I’ve spent much of my career in the legal industry as a lawyer and a law firm business administrator. I don’t have the demographic profile of a typical American lawyer or even a typical BigLaw business director. My parents, Italian Americans from Greater Boston (one of whom is a second-generation American) did not graduate from college, and no one in their families went to law school or became a lawyer.

I graduated from law school in 2010, during one of the worst job markets of the past several decades—in the wake of a financial crisis that gave rise to widespread unemployment and wage stagnation. I was always taught to put my nose to the grindstone, to never complain, to eagerly volunteer for more work—whether that meant staying at the office late or working on weekends. “You’re lucky to have the work” was the dominant refrain, and we find that sentiment returning today—in another employer’s market.

When I began my career as a lawyer, I always wanted to learn more and take on more responsibility—the more that I did and produced, the more like a real, worthwhile human being I felt—at least at first. I would do anything to make my family proud. But I slowly became more unmoored, isolated from family, friends and my values. My whole personality was buried under inauthentic, fawning people-pleasing, saying yes regardless of the mental and emotional costs, adding projects and hours in the hope that it would make me feel like I was accepted and belonged.

When you’ve been masking with all your might since you were a small child, you end up feeling incredibly lost, alone, alienated and afraid, unable to develop a clear picture of who you are. You constantly ask yourself whether you really know anything about your personality and values, creating a constant, unbearable sense of dread and extreme dysphoria.

But this kind of strenuous masking is a requirement for success in the corporate world if you are neurodivergent or struggle with mental illness. The expectation to be an extrovert and deliver consistent high performance created a sense of unrelenting feeling of being overwhelmed.

My mental health issues come with an acute sensitivity to rejection, but ironically, this has led to personal and professional habits that have made rejection seem almost inevitable: among them paralyzing perfectionism and rumination. Though it would take years and an almost deadly breakdown to recognize it, I was experiencing acute, life-threatening burnout.

Over the years of acute mental illness, my day-to-day life got darker and scarier. I tried to quell what became hourly panic attacks with various forms of self-medication. As the years passed, I spoke extensively with some of the country’s top therapists and psychiatrists. No one knew quite how to diagnose me or which pills to give me. Commonly prescribed drug therapies and treatment programs failed to help, and they have often made my symptoms worse.

After years, I finally reached a point of physical and psychological exhaustion that made suicide feel like a good (or better) option. I began to have very persistent, frightening thoughts about how nice it would be to simply not exist. In my mind, nothingness looked like rest from constant pain and anxiety and exhaustion, like sleep and perfect, endless peace.

On Sept. 14, 2023, after years of quiet struggle, I tried to take my life in a hotel room in Chicago. The idea of going to sleep and never waking up seemed like my best bet, like the only chance I had left for any relief, the only way to be able to rest my mind, my body and my heart. I was disappointed to wake up in the hospital.

We remain in the earliest days of understanding mental illness, a preparadigmatic stage in which the results of studies often are not replicable, and we find a lack of consensus among the various available models used to explain it.

We hear a lot these days about a mental health crisis, but no one really knows what that means; so much of the information that we would have to know lives on the other side of our collective unwillingness to change the social and institutional structures that are hurting us. It lives in unshared stories and the pain that we hide to try to save face.

Even after having lived with major mental health issues, I can’t shake my outmoded ways of thinking about them and the people they afflict—myself included. We’re all judging people with mental health issues because we’ve been trained to and because we think that tough, capable, high-achieving people are supposed to power through. More than that, we think that highly credentialed professionals are simply not the kinds of people who have mental health issues in the first place.

Top firms attract smart, talented and driven people who personify what has come to be known as hustle culture. We are taught to measure our self-worth in degrees, credentials, job titles, promotions and—perhaps more than anything else—money and status. For many of us, there is no shame worse than looking weak to our high-achieving, high-earning peers. Our culture is one of toxic productivity, fixated on endless growth.

This fact has become more and more conspicuous as so many of our hardest workers and highest earners seem to be the most impoverished among us in terms of free time and peace. Burnout and overwork have now become a crisis and an epidemic, responsible for millions of deaths every year. Deep feelings of isolation and purposelessness seem to be a feature of the prevailing social and economic paradigm, rather than a bug. “Hopelessness is at epidemic levels,” with a growing number of Americans experiencing chronic depression and despair.

Credentialed “knowledge workers” like nothing more than to flex on social media, cultivating the appearance of a person who really cares and would help. But when push comes to shove, stigma remains the dominant and overriding fact and cultural mode, present in every conversation about mental health generally and suicide in particular.

