The Association for Corporate Counsel and American Counseling Association have partnered to develop a toolkit for ACC members around wellness, an escalating concern for that community.

The Well-being Toolkit for In-house Lawyers, released earlier this month, is a publication that includes recommendations around health and work-life balance for members, both as individuals and as team leaders. The document collects, refreshes, and adds material that ACC has developed around wellness in recent years. Demand for that material became more acute during the pandemic, said ACC President and CEO Veta T. Richardson.

“It’s no secret that lawyers suffer from higher levels of alcoholism and substance abuse than other professions,” she said. “We increasingly heard that [members] wanted more material around soft topics like wellness, health, and how to be a better leader and manager of people. When ACC started offering programs around that, we were delighted to see that in some cases they were oversubscribed—it told us that we were hitting a need.”

To develop the toolkit, ACC reached out to members and experts in the legal world for feedback and recommendations. Richardson also reached out to Shawn E. Boynes, FASAE, CAE, CEO of the American Counseling Association, for additional expertise from his association’s community. For Boynes, a veteran of other legal associations before taking the helm at ACA in 2022, the partnership was an opportunity to test how it might leverage its expertise to other industries that might be facing wellness challenges among their members.

“ACA had been mostly internally focused, and one of my priorities [as CEO] has been to shift that focus and have the organization focus more externally,” he said. “Wellness and mental health impacts everybody, not just counselors… When I was having conversations with CEO colleagues, there were a good number of CEOs who said to me, ‘Hey, it would be great if we could have some sort of resource.’”

Much of the information in the toolkit is tailored to ACC’s membership, including quotes about how to address wellness issues from corporate lawyers, and recommendations from ACC’s own resources: A checklist on the importance of seeking outside help, for instance, directs readers to helplines and bar-specific assistance programs, survey information, and tips for discussing challenges with others in the legal community.

But the initiative benefits from its connection with ACA, Richardson said. “It starts with recognizing that no one organization has all the answers,” she said. “By thinking a little bit more out of the box in terms of who you might partner with, you can really generate greater value for your members.”

Boynes added that collaboration on this subject is particularly valuable for the association community. “It doesn’t make sense to recreate the wheel—there needs to be more collaboration and ask, How do we lean into each other?” he said. “I’m not trying to steal ACC members. They’re certainly not trying to steal ACA members. Together we’ve created a quality product for that audience, and that’s what it should be about—the value proposition for the audience that you’re trying to serve.”