To practicing attorneys, the pandemic seemed to change the legal system overnight. These changes, along with preexisting systemic issues, underlie the mental-health crises that affect attorneys throughout the profession—depression, anxiety, burnout, and substance abuse. Attorneys need to acknowledge and understand those conditions, as well as how to address them properly. This episode features Katie Rose Guest Pryal, an author, educator, and attorney who researches and writes on disability and mental-health issues, focusing on public discourse, mental illness, and neurodiversity. Being neurodiverse herself, Katie strives to make the world more accessible through her scholarship and teaching. She discusses the challenges of addressing mental health and how to cope with burnout in our ever-changing world.
ADDRESSING BURNOUT IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION | KATIE ROSE GUEST PRYAL
Our guest is Katie Pryal. She is a law professor, an author, and many other things that we are going to talk about. She’s also my cousin. She’s the person in the law that I have known the longest. I have known her my entire life. Katie, thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you for inviting me.
We are glad to have you here. I know some of our readers probably know who you are through Twitter but those that don’t, will you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?
I am a lawyer, an author, a keynote speaker, a law professor, adjunct now at the University of North Carolina School of Law.
You were an academic as well outside of law.
I was full-time at UNC Law for several years and stepped back to write full-time in 2014, but I still teach there as an adjunct and enjoy it very much.
You’ve got a graduate degree in Creative Writing, went to law school, and got a PhD in Rhetoric. You have not practiced. You have done the academic side of things. Is that a fair way to put it?
I have practiced in the margins. In fact, I’m an Attorney of Counsel at Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani, which is a known national firm. I average one matter a month with them now. Sometimes it’s more, but it’s a blast to work with them. I maintain my license and practice law. When I was getting my PhD, I practiced part-time at a workers’ comp firm that helped me graduate without debt, which is a nice thing.
Even though we get fellowships, we go into doctoral programs. I had a teaching assistantship. I had roommates, and we all squatted in a house together. It doesn’t cover everything you need, and we take out loans. I was able to work part-time with a flexible schedule for a workers’ compensation firm. I have practiced law in the margins and maintained my license. I have a firm of my own, mostly to help my friends get out of trouble.
You also did a Federal clerkship, and we could talk about it as much as you want. Yours had a unique aspect that I would love for you to share. We talked about it before.
I clerked for a Chief District Judge in the Eastern District of North Carolina at the time. I was thrilled because it was such a wonderful clerkship, but the location was special. It’s Elizabeth City, North Carolina, which sits on the Pasquotank River. It opens right into one of the sounds on the Outer Banks. I was on the inner inside coastline with the Outer Banks outside. I could cross a bridge and be right near Corolla, Duck, or Kitty Hawk if you know where that is.
I got to live out there, which was a lot of fun. There were a variety of interesting things that we got to do because we were in the Eastern District. Our jurisdiction included all the parks and national seashore. We had cases that were hilarious and also weird because of the national seashore. One involved the wild ponies and sea turtles.
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We had some vacancies on the court. We would go and sit in New Bern, down the coast. We had chambers in Raleigh. We would travel some, and on one of our trips, he was like, “Let’s go to the lighthouses.” The public is allowed to go up the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse but they are not allowed to go up the others.
We’ve got to go up the one on Ocracoke Island, which I don’t recommend because it is very narrow. In fact, I got claustrophobic and freaked out in that one because I don’t know if a human nowadays is supposed to be able to fit inside that lighthouse. I am 6 feet tall and went up in that. As you go, it gets smaller. The stairs were so narrow, and I was ducking down to try to turn my body to fit these spiral stairs that were not welded together anymore.
It’s not very tall. The Hatteras is enormous. I was like, “I don’t feel a need to go all the way to the top of this lighthouse.” I came back down. This is on Ocracoke, and that’s the one where Blackbeard had his hideout. Ocracoke is an island. You have to take a ferry to get there. We ferried over to Ocracoke, and there’s the one in the Outer Banks that’s with the diamonds on it. I’m like, “This is Bodie Island, Hatteras, Ocracoke, and the other one.” I cannot remember what it’s called.
We have to go up that one, which is lovely, not scary, and Hatteras, which is extremely tall. I am a fit person yet not fit enough to get all of this. I was like, “I’m dying.” That was neat. This is on Federal land. The park rangers, who all knew my judge, liked and respected him a lot, escorted us into this Federal land. They let us see that. That was a real treat and was nice. We’ve got to see the ponies, which was awesome.
You think about a Federal clerkship, and being on the Outer Banks and all the wild animals is not something you think about.
I’m curious about your practice area and teaching concentration, both as a lawyer and law professor. What are you talking about and practicing?
I did work in Compensation Law before and all through grad school. I’ve got my PhD in Rhetoric, and that took approximately 3 and a half to 4 years to do that. During that time, I practiced law. When I was first brought to Gordon & Rees, it was to do workers’ comp but I branched out. They are like, “You can do Employment Law?” I said, “Yeah.”
