Wendy Heilbut of Jayaram Law: 5 Ways That Businesses Can Help Promote The Mental Wellness Of Their Employees

Eliminate a billable hour requirement. This is earth-shattering in the legal profession, but we’re doing it! We trust the lawyers on our team to focus on our clients’ needs. Being a lawyer is stressful enough, we don’t need to add the pressure of reaching some wild number of ‘billable’ hours on top.

As a part of my series about the “5 Ways That Businesses Can Help Promote The Mental Wellness Of Their Employees” I had the pleasure of interviewing Wendy Heilbut.

Wendy is a partner and founder of Jayaram Law, a boutique law firm specializing in supporting innovators and creators through the protection of their Intellectual Property, growth of their businesses and providing advice and management as they grow and fundraise. She spent the early years of her legal career at one of the largest global law firms experiencing extreme exhaustion and burn-out. Today she and her partners aim to change the way law is practiced in the US through creating a healthy workplace that takes everyone’s wellbeing into account. She is also an angel investor, non-profit trustee, wife and mother to two humans and one dog, she lives in Manhattan.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive into our discussion, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?

I actually first set my eyes on a legal career because a psychic suggested it! I’m not kidding! But the story I usually tell is that post-college I was working in San Francisco as a recruiter for administrative and support staff mostly service law firms as clients were. I quickly found myself more intrigued by what the lawyers were doing than what I was doing. After determining that I was an east coast girl at heart, I headed to DC for law school and was recruited out of law school by a huge New York law firm. Even though NYC seemed way too big for me, I figured — if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere! One-year into my NYC stint I met my husband, a born-and-bred New Yorker and I’ve never left! But after about 5 years in BigLaw, I burnt out and turned my attention toward my new family, non-profit work and a friend’s start-up. As my second child hit preschool, so did my second burn-out so I went back to the law and joined an old contact in growing Jayaram Law. We’ve been at it since 2017 and we’ve grown tremendously.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

Goodness, I feel like they happen every day! I love the diversity of my job. Meeting people with mutual connections is great — the NYC start-up community is much smaller than you would think.

What advice would you suggest to your colleagues in your industry to thrive and avoid burnout?

As a partner and a founder, I am responsible to both my team and to my clients. Someone always needs me! I could work 24-hours a day and never see the end. I know many attorneys and service-providers feel this way. I believe burnout happens when we don’t allow our mind and spirit to stop thinking about work, so I pick certain windows (select evenings, all-day Saturdays) to not even think about work. It can be easy to “take time off” only to be strapped to a phone or laptop all day. Through this method, I give myself certain times to truly shut it off.

What advice would you give to other leaders about how to create a fantastic work culture?

Interview everyone yourself. Someday this might become impossible, but I always hope to at least say hello to every candidate before they are hired, and for now, I screen them all! Having a team of NICE people is number one — we are considerate of one-another and respect each other before anything else.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?

I have always liked the short phrase, “Be here now.” When the day throws a dozen balls into the air and I don’t quite know how they will each land — I try to just be present to the moment and proceed.

Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s move to the main focus of our interview. As you know, the collective mental health of our country is facing extreme pressure. In recent years many companies have begun offering mental health programs for their employees. For the sake of inspiring others, we would love to hear about five steps or initiatives that companies have taken to help improve or optimize their employees mental wellness. Can you please share a story or example for each?

1. Lead by example. My partners and I each see a therapist and boldly keep those meetings on our weekly work calendars.

2. Don’t expect work outside regular hours. This might sound obvious, but in the legal field this is REVOLUTIONARY! We occasionally need weekend or evening work — but that is not the norm and we always ask our team for their time in those instances rather than expect it.

3. Offer unlimited personal time. We are trusting that our team will get their work done so we don’t count hours for moving mom to Florida or taking Fido to the vet. If you want to take an afternoon for the doctor or a week at the beach — do it!

4. Eliminate a billable hour requirement. This is earth-shattering in the legal profession, but we’re doing it! We trust the lawyers on our team to focus on our clients’ needs. Being a lawyer is stressful enough, we don’t need to add the pressure of reaching some wild number of ‘billable’ hours on top.

5. Discuss and focus on non-work topics with your team. In interviews and with our team we like to share our outside interests. Without outside interests we’re certainly not good lawyers, but we’re also not good people.

These ideas are wonderful, but sadly they are not yet commonplace. What strategies would you suggest to raise awareness about the importance of supporting the mental wellness of employees?

We are hoping to lead by example. Little by little as we are able to hire and retain top-talent; achieve excellent results for our clients; win exciting accounts and projects — all while having a life, we think we will be noticed. In fact, we already are! We also rely on the outside recruiting firms we use to spread the word.

From your experience or research, what are different steps that each of us as individuals, as a community and as a society, can take to effectively offer support to those around us who are feeling stressed, depressed, anxious and having other mental health issues ? Can you explain?

I try to pick up the phone and call my colleagues as often as possible. We’re living in these isolated little bubbles right now and it is really hard to read how someone is truly doing through email and video-conferences. I always take time to just listen to what someone choses to share with me — even that can be telling. When someone clearly has too much on their plate, I bring in colleagues to help. We are a small team, but everyone can pitch in.

Habits can play a huge role in mental wellness. What are the best strategies you would suggest to develop good healthy habits for optimal mental wellness that can replace any poor habits?

Well meditation OF COURSE: a daily practice, even if just 10 minutes is critical. I try to do the 20–20–20 rule of taking 20 seconds away from a screen every 20 minutes and looking at something 20 feet away. They say it’s good for the eyes, but I think its good for the mind too! Exercise, meal breaks, breathing breaks . . .

Do you use any meditation, breathing or mind-calming practices that promote your mental wellbeing? We’d love to hear about all of them. How have they impacted your own life?

Why yes! See above! For breathing — it could not be simpler. Stop. Breathe. Resume. That’s it. Breathe into your full lungs and your full belly.

Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story?

I don’t have a book, but I love the meditation app Insight Timer. You can come and go (3 months on, 2 months off) and no one will judge ;-) Also Pilates is the key to my sanity!

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Besides world peace and global equality, I would have everyone pause and smile. Just smile. Smile at yourself in the mirror every day, smile at strangers on the street, smile at the check-out people, smile while you talk on the phone, smile before your reply to a snarky email — I promise it will turn your day around.

What is the best way our readers can further follow your work online?

Jayaramlaw.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendy-heilbut-1356022b/

Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!