Law Student Town Halls
In 2020, the Supreme Judicial Court Standing Committee on Lawyer Well-Being hosted a number of Town Hall meetings with members of 7 Massachusetts affinity bar associations, which resulted in the publication of the Committee’s Report Summarizing Affinity Bar Town Hall Meetings in February of 2021. This Report has already had a significant impact in challenging legal institutions throughout the Commonwealth to address the lived experiences of lawyers from underrepresented populations here in Massachusetts, and the Committee has held further Town Hall meetings in 2021 following the release of the Report, including with lawyers and law students with disabilities.
The Standing Committee now seeks to similarly engage with law students and very recent graduates (0-2 years post-grad) in its efforts to enhance lawyer and law student well-being in the Commonwealth. Across the month of November, we hosted Town Halls and will host additional Town Halls in February learn more about all the well-being challenges that Massachusetts law students face. Please sign up below to attend one or more sessions on the following dates/times.
*If you cannot attend a session, or if you would like to anonymously submit feedback/experiences outside of the sessions, please consider completing this anonymous survey about your experiences: https://forms.gle/MdsCZP1ALay2snE39.*
The goal of these sessions is not for the Committee to tell law students of the Commonwealth what their challenges are or how we’re planning to respond, but for the Committee to really hear from students about their own lived experiences and challenges, so that we are better equipped to ensure that the individual and collective well-being challenges faced by students are reflected in the Committee’s ongoing work to improve the lives of legal professionals throughout the Commonwealth.
*These sessions are not categorized by region or school, and each session is open to all law students from across the state.
*No professors or school administrators will be invited to these meetings, and all insights shared will be anonymized to the extent possible in any reporting regarding these meetings and will not be attributed to any attendee.
One major theme of the 2019 SJC Steering Committee on Lawyer Well-Being’s Report was the importance of “[a] strong and on-going commitment to enhancing diversity, equity and inclusion in all our practices” as being “crucial to our individual and collective well-being.” To that end, the third of these Town Halls (Nov. 30 from 6:30-7:30pm) will be specifically dedicated to hearing from students who are members of identity-based law student affinity groups or who are members of underrepresented or marginalized groups, or both. This is to focus on the specific challenges and added stressors that underrepresented and marginalized students face with respect to their well-being.
