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Ed. note: Brian Cuban wrote this piece for the Texas Bar Journal, and it is being republished here with the permission of the State Bar of Texas.

Lawyers are 3.6 times as likely as non-lawyers to suffer from depression. We have the highest problem drinking rate. It seems like once a month I read about a lawyer dying by suicide (this month has been no exception). We are fourth in that category.

It breaks my heart each time I learn that we have lost another colleague. I may see it on Facebook, Twitter, or a news article. It is rare that suicide is specifically mentioned, but there may be a request in lieu of flowers for a donation to a mental health organization or there may be commentary about the person’s struggle with mental health issues.

We can’t bring ourselves to say the word. We make the donation. We grieve. Maybe tweet out or Facebook post the number to a suicide crisis line. We talk about reaching out. Then we lose another. And another.

In 2005, I stood on the precipice of becoming a tragic statistic as a result of my mental health struggles. That summer, after decades of depression, alcohol, and cocaine addiction, I lost all hope. I looked in the mirror and saw a monster, ugly inside and out. A circus freak who deserved to be locked away in a pitch-black dungeon, shackled to the walls so my “sickness” did not infect anyone else.

In those aphotic moments, it suddenly made perfect sense to me. I would do my family a favor by relieving them of my burden. Self-cull the Cuban herd of the lone black sheep. I did not see a selfish act. I had no concept of “selfish.” Living in the dense fog of suicidal ideation, it was an act of love. A thought process that may seem unfathomable to anyone who has not dwelled in that type of darkness, with seemingly no way to climb out. Days spent in bed, crying and hoping for an end to the pain of loneliness and isolation with no way to articulate it to those who care.

It was a close call. I was lucky to have family and a friend who did not mind their own business. My brothers showed up at my home. They dragged me kicking and screaming to a local psychiatric hospital for what would be my first of two trips over the next two years.

As they pulled me out of bed and forced me to get dressed, evidence of the depth of my problems was strewn about the room. Empty and half-full bottles of booze on the floor. Cocaine lines on the nightstand. Xanax tablets strewn over the imported marble top of my dresser. In addition to the pills, I was chugging whiskey as a sleep aid to come down from the cocaine high — a difficult if not impossible way to engage in the competent practice of law. As we walked out the door, I heard my younger brother, Jeff, mention addiction and drinking issues. My older, Mark, focused on depression. They were both right.

The drive to the hospital consisted of me screaming at my brothers to take me back home and leave me alone. I wanted the people who loved me most in the world out of my life. They were trying to save me.

As we walked through the doors of the psychiatric facility, it dawned on me that there was going to be an attempt to have me committed. I was not going to let that happen. I put my law degree to use. I made it clear, sitting with the attending psychiatric physician, that I was not a danger to myself or others. I convinced him that I had no intention of harming myself. To the chagrin of my brothers, they could not keep me there. When we returned to my house, they took my car keys and demanded that I not leave for two weeks so I could sober up and “get my head on straight.” I recall thinking that was fine because my cocaine dealer made house calls. My family was no different than any other. They struggled to understand my problems and were learning about addiction and major depression in the moment, while also trying to save my life.

Tough lessons under any circumstances.

It would take one more trip to that hospital after a two-day drug-and-alcohol-induced blackout before I would begin my long-term recovery journey. I often reflect back on those brutal moments and wonder why I am still here. There was clearly a timing factor. People did not mind their own business at the right moment for intervention to occur before I completed the act of suicide.

Tragically, that is not always the case. Whether its depression, addiction, or other mental health variables, we can’t be there every moment and those tragic and life-changing/ending thoughts can come quickly and without warning.

The good news is that we all have the ability to play a significant role in changing the course of a life by simply doing what my friend and brothers did. By stepping outside of our comfort zone. By not minding our own business. We can look within ourselves and pledge to pay attention. To lend an ear. Here is a simple method I use to engage when I suspect someone is struggling even if I have no idea what the issue may be.

Me: “(First Name), you looked stressed today, everything OK? Anything I can do to help?”

Possible response: “Appreciate it, I’m fine, thanks for asking.”

Don’t walk away! Repeat the message.

