Welcome to the Mind Over Law podcast, where we break the traditional rules of practicing law. Our focus is helping you first to become a better, happier person, which in turn will make you a better, happier lawyer both in and out of the courtroom. We will combine mindset and energy practices grounded in ancient wisdom along with cutting edge neuroscience give you those skills.
Plus, I'll have deep conversations with some of the most thoughtful leaders that will share their life stories, their leadership journeys, and their legal practice wisdom. I'm Lexley Overton and my promise is that each episode will offer practical insights and strategies to empower your law practice, your leadership skills, and most of all, your personal well-being. Join me and I promise you'll become a better you lawyer and leader.
Welcome to today's episode of the Mind of our Law podcast, y'all. I'm so excited about the guest that we have today. Not only is she a dear friend, but she's a true inspiration for me.
She is a trailblazer in the legal field and has had a long over 30 year practice as a lawyer and has held numerous leadership positions not only in her state legal organizations, but also nationally and has taught and mentored trial lawyers for years. She truly is an inspiration and has such incredible wisdom. We're talking today to trial lawyer Vicki Slater and our discussion today is all about how to handle disruption and change and to be better at everything that you do with some of the amazing wise advice that she has.
So super excited to have her here today. So let's dive in, Vicki, I'm so excited to have you here. One, just because I miss seeing you.
Wish we could see each other all the time. But two, every time I'm with you, I just learn something more that helps me to live in a different way. So I can't wait for our listeners to have the same experience.
I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Of course. So I'm just going to jump in. I'm thinking about you've had such a long career and an incredible career in leadership in the legal field.
I'm going to ask you a question. Just thinking about the practice of law and how there's so much that changes, you know, from the day-to-day and up and down and all the things that we juggle. From where you sit now, looking back over your career, what do you think is something that's important for lawyers to really think about when they're trying to live a healthier, happier life?
I think that it's important for lawyers to take care of themselves whenever they can. Lawyering is a caring profession, so we focus a lot of our energy into caring for others, but we have to realize that there needs to be a time to draw back into ourselves and just take care of ourselves. There is a lot of unhappiness in our profession and I'm so happy that people like you and others are finally realizing that we need to take care of the lawyers, we need to practice mindfulness.
So I would say take care of yourself in any way you can. And that can be something simple, that can be painting your office your favorite color. It can be just be treating yourself in small ways every day.
Yeah, it's so important for us to invest in ourselves. Mommy's talking to people, especially when they're coming to me and they're feeling burned out and overwhelmed. It's like you can't do for others until you fill up.
And I think especially for women, that's hard for us. We're so used to taking care of other people. And that's, you're right.
That's what we do as lawyers when we're really stepping in, is helping and caring for other people. And it's so important to understand that you can't do that well if you're not right of yourself.
And the exciting thing to me is that if you are a lawyer running your own law firm, you can pretty much make the rules. You can make rules that have never been made before for law firms. For instance, Roxanne Conlon is a big role model for me.
She's been a lawyer for a very long time, and when she started her own firm, she had a baby room so that anybody that had just had a baby could bring the baby to the office for the first like couple or three months and everybody would pitch in on taking care of the baby. That's awesome. Like you want to, you can design it to add more to your staff's life and your life.
And we tend to set up to just go into the rules that were made by the patriarchy without questioning. But we can be a little bit more flowy with that. I know when I had my law office running at full capacity, I would always give the employees the choice to have the day before the holiday or the day after the holiday off.
Because as women and mothers, a lot of times we need the day before to cook and plan and shop and, you know, get ready for the holiday. So that was a way that I something into the law firm that could provide for more fun and enjoyment of life for everybody.
Right. And that's just such a great leadership skill is to really learn how you can invest in your people and looking at them in their unique circumstances and having the ability to recognize that you're as a law firm owner can do that. And that's what keeps people loyal, right?