Our glorification of powering through challenges without taking time to recover or assess underlying issues is a maladaptive response to chronic stress and exhaustion. It perpetuates the worst aspects of hustle culture by ignoring the structural and systemic factors that have led us here, isolating people by making us think that everything comes down to our choices.

I’ve had several people, including colleagues, friends and family members, suggest or state outright that mental health issues are not a real disability or even a genuine health issue—at least not as real as physical health issues—notwithstanding the fact that we have known for decades that mental health issues have a real and tangible impact on physical health, and that the brain is indeed an organ and part of the body.

After my suicide attempt, the first thing I heard from those closest to me was: “So when are you getting back in the saddle?” and “I know you can do better—just try harder!” One of my closest family members even encouraged me to end my life. Only my productivity mattered.

Much of the resilience discourse and the practices that we have adopted in the corporate world have become completely toxic. Our culture teaches us that if one is struggling with mental health issues, they are essentially weak and just have to try harder. The prevailing message remains: No one is looking. It’s your responsibility to keep pushing.

---

David S. D’Amato is an attorney, a businessman and an author of popular and scholarly articles. His writing has appeared in the Hill, Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, the Washington Examiner and many other publications, and his work has been cited by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, among others.

---

ABAJournal.com is accepting queries for original, thoughtful, nonpromotional articles and commentary by unpaid contributors to run in the Your Voice section. Details and submission guidelines are posted at “Your Submissions, Your Voice.”

---

This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.

Ari Kaplan recently spoke with Lynn Tubalinal, the director of litigation support at Dykema, and Julia Voss, the director of litigation support and e-discovery at UB Greensfelder.

Both are among the industry leaders who contributed to the recently published report Advancing Litigation Support to Fuel Growth in a Changing Legal Market, supported by Opus 2.

They discussed the effect of the increasing volume and variety of data, how a team knows that it is time to upgrade its technology, successful strategies for driving adoption, and effective generative artificial intelligence use cases.

Ari Kaplan: Tell us about your background and your current role.

Lynn Tubalinal: I started my career as a paralegal and leveraged my technical background into a litigation support role. I began to lead teams at Sidley Austin, where I spent eight years, and three and a half years ago, I moved to Dykema.

Julia Voss: I am an antitrust litigator turned e-discovery professional. Twenty years ago, I had one of the more significant cases in the firm, while the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were changing. I was tasked with figuring it out and then started teaching my peers about those developments. So in 2014, when the firm decided that a lawyer should lead litigation support, they asked me to move into that role. I have been the director of litigation support and e-discovery for 11 years.

Ari Kaplan: Did anything in the Advancing Litigation Support to Fuel Growth in a Changing Legal Market report surprise you?

Lynn Tubalinal: What is really surprising to me, and it’s not necessarily related to the content overall, is that we are all going through the same issues and figuring this out as we go. In these roles, you tend to feel like you’re on an island and don’t hear about what everyone else is experiencing until you begin talking to them. In this fast-paced industry, we don’t always get to speak to one another and connect. Through these reports, I could relate to the perspectives of my peers and identify strategies that could work for us internally and as an industry.

Ari Kaplan: One theme in the report was the increasing volume and variety of data. What effect do you expect this trend to have?

Julia Voss: The growing data volumes are driving more litigators to realize they need a technical solution to manage their dockets. When they had small cases with a few hundred documents, they could manage, but that is no longer possible. The variety of data is the most complex issue today because many different data sources are available. Every day it seems as if there’s a new app or an update to the phone or Microsoft. Litigation support professionals are constantly chasing updates and developing new methods for collecting data. There was a time when we felt like we knew e-discovery because we could effectively collect emails. Then Teams came along, followed by Slack and then WhatsApp, and now, it feels like a never-ending cycle of chasing the newest app.

Ari Kaplan: What advice would you offer to others who are managing these changes?

Lynn Tubalinal: Don’t get overwhelmed. We are all going through this at the same time. Identify what works best for your team. Meet with your peers, and discuss specific issues, like processing unique data types and learn which solutions you can offer to the case team. It is typically not a single solution. You may need different applications for some instances, such as those with modern attachments. We focus on understanding the case team’s challenges to help develop a holistic strategy, rather than solely provide technical support. They are our internal clients, and we need to help them communicate more effectively with the firm’s external clients. It can really be easy to get overwhelmed because there are many different data types, and you will not be the expert on everything, but rely on those who are the experts and get information from them.

