December 21, 2023

1:00pm – 2:00 pm Eastern

Mental Health and Wellness:  Sleep, Neuroscience, and Ethics

Description: Sleep impairment impacts all aspects of client representation, including competence, focus, diligence, decision-making, effective client communication, and case management. Sleep deprivation predicts lawyer misconduct by increasing anxiety, interrupting working memory, and impairing effective executive thinking. This program provides the latest neuroscience behind sleep, and its impact on mental health, substance use, ethical behavior, and performance.

Speakers: Joan Bibelhausen JD & Robin Wolpert, Esq,

Joan Bibelhausen has served as Executive Director of Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers since 2005. She is an attorney and received her JD from the University of Minnesota Law School. Joan is nationally recognized for her work in the lawyer assistance and diversity and inclusion realms and has significant additional training in counseling, mental health and addiction, diversity, employment issues, and management.

Joan has a passion for reducing the stigma about asking for and offering help to do our best work and live our best lives in the legal profession. She has spent her career working with legal professionals at a crossroads because of mental illness and addiction concerns, well-being, trauma, stress, and related issues, and has a particular interest in helping those with career challenges.

Robin Walpert, Esq., is an accomplished business and criminal defense litigator who carries a passion for public service.  Robin has earned recognition as a speaker at previous ABA conferences on lawyer wellness, and she is deeply committed to ethics in law.  She serves on numerous committees supporting lawyers’ success, taught as an adjunct law professor in 2022, and is a past president of the MN Bar Association.