And with people want to stay and belong when they think that people care about who they are, We know that's one of the key factors is having managers who care about you. That's a great example of that. That brings me into one of the questions we always ask at the end is if you looking back now after 30 years of practice, if there was one rule that you could tell lawyers to break, that's the traditional way of practicing law, what would it be?
Get out from behind your desk. Go see your clients, go see the the room where it happened. As they say in Hamilton, you know, get out and talk to witnesses.
Do some of that yourself and don't just depend on others to go out and do all the running for you. You need to go by your local courthouse, you know, every once in awhile, every few weeks or so, get out and see people face to face. COVID put us all where we like, oh good, I never have to see anybody in person.
And now we people are breaking out of that and we see that and booming attendance at different functions. People are happy to be back out and mingling again. So I would say get out from behind your desk because if you stay behind your desk it'll kill you physically and in every way.
And you're a better lawyer if you're out connecting with people, right and learning your, your clients story. It has a lot like what you're saying, seeing the room that it happened in. I had a friend of mine one time asked me if I had seen a scene of an accident like I had been to the place that happened on the road.
I was like, I haven't, he said, how can you describe the ocean if you have never seen it? And I was like, oh, you're so right, right. But just thinking about there's so much more to law than how we're taught to practice law in law school, right?
Like the research, the things that and but really getting out and connecting right into the world that's.
What you're saying right?
Yeah.
I mean, we each have gifts that we bring, and we're not just machines. We're there to bring our unique gifts. And that's true of everybody that works with us.
And so making space for that.
Yes, yes. So I'm wondering because you and I are good friends. I know that there's been a lot in your life that, especially in the last few years is really about about overcoming things and being persistent and moving through.
What is it that you would give as advice or how do you look at the disruption that happens in our lives? You know, they unexpected even in the practice of law that we're talking about learning to manage. That's right.
So we're always waiting for the next thing to hit, but we're looking for what's going to be the next thing opposing counsel's going to throw at us is the the other side of the story, right? And that's really just being learning how to manage change and disruption. What are your thoughts about that?
Well, disruption happens so often. And as you said that I just realized that if you are a lawyer that is in litigation, you don't have control. Your day could be disrupted by an e-mail or a fax machine or a phone call.
So you have those kind of disruptions that are just part of your everyday profession, but then life can come along and just totally way like everything. So my, my husband got sick in 2022 and I had a really happy, happy life up to then. I, my practice was just like, I wanted it.
Everything was going good. I loved my life. I was able to get out, see my friends, go on trips and my husband just got very sick.
And so when he got sick, I just like immediately, I, without thought, just referred all my cases out because I wasn't going to be able to practice and take care of his illness, esophageal cancer. Then I lost him about eight months later and we had been married 32 years. So that has been a major, major disruption for me.
One thing or change?
And loss.
Yeah, right. And just everything is, everything's different. So the one thing that's not different is that other people that love me have been there, thankfully, thank God.
And to draw me out, not let me isolate, not let me fall into despair. And so I told a good friend of mine, Betsy Green, I said, you know, my friends are great. They'll let me scream, cry, moan, but they won't let me fall.
You know, OK, that's enough. So that's one thing. Another thing is when disruption comes, it brings grief, whether it is the loss of a spouse, loss of a law partnership, the loss of a, you know, maybe a child moving off to college and that's it.
You know, that youngest one goes and now what? So grief is always in the mix there.
Yeah. And like, even lost cases that you've been with for a long time, even if you win, I can remember coming out of trial and feeling like this let down even when I won. And it's just something because you're so invested, your energy is in and all of a sudden there's a change in all of that, right?
Everything that you're describing, like whether it's the loss of a spouse or a loss of a job or a loss of a partner, or even when we move, right, there's like a loss of an identity in some place. So that I mean, there's disruption or change. There is often times grief that comes in that we don't even recognize.
You know what you've said is so true. I have done transactional work as a lawyer, and I love transactional work, but this really just speaks to trial lawyers. When you work on a case, it becomes part of your molecular system.
