In this episode of Lawyers as Healers, I’m joined by Holly Hedley, a specialist health, employment, privacy, and human rights lawyer from New Zealand.

Holly is the founder of Dawn Legal and is completing a Borrin Foundation Women Leaders in Law Fellowship exploring trauma-informed legal practice for Aotearoa New Zealand.

Our conversation explores Holly’s move from large-firm practice into her own practice, where she has more freedom to approach legal work in a compassionate, restorative, and human-centered way.

We talk about gender expectations in law, parenting, birth trauma, vicarious trauma, and the often invisible weight lawyers carry from the work they do. Holly shares a powerful story about being stopped in her tracks by a memory from a difficult case while walking with her infant son — a moment that led her to ask deeper questions about trauma, legal work, and what lawyers absorb over time.

A major theme of this conversation is that lawyers are often expected to be detached, rational, and unemotional. But that does not mean we are unaffected. Holly challenges the idea that good lawyering requires us to ignore our own humanity or the humanity of the people we serve.

We also discuss what trauma-informed legal practice can look like in practical terms: understanding boundaries, knowing when to refer clients to other supports, creating space between difficult meetings, using language more carefully, and asking one simple question before sending a letter, submission, or judgment:

How does this land?

At its heart, this episode is about practicing law with clarity, compassion, and power — without pretending lawyers have to become therapists or stop being lawyers.

As Holly puts it, maybe the invitation is simply to find the human way of lawyering that is truly yours.

• Holly’s transition from large-firm practice to Dawn Legal
• trauma-informed legal practice in New Zealand
• gender expectations, parenting, and law firm culture
• why trauma may appear in every area of legal practice
• the myth of the detached lawyer
• supervision, reflection, and better support for lawyers
• boundaries between legal work and therapeutic work
• writing with heart, clarity, and power

Dawn Legal:
https://www.dawnlegal.co.nz/

Trauma-Informed Legal Practice project:
https://www.dawnlegal.co.nz/trauma-informed-legal-practice

Borrin Foundation Fellowship:
https://www.borrinfoundation.nz/women-leaders-in-law-fellowship-for-holly-hedley/

Heart-Centered Judgment:
https://www.qlsproctor.com.au/2025/08/nz-judge-writes-letter-to-child-as-judgment/

Holly Hedley
Founder, Dawn Legal
Specialist health, employment, privacy, and human rights lawyer

Dave Albrechta
Mediator, coach, recovering litigator, and host of Lawyers as Healers

Interested in coaching to transform your practice?

Email dave@tallgrasscollective.org

In this episode of Lawyers as Healers, I’m joined by Gina Steele, a lawyer-turned-coach who helps attorneys move from overwhelm and exhaustion toward fulfillment, energy, and meaningful impact in their careers.

Before becoming a coach, Gina practiced law for nearly two decades, including work in patent litigation and patent prosecution. Her own experience with burnout eventually led to a serious health crisis — and then to a deeper exploration of mindfulness, neuroscience, nervous system regulation, and what it actually takes for lawyers to thrive.

This conversation explores the connection between lawyer well-being and the larger role lawyers play in society. Gina makes a powerful point early in the conversation: we need to heal lawyers so lawyers can become better healers.

We talk about how law school and legal practice often train lawyers into scarcity, competition, stress, and constant fight-or-flight. When lawyers are dysregulated, exhausted, and overwhelmed, they lose access to empathy, creativity, collaboration, and the fuller perspective needed to help clients make good decisions.

Gina also shares practical tools for lawyers, including mindfulness, breathwork, movement, EFT tapping, orienting practices, and the importance of building regular habits that help regulate the nervous system.

We also discuss the neuroscience of civility, why professionalism cannot just be a vague instruction to “be nice,” and how lawyers can learn to see conflict not as a fight, but as a call for collaborative problem-solving.

At its heart, this episode is about why lawyer well-being is not separate from the future of law.

It may be the foundation of it.

• Gina’s path from law to coaching
• law school, scarcity, and competition
• burnout, stress, and Gina’s health crisis
• mindfulness and nervous system regulation
• why exhausted lawyers lose access to empathy
• the neuroscience of civility
• fight, flight, freeze, and legal practice
• how lawyers affect the nervous systems of clients and colleagues
• tools lawyers can use to regulate themselves
• why conflict can be reframed as collaborative problem-solving
• how coaching can help lawyers reconnect with meaning, values, and impact

Steele Leadership:
https://steeleadership.com/

Email:
gsteele@steeleadership.com

Gina Steele
Lawyer, coach, and founder of Steele Leadership

Dave Albrechta
Mediator, coach, recovering litigator, and host of Lawyers as Healers.

In this episode of Lawyers as Healers, I’m joined by Nanci Smith, an attorney licensed in Vermont and New York and author of Untangling Your Marriage: A Guide to Collaborative Divorce.

Nanci’s work focuses on promoting peaceful divorce practices and helping people move through one of the most painful transitions of their lives with more dignity, clarity, and humanity.

Our conversation explores Nanci’s path from traditional litigation into collaborative divorce, including the moment she began questioning whether being known as a “barracuda” was really the identity she wanted as a lawyer. We talk about the emotional weight of family law, the limits of the adversarial system, and why divorce is not only a legal process, but also a financial and deeply emotional one.

Nanci explains how collaborative divorce works, why it creates a different kind of container for conflict, and how lawyers, mental health professionals, and financial neutrals can work together to support families without immediately escalating to court.

We also discuss lawyer identity, trust, ego, fear, apology, and the courage it takes to step away from the warrior model of lawyering.

At its heart, this episode asks what might happen if more lawyers saw themselves not only as advocates, but as facilitators, peacemakers, and healers of human conflict.

• Nanci’s path into law and family law
• the moment she began questioning the “barracuda” identity
• collaborative divorce as an alternative to litigation
• why divorce involves legal, financial, and emotional realities
• the role of mental health professionals and financial neutrals
• lawyer ego, identity, and resistance to change
• why people in conflict often need to be heard more than they need to fight
• the power of apology, remorse, and acknowledgment
• what gives Nanci hope about collaborative practice

Nanci Smith Law:
https://nancismithlaw.com/

Book:
Untangling Your Marriage: A Guide to Collaborative Divorce

Nanci Smith
Attorney, collaborative divorce practitioner, and author of Untangling Your Marriage

Dave Albrechta
Mediator, coach, recovering litigator, and host of Lawyers as Healers.