — most of them, in fact. Making friends as an adult can be difficult, especially when you have one of the busiest jobs in the world. This article explores the problem and equips Florida Lawyers with strategies for overcoming lawyer loneliness.

What Your Dirty Dishes Can Teach You About Work-Life Balance: When we take small bits of time throughout the week to tend to life’s “little necessities,” we find more of the time, energy, and focus we need for the big things when they come around.

Florida Lawyers— Why Your Emotion May Be Your Most Important Client: When it comes to IQ, lawyers are second to none. EQ, though? Well, we hate to tell you what the studies say, but…

A Personal Growth Guide for Lawyers: From movies and music to literature, comedy, and beyond, we’ve thought up all kinds of ways to enrich your life by expanding your horizons.

Aligning Your Who and Your Do: While work-life balance is a worthy goal, what we all really want is work-life alignment. This article can help Florida lawyers reframe the way they think about their jobs while resisting any assumptions about “the right type” of lawyer personality.

The Florida Lawyer’s Guide to Slaying Stress: Of course, no one ever really gets rid of stress. We just learn to recognize it, process it, mitigate it, and recover quickly so that it cannot steal our joy. Here’s how science says we can do that.

How Florida Lawyers Can Grow Themselves into Happier Beings: Let’s look at a few ways Florida lawyers can cultivate this “atmosphere of growth” in spite of a busy life and daunting career.

How Florida Lawyers Can Be Better to Each Other: If we as lawyers recognize that we as lawyers are the problem that we as lawyers hope to solve, it seems self-evident that a solution should be within reach.

Managing Our Emotions, Do This, Not That: Even the Gandhi-est among us could surely do with a reminder or two on managing our emotions when circumstances put them to the test.

As part of our renewed focus on lawyer well-being, in Autumn 2020, we launched a brand-new blog series dedicated to “The Florida Lawyer Life.” Sunny Decisis® is your go-to guide for everything about being a lawyer other than the law. We’re adding new content all the time.

Florida Lawyers Mutual Infographics

The Florida Bar Resources

The Florida Bar offers the following lawyer well-being resources:

Mental Health and Wellness Center
Florida Lawyers Helpline: 833-351-9355
Florida Bar COVID-19 Resource Center

Institute for Well-Being in Law Resources

Created as a result of the aforementioned 2017 National Task Force report, the Institute for Well-Being in Law (IWIL) offers the following resources for lawyer health and wellness:

American Bar Association Resources

National Helplines, Emergency Resources, and Support Groups

Alcoholics Anonymous in Florida
SAMHSA National Helpline
Rational Recovery
The Addicted Lawyer blog
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
In the case of any emergency, call: 911