Me: “Glad to hear that, but I want you to know that if you want to talk, I am a good ear.” (or something like that)

What you have done is provide a message that can prompt someone into thinking about getting help even if he or she is not ready at that moment, and with the quick repeat message, you have reinforced it and provided a window for the person to change his or her mind. In those few seconds, people do change their minds. The tap on the shoulder comes as you walk away. Or maybe you get a call or text later in the day.

Possible response: “Now that you mention it, can we talk?”

Regardless of the response, you have now become a vital cog in positive mental health messaging. No accusations.  No judgment. Just empathy and support.

The person may not be ready to talk about it or not want to talk about it with you. They may reach out to someone they have a comfort level with. It doesn’t matter. The messaging is as important as the response. The knowledge that people do care is implanted and reinforced. I had a lawyer tell me that he was not ready when I stepped out of my comfort zone, but he never forgot that I cared and after a cumulation of people not minding their own business, he sought help for both his depression and problem drinking.

Each time we don’t mind our own business, it could be that one moment that changes the course of someone’s life. It also could be one of a series of touchpoints that eventually gets that person to seek help.

Not minding your own business will not save everyone. As long as there is human suffering, there will be tragedy. We cannot be there every moment of the day when someone is struggling, and I know from experience that the thoughts and desire to act can come on fast without warning to anyone else. Not minding your own business, however, may be the one moment that you need to save just one person by interrupting a terrible, dark process. Take that chance. Be uncomfortable. Reach out. Interrupt.

Pledge to ask someone how he or she is doing and let him or her know you are there for an ear. When you see how easy it is, think about doing it again and again. It costs nothing but some time. Those few seconds can change the course of a life. The benefits can last a lifetime.

Brian Cuban (@bcuban) is The Addicted Lawyer. Brian is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, The Addicted Lawyer: Tales Of The Bar, Booze, Blow & Redemption (affiliate link). A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, he somehow made it through as an alcoholic then added cocaine to his résumé as a practicing attorney. He went into recovery April 8, 2007. He left the practice of law and now writes and speaks on recovery topics, not only for the legal profession, but on recovery in general. He can be reached at brian@addictedlawyer.com.

We Use A Lot Of Concrete

I spent this Labor Day at one of my favorite museums. You really can’t help but learn something useful every time you go there. I’d gone in already having a pretty good idea as to what I’d be writing about this week, and as luck would have it, stumbled upon a little something that helped me along in my research.

Human beings need a lot of resources to survive, and especially to survive in style with iPhones and whatnot. The most-consumed material on earth is probably not a surprise to you. It’s water. But the second most-consumed material isn’t as obvious: reinforced concrete.

Each year, we use three metric tons of the stuff for every person on earth. That’s a lot of concrete. Reinforced concrete is the world’s most common building material, and ever since French gardener Joseph Monier came up with the stuff in 1867, the artificial environment we construct for ourselves has never been the same. Thanks for the helpful background info, Science Museum!

Concrete Is Awful For The Earth, But What If You Could Make It Out Of Ganja?

While reinforced concrete has proven terribly useful over the last century-and-a-half, it’s also proven terribly, well, terrible in terms of its environmental consequences. Cement makers can take credit for about seven percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. The limestone kilns required to produce cement, and therefore to produce concrete, are not exactly ecofriendly. The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in the process of making cement weighs half as much as the cement produced, according to the European Cement Association.

Now, bear with me here, because a possible solution to this problem at first sounds like a half-baked idea that came from your fully-baked friends: what if we just all built our houses out of weed?

Thanks to some wonderful reporting from Bloomberg, we now know that this is sort of already a thing. It is not actually marijuana that is being used as a building material, of course, but rather marijuana’s industrious (and non-psychoactive) cousin, hemp.

Hemp is a pretty useful plant. In addition to its many other applications, hemp has been used as a building material since the days of the Roman Empire, when engineers mixed its strong fibers into the mortar they used to hold up bridges, many of which stand to this day. In newer structures, we use modern hempcrete, a combination of the inner woody core of the hemp plant and a lime-based or clay-based binder. Like its reinforced concrete antecedent, hempcrete was also developed in France.

Fully cured hempcrete weighs only about a seventh or an eighth of the weight of concrete. Compared to their concrete counterparts, hempcrete buildings have better temperature regulation, ventilation, and fire resistance. Maybe best of all, hempcrete is carbon negative. Growing hemp absorbs CO₂, and the plant continues to soak up carbon as it’s mixed with lime or clay. According to Canadian builder Just BioFiber, each cubic meter of its hemp-based structural material entraps 287 pounds of carbon dioxide, which is more CO₂ than is emitted during production.

