3M headquarters in Maplewood, Minn. Photo: Shutterstock.

When it comes to combating substance abuse and other mental health issues in the legal profession, 3M Co. is once again taking the lead on the in-house front.

Less than a year after the corporate legal department at 3M became the first in-house team to sign onto the American Bar Association's mental health initiative, it has now incorporated the issue into its requests for proposals process. The applied science consumer products company asks law firms if they have signed the pledge and what specific action they have taken to promote well-being among the lawyers and other legal professionals in their firms.

It's been nearly a year since the ABA unveiled the seven-point framework it hoped all legal employers would embrace by the start of 2019. Although dozens of law firms and law schools have done so, 3M is one of only five in-house departments to make the commitment. The other four are Barclays, Cummins Inc., U.S. Bank and VMware Inc., according to the online list of pledge signatories.

"We recognize that this is important and that if we don't formalize our approach to this, we aren't really going to make progress," said Maureen Harms, associate general counsel and managing counsel at 3M who is working closely with the company's senior vice president for legal affairs and GC Ivan Fong to head up the department's efforts.

Fong identified the project as one of his "vital few," or those two or three initiatives he determines each year to be "critical" and perhaps would otherwise not be addressed. "For us, [it's] putting it as a priority and putting the proper resources to it," Harms added.

Maureen Harms.

Like 3M's efforts, the other four departments' initiatives were generally part of a larger, more holistic approach to attorney well-being that had been in the works in their ranks before the ABA pledge. In the summer of 2017, for example, Cummins began developing its own mental health and wellness program that now incorporates eight pillars of well-being: relational, mental, emotional, financial, physical, spiritual, professional and community, said Natalie Stucky, who is senior counsel at Cummins and heavily involved with its wellness efforts.

To that end, the department has identified various health screenings—mammography, for example—that are available in each of the regions where attorneys are based, provided yoga instruction for the team and begun to incorporate some element of wellness into every global senior counsel meeting, from 20-minute breaks to check email or a walk with a previously unknown colleague, she added.

At Barclays, the legal department's participation in the ABA initiative followed its adoption of the Mindful Business Charter, a set of best practice, behavioral principles that the banking giant helped devise to try to mitigate unnecessary stress among both in-house lawyers and outside counsel, GC Mark Shelton said. The principles include ways to tackle and reduce avoidable stress by thinking about the type of demand a particular request would place upon a lawyer before acting on it.

"We recognize that we are in an industry where time pressures happen, but this is addressing undue stress," he said. "This is about ensuring that, in cases where the work doesn't have to be done over the weekend, lawyers aren't getting an assignment on a Friday with a Monday-morning deadline."

The ABA's initiative followed a landmark study in 2016 that found high rates of depression, anxiety and substance abuse among lawyers.

Jim Chosy, GC at U.S. Bank, said his department launched an internal law division "center" for lawyer well-being. The formal program is to ensure the efforts "are given prominence and importance within our department" and has a committee structure and 50 people across the legal department serving on various subcommittees.

The division has sponsored internal education to provide a formal session for the legal department and participated earlier this year in the Minnesota Supreme Court's 2019 Call to Action for Lawyer Well-Being. The programming has invited speakers such as Joan Bibelhausen, executive director of the St. Paul, Minnesota-based Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers, a nonprofit group dedicated to helping members of the Minnesota legal profession address behavioral health concerns,

"We are trying to set the right tone at the top: to communicate that this is important and to try to make it a big part of our culture and what we're doing," he said.

Like Barclays' Shelton, Chosy recognizes that corporate law departments can play an important role in improving lawyer well-being in other sectors of the industry, namely outside firms.

"We are thinking about what we can be doing in the way we communicate with them and some of the deadlines we tend to impose," Chosy said. "I do think that there's some common ground that we could explore to benefit both sides. We are eager to play our part in helping."

Amy Fliegelman Olli, senior vice president and GC at VMWare, agreed, noting that part of her department's commitment to well-being is ensuring that the in-house team is "being thoughtful on the issue of how we work with our law firms."

"What I try to do with everyone, including those who work with me, is to inform them when there are things that really are an emergency or when there are things that can wait and do not need to be done right away," she said.

Olli said she was surprised to learn her department is one of just five in-house ones to adopt the ABA pledge, noting many of her peers and colleagues work for companies like hers that have these types of programs in place and are progressive on mental health issues.

Terry Harrell, chair of the ABA's Working Group to Advance Well-Being in the Legal Profession, the group behind the pledge, said the lack of corporate participation in the project may be just a matter of marketing.

"The outlets where we're talking about it tend to be where firm members go," she said. "We need to target a little differently to get the word out to businesses."

Cummins' Stucky opined that the discrepancy between firm and in-house participation may be due to budget. Many law firms have significant funds to put toward wellness efforts, while in-house departments, including hers, have none, hampering her ability to, for example, attend out-of-town conferences on the matter.

3M's Harms has another explanation: In-house leaders simply may not have a lot of experience trying to get such an initiative off the ground and don't know how to go about doing so.

To them, she has this advice: "It's the right thing to do, even if you don't know what you're doing. Just start. It doesn't have to be perfect."

 

Read more – Minds Over Matters: An Examination of Mental Health in the Legal Profession