You take in that story and it becomes part of almost like part of who you are. You're the teller of that story, and it's like treasure that's been given to you. It's enriching your being in some way.
I always felt after trial like I had had an amputation, like it was like a physical manifestation. I can't. I don't know how else to describe it, but it's like something's missing.
Right.
And it was because I had poured all of that out, and that's what trial lawyers do. My criminal law professor called it bathtub brain. We fill up with that one case that we're having to focus on, and then we let all that drain out into the world to do hopefully render some kind of justice.
And then there's we're empty, right? And so that is a kind of grief. And that happens a lot.
Yeah, I've experienced, definitely experienced that. And then you're like this client that you talk to like every day or whatever, that there's no relationship there because that was an attorney-client relationship. Of course, if you run into them at the grocery store or something, that's different, but it's not that part of you to put yourself out to be a lawyer or do that kind of work.
And I'm sure lawyers that do transactions have the same manifestation, but I, I can't really articulate how that would be. We don't really realize how much we're exposing ourselves and giving ourselves away. All right.
So usually this is because we've come from some kind of background where we had to take care of maybe other siblings, parents, dysfunctional parents or parents who are not healthy. And so once we get in that lawyer's chair behind the desk, it feels like life has always been, and this is what I'm having to learn self-care at an older age because I was never taught it at a younger age.
Right.
There's nobody else that's going to speak up for you as a lawyer about certain things if you don't do it for yourself.
Right.
And you might see somebody being worked to death, like you're being worked to death maybe. And if you saw it happening to somebody else, you would speak up. But you don't give that for yourself.
And it's like, there's nothing wrong with speaking up for yourself. I think in the South, you know, we're kind of taught this. Put yourself last or whatever.
Yeah, it's part of that Simpsons, I think, that we get into of saying yes to everything.
Right.
Or doing the opposite of what you were talking about, like isolating, which is saying no to everything, right?
Right, and say what we had talked about earlier, self sabotaging.
Right.
So let's say we have all these forces pushing on us. We have our clients needs, our family's needs, our needs, our parents needs, the judge's needs. We have all these forces seem to be doing OK with it.
But if we get into a mode where we say yes to everything, then what we're actually doing is we're self sabotaging because you can't do everything and every yes is a no to something else, right? My yes to this person is a no to myself unless there's a mutually beneficial something going on. So then we just get overloaded to the point that we actually don't end up saying yes to everything.
We end up saying no and then we feel bad about ourselves for failing after we set ourselves up to fail. And then we're saying, oh I, I can't deal with anybody. I just have to isolate for a while.
And that's it's not self-care, that's self sabotaging.
Yes.
So if you're not on your side, you don't have anybody. And this is what I've had to learn. I've depended on my husband to be on my side when I rarely ever was on my side.
Yeah.
So then after I lost him, there was nobody on my side. But for the love of friends, there was nothing, you know? So I'm having to build this.
Some days I find myself pushing myself, but it's like so hard. And I'm like, OK, I need to take this slower. I need to eliminate things off my list because all of these different griefs are affecting us physically.
Yes.
And we don't check in with ourselves enough to realize that.
Right. Physically and emotionally right and mentally right. There's this fog that you start to operate in.
You're not really present.
Right. Yeah. And so there's nothing wrong with that.
For instance, after Scott Dr. I told my kids I said I can't drive a car because my mind was just so scattered, like confetti blown out of a cannon, sort of, you know, right, that I couldn't stay focused on the task at hand. And so I would find myself, you know, trying to cut my car off while I'm driving down the Interstate.
Just crazy stuff, right? So I asked for help or refusal to ask for help when you need it is a self sabotage. So there's these different ways that we self sabotage that.
You know, I'm not sure why it happens other than maybe it's from a pattern that you grew up with or whatever. Something somebody told you, like you never finish anything. OK, well I'm going to say yes to everything, you know I'm going to show you and then you don't finish anything.
