In September 2018, the American Bar Association’s Working Group To Advance Well-Being in the Legal Profession (ABA Working Group) launched a Wellness Campaign for Legal Employers. This initiative flowed from the central themes in the August 2017 Report from the National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being in August 2017 (National Task Force Report), which included:

… identifying stakeholders and the role each of us can play in reducing the level of toxicity in our profession … emphasizing that well-being is an indispensable part of a lawyer’s duty of competence … [and] taking small, incremental steps to change how law is practiced and how lawyers are regulated to instill greater well-being in the profession.

The National Task Force Report built on the alarming statistics of serious mental health and substance-use issues among populations of practicing lawyers and law students, highlighted in the 2016 findings by the ABA Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs (CoLAP) and Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, and the 2015 ABA Survey of Law Student Well-Being.