Trauma-Informed Law
Trauma is the glue that holds the legal system together. Some practice areas are obvious cauldrons of it — criminal law, immigration, divorce, personal injury — but even tax lawyers and M&A attorneys experience it.
Trauma and the Legal System
Lawyers are swimming in trauma: their own, their clients’, and the systemic trauma all around them. Yet law school historically has taught the opposite lesson — that feelings are irrelevant, that “professional distance” and enough emotional armor will see a lawyer through. It hasn’t worked: the profession is known for its high rates of depression, addiction, and burnout.
Trauma-Informed Law: A Primer for Practicing Lawyers
Published by the ABA in March 2023, this book is Kim’s attempt to close that gap. She co-edited it with Helgi Maki, Marjorie Florestal, and Myrna McCallum.
The book treats trauma as a physiological reality, not a character flaw. A threat activates the brain’s limbic system faster than its prefrontal cortex can weigh in. This helps explain why a triggered client’s memory can come out non-linear, why reactions can look disproportionate, and why lawyers themselves can be “hijacked” by an old trigger.
A Different Question to Ask
The practical payoff for a lawyer is a different question to ask. Instead of “what’s wrong with you?” when a client misses deadlines, can’t make a decision, returns blank forms, or tells the same story over and over in more and more detail, a trauma-informed lawyer asks “what happened to you?” That single shift changes how a lawyer reads a client’s silence, anger, or scattered timeline — not as a credibility problem, but as a trauma response that a bit of grounding and genuine listening can help settle.
Intrapersonal
knowing your own triggers, and using the body — a walk, a task, five senses grounding — rather than trying to think your way out of a trauma response, since the survival brain reads sensation, not logic
Interpersonal
co-regulating with someone else by settling your own nervous system first, and offering listening without judgment or fixing
Systemic
educating colleagues, destigmatizing trauma, and building toward the kind of legal system integrative models like collaborative law, restorative justice, and therapeutic jurisprudence are already reaching for.
Multimedia
Links & Resources
- Trauma-Informed Law — the book (Maki, Florestal, McCallum, Wright)
- ABA Journal — “How reckoning with trauma can help you, your clients and the legal profession” (podcast episode on the book)
- Somatic Experiencing International
- The Wisdom of Trauma (documentary, Dr. Gabor Maté)
- Resilience (documentary)
- National Legal Aid (Australia) — Trauma-Informed Resources (With You Training)
- Trauma-Informed Law Project — Resources (Helgi Maki’s curated list)
- https://www.njcourts.gov/sites/default/files/attorneys/attorney-resources/trauma-article-jkw-2024.pdf