In this Article, we emphasize the need for lawyers, judges, jurors, and others affected by the lawyering and litigation processes to come forward with their stories of how they have been directly or indirectly traumatized by their work or by their duties. We summarize the moving discussions by panelists for the Wake Forest Law Review’s 2021 Spring Symposium about their experiences with secondary traumatic stress (“STS”), including testimonials from capital defense attorneys, innocence lawyers, military lawyers, a prosecution social worker, the former wife of a big-firm lawyer who self-medicated to deal with job stress, and a juror traumatized from a horrendous death penalty trial over two decades ago. We discuss important studies that have been conducted on the STS experiences of public defenders and others. We relay our own survey findings about STS among capital defense attorneys in North Carolina. Dr. McQuiston discusses her research and findings about STS among judges and jurors. We then discuss the need for further studies to document STS in lawyering in order to educate leaders, lawyers, and students about important structural and individual changes that must take place to minimize STS and promote resilience.
