The Florida Bar’s Henry Latimer Center for Professionalism recorded a conversation with Justice Alan Lawson on a subject the profession talks about more than it practices: how a lawyer stays whole.
The Florida Bar describes Justice Lawson as someone who has “spoken extensively in continuing legal education seminars and other venues about work/life balance,” and the Henry Latimer Center for Professionalism, together with the Bar’s Standing Committee on Professionalism, invited him to open a three-part series on lawyer wellbeing in February 2021. The format was a “Lunch and Learn” conversation with Administrative Law Judge Suzanne Van Wyk, who framed the problem plainly: lawyer wellbeing had become a crisis of the profession, not a personal failing of individual lawyers.
Justice Lawson brings an unusual vantage point to the subject. He practiced for more than a decade before taking the bench, then spent twenty years as a trial judge, an appellate judge, and a Justice — watching lawyers at every stage of their careers, at their best and under strain. The conversation is about work/life balance in a profession not known for it, drawn from his years as a trial lawyer, a trial judge, and an appellate judge, and about how lawyers and judges can sustain their wellbeing under heavy professional demands.
The Bar has kept the recording available on its website, and it remains approved for two hours of continuing legal education credit (general and professionalism; Course No. 6770) through November 30, 2026. It is a subject the firm’s founders have thought about a good deal in building a firm designed for the long haul, and worth the time of any lawyer who has wondered whether the way things are done is the way they must be done.
Watch
The Well-Balanced Lawyer — Lunch and Learn with Justice Alan Lawson, The Florida Bar, Henry Latimer Center for Professionalism. Recording and CLE information on the Bar’s website.
About Alan Lawson
Alan Lawson is a founding shareholder of Lawson Huck Gonzalez and a retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida. Over a thirty-five-year career he served at every level of Florida’s courts — as a circuit trial judge, as a judge and Chief Judge of the Fifth District Court of Appeal, and as a Justice of the state’s highest court — and today he guides clients through high-stakes appeals, critical motions, and complex litigation.
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