Each episode, we sit down with someone new in the lawyers risk management space to discuss ideas, personal stories, and more. Take a break, have a listen.
All content for The ALPS In Brief Podcast is the property of ALPS Lawyer’s Malpractice Insurance and is served directly from their servers
with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.
Each episode, we sit down with someone new in the lawyers risk management space to discuss ideas, personal stories, and more. Take a break, have a listen.
The State of the Solo: Positive Trends in Solo Attorney Well-Being
The ALPS In Brief Podcast
41 minutes
5 months ago
The State of the Solo: Positive Trends in Solo Attorney Well-Being
In Episode 2 of our thought leadership podcast series, the Deep Think, ALPS COO and long-time attorney well-being advocate Chris Newbold sits down with ALPS Director of Strategic Partnerships Rio Lane to discuss the surprising and heartening results of our solo well-being survey and trends report.
—
Rio Laine:
Hey, everyone. I'm Rio Laine with ALPS Insurance, and welcome to the ALPS In Brief Podcast. Today, we'll be talking to ALPS COO Chris Newbold about wellness and ALPS's new Solo Attorney Wellness Trends Report. Hi, Chris. Thanks for joining me today.
Chris Newbold:
Hey, thanks, Rio. Thanks for having me.
Rio Laine:
Yeah. Absolutely. So I would like to start with maybe giving you a chance to introduce yourself to our audience, a little bit about who you are and what you do at ALPS.
Chris Newbold:
Yeah. I'm Chris Newbold. I'm the chief operating officer of ALPS, and one of my great passions, I think, in terms of giving back to the profession has been thinking about the notion of attorney wellness. And not just attorney wellness, but well-being in law more broadly, and that's given me the opportunity to really think about how the legal profession is structured, what people are looking for, where they may perhaps were missing the mark, and then thinking about the systemic reasons why.
I think a lot of lawyers today are struggling in terms of their selection of a profession in which they're not necessarily finding the professional satisfaction that they may have sought when they went into law school.
Rio Laine:
Yeah. Absolutely. And, I mean, I think, as we all know, the concept of wellness and taking care of yourself as a lawyer is relatively new. Up until recently, there was a lot of stigma around that. So it's excellent that we actually get a chance to talk about that and are starting to see good work and traction as far as that's concerned.
Chris Newbold:
Yeah. And the movement, the attorney well-being movement is almost about 10 years old now in terms of a groundbreaking report coming out that stimulated a lot of thought in legal circles around where is this profession, where does it need to go, and then thinking strategically about that.
And again, I've been really fortunate to be at the epicenter of a lot of those conversations in terms of convening groups, convening stakeholders, thinking about research and other things that we can do to kind of document where is the profession and where does it need to go so that we're attracting more people into the profession and not seeing more people exit the profession.
Rio Laine:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Absolutely. And so, speaking of groundbreaking reports, we're going to be talking about ALPS's Solo Attorney Wellness Trends Report, which you have really spearheaded an effort in gathering important data and information about wellness as it relates to solo attorneys. So before we dive into that, I'd like to kind of explore your history in the wellness space. And now, you've been a proponent for well-being in law, and you've done a lot of work with the Institute for Well-Being in Law for some time now. So tell me how you got here and why this is something that really resonates with you.
Chris Newbold:
Yeah. Thinking back on my experiences, one of the things that we were really looking to do is to understand... I went to a small law school with 75 students, and everybody was very excited, I think, about going to law school. Yet, now that I'm out of law school for more than 20 years, the number of folks who have actually reflected and said, "I really am proud of my decision, and I've really enjoyed practicing law," a lot lower than I think that you would obviously think. And so, I think there was an expectations gap between what people thought versus the reality.
And I think one of the things that... Again, I started to lean in on the subject, wrote part of the section for the groundbreaking report, spent three years as the co-chair of the National Task Force on
The ALPS In Brief Podcast
Each episode, we sit down with someone new in the lawyers risk management space to discuss ideas, personal stories, and more. Take a break, have a listen.