Helgi is a co-editor and co-author of the book Trauma-Informed Law: A Primer for Lawyer Resilience and Healing, with Marjorie Florestal, Myrna McCallum and J. Kim Wright, published in Spring 2023 by the American Bar Association (Practice Management Division).
In addition, Helgi Maki is a consultant and executive coach to lawyers and law firms. Helgi helps lawyers improve their resilience skills to benefit their legal practice and well-being and improve client satisfaction. She also provides training in trauma-informed law.
Helgi Maki is a University of Toronto Faculty of Law graduate with an M.A. in Political Economy from Carleton University(Norman Paterson School of International Affairs). She joined the Ontario Bar in 2003 and the New York Bar in 2005. Helgi is an executive coach and consultant who helps lawyers use resilience skills to assist clients more effectively and improve their career satisfaction (including well-being). She incorporates mindfulness practices into her work, drawing on over seven years of mindfulness instructor & movement teacher training. Previously, she was a partner at a large law firm and has done legal technology & data analytics consulting. Helgi advocates for trauma-informed lawyering to increase access to justice, improve client service and support lawyer well-being.
Her work is featured in the Canadian Supreme Court Law Review and the “Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)” conference series convened by California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris.
In addition, Helgi has worked on various pro bono advocacy projects, including helping victim-witnesses of interpersonal violence advocate for federal judicial training on the connection between sexual assault and trauma, legislation for which came into force in May 2021.
For details, see https://helgimaki.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/helgimaki/
Websites and social media accounts are noted below:
Websites
Coaching website: https://helgimaki.co/
Book Project website: https://www.traumainformedlaw.org/
Social media
LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/helgimaki
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HelgiMaki/
Contact details:
Helgi Maki
Generativity Co.
Tel: 416.418.3204
Email: helgi@helgimaki.com
(For consulting matters, email helgi.maki@generativityco.com) Helgi Maki Currently resides in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
The summer when I was nine years old my mother died, and that was when I decided to become a lawyer. I have friends who suffered a similar loss, but their stories end with the choice to become a doctor. For me, it wasn’t my mother’s disease I wanted to battle but the deep sense of injustice I felt at losing her. The only people I knew who fought injustice were civil rights lawyers. I wanted to be like them.
No one ever talks about the trauma these lawyers experienced in their quest to make the law live up to its ideals. What must it have been like to bear witness to the lynching of Emmett Till or the bombing death of those four little Black girls in the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama? I was taught to think of these civil rights lawyers as heroes. It wasn’t until I became a lawyer that I began to reflect on the price they paid for their heroism. In law school I learned to “think like a lawyer,” which I interpreted as a call to suppress emotion and favor logic. When I became a law professor, I passed the same lesson on to my students. One day, a student showed up at my office in tears, and all I could tell her was “let’s talk about contract law.” I knew then that some- thing in me had to change. I needed to get in touch with the pain of my experiences, and not just the righteous indignation and the desire to fight for change.
It was a 25-year journey to get to this place—and because I am an academic in head and heart, part of the journey included getting advanced degrees in Jungian psychology and human development. My contribution to this book is my academic training in law and trauma as well as the lessons I learned on the journey. One of the most profound lessons is this: there is another way—a better way—to be a lawyer. And it does not require me to suppress any part of myself. I wish the same for you. Marjorie Florestal lives in Sacramento, CA.
Upon graduating from the University of Florida with a Juris Doctorate, I was first sworn into the [State of Georgia] Bar in 1989. Since 1994, I have been a member of the North Carolina Bar, the only bar membership I maintain.
In 2009, I was named as one of the first ABA’s Legal Rebels, “finding new ways to practice law, represent their clients, adjudicate cases and train the next generation of lawyers.”
I am a central figure in the Integrative Law Movement, an ecosystem of practitioners and organizations who are practicing law in innovative ways.
My practice focused on humanistic, relational approaches in law. From collaborative divorce practice to restorative justice to relational contracts (and many others), I have practiced, pioneered, and promoted innovative models and ideas. I am one of the co-creators of the Conscious Contracts(R) model with practitioners doing business in 20 languages around the world. I no longer actively practice law, now serving as a coach, consultant, professor, author, and trainer.
I wear a lot of hats. I coach lawyers to design their lives in alignment with what matters to them. As a legal consultant, I work with companies and organizations on developing values-based legal documents and policies. I have trained hundreds of legal professionals on six continents. I am active in reinventing work, Spiral Dynamics, legal design, and Emergent Entrepreneurship.
A Senior Fellow at the Quinnipiac UniversityCenter on Dispute Resolution Project for Integrative Law in Legal Education, I also teach an experiential simulation course on the Integrative Law Approach to Negotiation. I consult on adding integrative law approaches to curriculum in educational institutions around the world, including several in South Africa and Zambia.
I am one of the co-editors of Trauma-Informed Law: A Primer for Practicing Lawyers and Pathway for Resilience and Healing (forthcoming, ABA, 2023) and the author of two foundational books for the global Integrative Law movement, Lawyers as Peacemakers, Practicing Holistic, Problem-Solving Law (2010) and Lawyers as Changemakers (2016). (Both books were originally published by the American Bar Association) I am a contributor to several books, including The Best Lawyer You Can Be: A Guide to Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Wellness by Stewart Levine (ABA Law Practice Management, 2018.) Lawyers as Changemakers book has been translated into Italian and we're working on French and Portuguese versions. I am working on several other book projects, including a micropublishing company.
As a mother, step-mother, host parent, and foster mother, I had sixteen children live with me between 1977 and 2003. I am a grandmother and great-grandmother. Those relationships make the future very real to me and I feel a strong impulse to make the world a better place. J. Kim Wright currently lives in Burlington, North Carolina.
I went to law school for a couple of reasons. I did not want to deal with emotions, and I did not want to have to console anyone or help anybody in the middle of an emotional break. I had experienced a lot of personal trauma in my life and if I could not be in touch with my own emotions, I knew I could not be there for others. I also wanted to serve Indigenous people, never contemplating for a moment, the collective and cultural trauma we experienced as a result of colonization. When I began to practice criminal law in Northern Saskatchewan, I found that the whole range of human suffering meets you in a courtroom. I was not prepared for the suffering I had to confront, in witnesses and, inevitably, in myself. I did not know how to deal with people in crisis who looked to me to rescue them and sometimes, pleading with me to do the impossible.
Our legal processes were never designed to be trauma-informed; in fact, I think they were designed to traumatize. No other outcome is possible when we are taught to treat people as nothing more than legal issues. Practicing law in this way creates a lot of harm in people who have already experienced significant harm in their lives. One day, upon meeting a little boy who had been sexually assaulted, I decided I could no longer recklessly contribute to the harm of others, in the name of justice.
This little boy and the hundreds of survivors who followed over the course of my legal career, taught me what I now understand to be trauma-informed lawyering. My contribution to this book is my translation of the education they provided me, the education none of us received in law school—but should have. Myrna McCallum currently lives in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