I haven’t had a workers’ comp case since that first one. I do Employment Law, mostly contracts, non-disclosure, non-compete agreements, and things like that but that was not my area of research as a professor. My area of research was Disability Law. If you look at my publications on my CV, which you know is boring but if you chose to do that because you needed to fight insomnia, you could see my publications. They focus on mostly psychiatric disability, mental illness, any neuro divergence like that. It was my main focus. Disability studies is the area. That’s where I published the most.
My other major area of research was legal writing. It continues to be. I have a new article coming out. I placed it when it’s coming out in the next book of the Barry Law Review. I give a talk every other year. It’s the Biennial Conference of the Legal Writing Institute, which is the scholarly body of legal writing studies. I’m looking forward to that.
I keep my hand in academia in that way. Those are my two main areas, disability studies and legal writing. Hilariously, sometimes I’m an expert in legal writing issues. I will write an affidavit or a declaration for something in litigation. People find me, and they are like, “Does this comma mean what you think it means? These parentheses don’t change the meaning of this sentence.” I have done that all over the country.
I have never heard of this. You get to do that. People hire you to pick apart their writing.
Mostly it’s dumb stuff. Somebody is trying desperately to win their argument and do it on something very specious. Yet someone else is like, “I still need to submit something. Can you please say that this is dumb?” I’m like, “I can’t say it like that but I can say it in a way that gets to the point.” I’m a grammar expert.
One of the things you have published is The Complete Legal Writer series with Alexa Chew. We don’t have to talk too much about it but I love it because it introduces the idea of teaching through genres. If you want to talk about that a little bit, that’s a cool approach.
The new article is called Genre Discovery 2.0, which is coming out in 2022. It’s an editorial. The first article was The Genre Discovery Approach: Preparing Law Students To Write Any Legal Document. It’s a big, bold claim, which is how we should title things. I wrote this article back several years ago. That’s why the new one is coming out. It was 2012 or 2013.
This is my Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition. It’s the idea of using genres to teach legal writing. What that means is you don’t teach people to write a particular office memo or appellate brief. You teach them that appellate briefs are a genre, which means a document type that exists beyond the one that they are writing and will exist after. It’s a recurring document type.
If it recurs, that means it has conventions that we follow when we write them. That’s how we know how to identify them. If you put 4 appellate briefs and 1 office memo, you could pick out which one was not the appellate brief. The reason why we are able to do that is that genres exist. “Which one is the office memo? That one, because it’s not an appellate brief, these are.”
That doesn’t mean that all appellate briefs are exactly the same. It means that they share conventions, which are not rules or templates. They are conventions. If you can learn the conventions, you can write an appellate brief in different situations. This jurisdiction has different rules. That’s fine. You can learn those rules and conventions because you know how to learn them.
What we teach in The Complete Legal Writer, what I suggested in this original article, and what Alexa helped me transform into something teachable is how to teach the student to teach themselves the genres they have never encountered before. When they go into a summer internship or practice and someone says, “You need to write a bankruptcy brief,” and they are like, “I didn’t learn that in law school.” That’s fine.
You go and get five samples out of your firm’s files, lay them out in front of you, and study the conventions. There are similarities. What do they have in common? You can figure out the conventions if you have the skill of discovering a genre. No genre is undiscoverable to you. You can discover anything. The idea is empowering students to teach themselves.
I love it because it’s something that all of us have done at some point. You are at a firm, you get on the system and search for whatever it is. It formalizes and gives it a name rather than looking around on the system blindly.
We already use go-bys. Instead of hacking it together, I said, “We use go-bys. We do this.” What do we do exactly? Let me analyze this and put it into practical terms. Find some samples, sit down, look for these things and take this. That’s the thing that we teach ourselves to fumble through in our first year or two of practice. Now the students enter practice and are already able to do this. They are like, “I need some go-bys, and we are going to have three. Thank you.” Ideally, even in front of the same judge. They come and know what to ask and look for. This is a real skill.
I love that label because it accurately describes what we do when trying to teach ourselves. Even as lawyers, you get new assignments. You run into an area that you are not familiar with necessarily, and in many years of practice, you are still looking for a form, a template or a go-by. I like that name of framing it into the genres. It’s cool.
The Complete Legal Writer is the first book in a series. Jody might know this already. It’s called The Complete Series for Legal Writers. The Genre Discovery is pulled through all of the books. The second one is The Complete Bar Writer, which is focused on the MPT, the Multistate Performance Test. I’m not sure if it wasn’t part of the test when I took it. That’s the one where students are given a case file and have to write some genre.
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We wrote this book with the idea of genre discovery. What if you are given something and don’t know what it is? How do you discover what the genre is and how to write it? We brought it through to that book. The third book is coming out in the spring of 2022. It’s The Complete Pre-Law Writer, which is targeted towards students entering law school, in summer programs, undergrads but also paralegals, and others who are lawyer adjacent. It’s a condensed version with assignments instead of a higher litigation process. In The Complete Legal Writer, it’s six writing assignments. The genre discovery thing is the thread that connects the whole complete series.
Original source can be found here.