Yeah, saying yes to everything could be the the whole proving yourself right. I get them to prove myself by being needed by people. So I'm going to say yes to that, right.
Then I matter. I think a lot of self sabotage underneath it is just fear, right? There's a fear of being enough for being worthy of fear of failure, all the things right, yes, So I know you said that you know with like there's been a lot of obviously with the loss of Scott disruption in your life, like you're having awareness of what you're experiencing.
What are you doing or what are you finding is E to helping you to take care of yourself? Because everything that you're talking about applies to any time when we're under a great deal of stress or dealing with a lot of change or a lot of disruption, like we talked about all of the response that we have mentally and physically emotionally is the same. It doesn't matter if the stimuli is different.
It's this place where our systems, you know, go into that fight or flight, but really in an extreme ways when there's loss like what you're talking about, what are the things that you were finding that are helping you? Ways of thinking, ways of being.
Yeah, different things. First of all, I would devote the 1st 15 minutes of my day to a meditation. I would listen to a meditation.
I found meditations about grief or loss. And just listen to those and just be still and quiet and don't rush into the day. And then I also found that making changes in small ways are huge.
For instance, I have been like drinking Diet Cokes like a fiend since I was, I can't remember, but you know, I don't go anywhere without a Diet Coke. So I just said I'm going to start drinking either water or tea. And so I've been drinking water and tea.
And so the other day I said I think I'll have a Diet Coke because I hadn't hadn't had one in like a week. Couldn't tolerate it. It tasted terrible to me.
So just little changes like that, you know, can go a long way, but I don't know how to. I hope I can articulate this. But to all the lawyers, I learned that I was seeing myself in a row.
I am the plaintiff's lawyer today. I am the mom today, I'm the grandma today, I'm the wife today, I'm the caretaker today. And I've just have realized that I'm starting to see that we're moving through our life and our past connect and disconnect with others.
And it's not just in what you're doing. And ever since trial lawyers college, I've been trying to learn this. You know, we're not human doings.
We're human beings.
Right.
And so sometimes you do just need to be. There's nothing wrong with it. But our culture in America is be the best, be the fastest, be the strongest, be the smartest, be the doer of all good.
But actually just your being is enough. Am I making?
Sense totally, just as you are.
So yeah, I'm beginning to see myself finally, you know, finally as this being that's moving through. I was meant to be Scott's wife and I had 32 years of that, but for some reason his journey ended before mine.
Right.
I don't like that fact. I totally intellectually reject it, but that's reality. Now I can see I'm moving on my journey.
Right.
And what I can see from that is love is the enduring thing.
That's what I was just going to ask you, Vicki, was what is the thing that remains no matter what role that you're in? And the story is, you know, I love you so dearly. So the story of seeing you transition from the identity of being a wife and being like, but I'm still here.
So who is that? Right, Right. And who is that?
And you're saying that love is the essence. There is so much in the work that I see with people who come in and they're they're overwhelmed and exhausted, etcetera. And it's because we've been doing, like you said, the culture and this profession is that too, right?
It's a lot of a lot of proving yourself that we forget who we really are. Sometimes we do an exercise that says who's the essence of who you are? And people look at me like, what in the world are you talking about?
So really, this is what you're talking about, right? Like I'm in roles of, like you said, mother, or you have the role of grandmother or wife or daughter or sister or teacher or lawyer. But that's not who my being is, right?
That's just place that you choose to spend my energy.
Of doing.
Of doing like.
Of doing so and the things that we do need to be out of love. We need to make sure that when we're saying yes to something, that's what it derives.
From. That's the core of it, the value.
So I had a friend that was really much smarter than I was. And whenever anybody asks her to do something, like if I ask her to do something like why don't we go out to eat next Thursday, she would say, let me think about it and I'll call you back. She never made an on the spot decision.