Ari Kaplan: Outdated technology, specifically case management, was another theme in the Advancing Litigation Support to Fuel Growth in a Changing Legal Market report. How do you know when it’s time to explore a new solution, and what are your tips for others as they select new applications?

Julia Voss: You start to realize it might be time to look at a new solution when people aren’t using the one you have or there is better technology that can provide more support. Focus on listening to the people around you to understand their evolving needs better. The hardest part of exploring a new solution is finding people with time to test the options and help determine the best way to move forward, especially with all the technology available due to developments in generative AI. With many things changing at once, you need a group of people who understand what your technology is doing and what a new product could improve.

Ari Kaplan: Does outdated technology contribute to a lack of adoption?

Lynn Tubalinal: Litigation support teams must always balance the use of outdated technology with the cost of moving to a newer, faster and better solution. Getting teams to buy into that upgrade can be a challenge. As technologists, we are enthusiastic about improving our tools, but cost, adoption and other variables factor into the ultimate decision to change.

Ari Kaplan: What strategies have been successful in encouraging adoption in your firm?

Julia Voss: Presenting the attorneys with the benefits instead of highlighting features alone is essential. The most effective strategy is to begin with a small team that pilots the application and presents the results to influence adoption. Once users see results, they are more likely to take advantage of the new tool.

Ari Kaplan: Generative AI has been and will continue to be a hot topic. How are you using AI in your firm, and what have you learned from your experiences so far?

Lynn Tubalinal: There are different types of AI, not just generative AI, and we have been utilizing more traditional AI in our workflows for years. We just purchased a generative AI component for our e-discovery document review platform and are excited to deploy it. I’m trying to identify my champions, who can use it in their matters and provide honest feedback. Most lawyers want to see results, rather than the nuts and bolts of how the technology works. Based on the impressions of generative AI that I have heard, everybody’s waiting to see what others are doing. Nobody wants to be behind the curve, and we want to adopt it, but we’re cautiously treading into the arena.

Julia Voss: We have also been using different kinds of AI for a long time, but generative AI is the obvious new shiny toy. We had been testing generative AI in our document review platform for a few months and are starting to expand access to grow adoption. For resources and training, we need to persuade the professionals on our team to allocate the time to update their skills using generative AI products, so that the great people we have can continue to help the legal teams move forward.

Ari Kaplan: What is your team doing in 2025 to maintain its competitive edge?

Lynn Tubalinal: Ensuring that the talent that we have can utilize our full suite of tools and be our champions. Education and marketing are paramount. I spent much of 2024 marketing my team because not everyone fully understands what we do. My team is just trying to get the work done but may not necessarily know how to market the team while they are supporting others. I have been working on that internally by encouraging more direct support, such as a phone call over an email or Teams chat. We are moving back to basics to better showcase our talent and capabilities.

Julia Voss: What didn’t surprise me about this report is that we’re all trying to do some of the same things. We are internally rebranding our group as the data intelligence team. We are showcasing the skills of our technologists and e-discovery counsel to raise their profile and highlight where they can provide support, so the trial teams can focus on the merits of their cases.

Listen to the complete interview at Reinventing Professionals.

Ari Kaplan regularly interviews leaders in the legal industry and in the broader professional services community to share perspective, highlight transformative change and introduce new technology at his blog and on iTunes.

---

This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.

An employee of the National Labor Relations Board who was fired by President Donald Trump is firing back in court with a federal lawsuit, calling her removal “unprecedented and illegal.”

Gwynne A. Wilcox called her Jan. 27 firing by late-night email a blatant violation of the National Labor Relations Act, which allows the president to remove board members only in cases of “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause,” and only after “notice and hearing,” according to the complaint.

“The President’s unprecedented removal of Ms. Wilcox defies 90 years of Supreme Court precedent that has ensured the independence of critical government agencies,” Deepak Gupta, an attorney for Wilcox, said in a statement. “Federal law is clear: The members of the National Labor Relations Board may only be removed for neglect of duty or misconduct, and only after a notice and a hearing. The President has violated the law.”

A group of Louisiana health care providers and reproductive rights advocates are challenging the state’s unprecedented action of classifying abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol to the state’s list of controlled substances.

Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, signed Louisiana Act 246 into law in May — a choice which effectuated the most extreme legal action yet taken on the drugs. Under the law, the two medications, which have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for more than two decades, are now classified as Schedule IV drugs. The classification puts mifepristone and misoprostol on part with certain painkillers and mood-altering medications that merit greater oversight due to their potential for abuse or dependence.