And that was gifting to herself and to me, because if she came back and said, yeah, I'd love to do it, then I knew that she had cleared out the space and set the intention and that if she came back and said no, she couldn't do thirsty, that she had thought about it and it wasn't good. And so I felt cared for whether she said yes or no to my invitation because she thought about it. Now, we've said yes to many things that require way more than Thursday night dinner, you know, cases and speaking engagements and all the things that we do.
There's nothing wrong with just saying, you know what? Let me think about it and take pause. She would take 24 hours.
Sometimes you can't give yourself that much time if if it's a decision and a case or something. But to give yourself enough time to just say, OK, now I'm saying yes, because I've thought about it. I've looked at my schedule and I can absolutely do it and I'm committed now.
There's so much of A gift to not only yourself, but the other person and whoever else is going to be there. It's such a small thing, you know, just like drink water instead of Diet Coke. It's a tiny thing, but it's humongous.
Right. And I think if you think about what makes me think of is when you said the part of you that remains as you move forward is this idea of love. And I think it really ties into not just about making, you know, decisions about yes for dinner or to say yes to a speaking engagement, like you said, but also to start to tune into the heart for for decisions in anything, right?
We use our brains so much as lawyers. We analyze and analyze and analyze and we often lose touch with our hearts, which is the essence of who we are, right? There's so much power and intuition when you learn to be and connect in with what you feel yourself called into.
And I think there's a lot of stress and overwhelm and burnout when people are constantly not following their heart and following what they should do or what's expected of them.
Right. And it creates this stress I call is what I call the ultimate stress needing or and or wanting to be in two places at the same time, which is impossible.
Right.
And that is so much stress on our bodies, on our minds and our hearts. It's just like, almost a literal tearing, you know? I think that, you know, you're exactly right.
Approach it with our heart. Take time to really go deep and not just say, oh, yeah, I'd love to do that. Oh, yeah, I want to do that.
Oh, yeah. We want to do a lot of things. We want to heal the world, we want to provide aid to the hurricane victims, we want to send packages to Gaza.
There's so much suffering, there's just immense need.
Right.
But we need to check in what can we really do? What can we realistically do and still exist? Because if we're just trying to wipe ourselves out by filling up with everybody else and everything else, we're missing the whole point of life.
So, you know, you may get to a disruption that you can't reach your own heart, you can't think straight, you can't practice anything. OK, now you're down to your little essential core of existing and rebuilding is once you start to rebuild, that other stuff starts coming in. Love from friends, your love for your friends, memories, happy memories of what you've lost, and you start building on something new which will have additional lessons for you.
But it's you moving through all of it and not. My existence depends on this office I've rented. My existence depends on this person.
I'm married to my.
It's not that on winning this case.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Right. We carry a lot to into our juries, you know.
Well.
OK, let's just try to remain restricted to the.
Yes. So that leads me to the question that like we love to ask it towards the end of our, we're with somebody on the podcast because you know, you've now seen yourself moving through this transition and on this journey. So what's something that you're excited about now either doing or creating?
Well, one thing that I'm excited about is I have a blank slate and I have different directions I can go in. And so, you know, I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for options and I'm grateful to be able to take my time and and decide, but I want to do something that is impactful not just for clients but for society as a whole.
And I have some ideas, but I haven't landed on something definite. I'm first starting to just be thankful for where I am now, what I have now, and just start from a place of gratitude. So I feel like I'm just laying a foundation of gratitude while trying to choose a direction.
Yeah, and choosing, taking the time to be what your heart is calling you into. Right before you choose, you say yes.
Exactly, Yeah.
And what an exciting place to be.
Yeah, so.
Thank you so much for being with us today. I really, really loved talking with you and sharing with you and you're amazing.
You are too Lexia. I enjoyed it.
Me too. Thanks for listening to today's episode of Mind Over Law. We hope that you're walking away inspired and ready to embrace your life and law practice in a more holistic, healthier, happier way.
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Until next time, remember with intention anything is possible.