Maybe The U.S. Should Get Over Itself And Stop Ceding The Hemp Market To Europe And Canada

Hempcrete is not a replacement for concrete in all circumstances. It does not have the same load-bearing capabilities of traditional concrete. Still, in Europe, buildings as high as 10 stories have been built using hempcrete.

Hemp’s proven utility abroad is finally winning it some fans again in North America. The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology reported that Canadian hemp sales reached $140 million last year, and could hit $1 billion within five years. In the United States, over the last half-century growing hemp has been largely illegal because of its resemblance to marijuana. However, the 2018 Farm Bill removed hemp from the controlled substances act and legalized its cultivation under certain circumstances. A number of states have since taken steps to ramp up production, although at this point it’s still a bit of a legal nightmare to actually get from a hemp seed to a building component in the U.S. Only a few dozen homes nationwide contain hemp as a building material.

Hempcrete is a hearty, sustainable, environmentally friendly, and profitable building material that can be produced in close proximity to the buildings it is actually used to construct. Sounds like a good way to help out the struggling farm economy, and maybe even gin up some work for the legal industry in unentangling over half a century of misguided regulation.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

According to Student Loan Hero’s 20 Best Law Schools for Avoiding Six-Figure Student Debt, which law school comes in at the top spot?

Hint: The average law school debt at graduation at this school is only $58,113, but it comes with a significant caveat.

See the answer on the next page.

Steven Chung’s recent post about the closing of Whittier Law School was a perfect eulogy. I, too, am a graduate of Whittier, but some 30-odd years before him. Take a trip with me in Professor Peabody’s wayback machine to the 1970s, long before most, if not all, of the ATL readership was alive.  I had written my own requiem for Whittier when the school first announced it was closing.

Most of the lawyers in this country are what Bill Henderson calls “people lawyers,” those who represent individuals and small businesses in cases that are what I call “one-offs.” One divorce, one bankruptcy, one estate planning, and so on. Clients come for help for these kinds of cases and there is usually no repeat business, but possible future referrals. These are the cases that have composed the bread and butter of so many lawyers’ practices for so many years.  Whittier was that kind of law school, a “people law” school.

Just thinking back on my law school class, there was those of us who went into government (both the DA and PD offices), and one enterprising duo set up an unlawful detainer practice. Many of us went into solo or small firm practices, doing exactly the kind of work representing people, not big hulking behemoth corporations.

Ha, but you reply, none of you were ever hired by Biglaw, which wasn’t even a term coined back then. (I don’t know if any of the “Biglaw” firms then even had enough lawyers to qualify for the term.) We were not naïve about hiring practices at the “chichi” law firms.

One of the reasons that most of us became lawyers was for autonomy, for independence, for the ability to represent people to the best of our abilities or to fire those clients who wouldn’t take our advice or who complained about the bills once too often. That is enormous freedom, and one of the reasons that many lawyers practicing in this country are either solos or in small firms.  (I’ve never understood how lawyers, who have a reputation for being independent, can shoehorn themselves into the corporate milieu that Biglaw has become. But that’s a topic for another time.)

In the early days, Whittier classes were composed of second careerists, those who had decided that there had to be something more rewarding, more challenging, and yes, even more lucrative than what we had been doing. Granted, it was a lot easier in those long-ago days to switch careers and to attend law school without incurring ginormous debt. We had no illusions about Biglaw careers. No one bothered to even interview at such places, as rejection was a fait accompli. We knew that we didn’t have the purportedly important credentials such as law review or Order of the Coif, but that didn’t matter to us.

We knew what we did have: a legal education that allowed Whittier to enjoy for a time the highest bar passage rate in the state. We understood the law and what it took to be a lawyer.  For the most part, our classes were not taught by academics, those far from the maddening crowd of practice, but by adjuncts who balanced their practices with teaching us not only law, but about real life situations they faced as lawyers.

Some of the early Whittier graduates were appointed to the Superior Court, the Court of Appeal, and the United States District Court for the Central District, despite the lack of “pedigree.” The school’s alumni today include judges and general counsels, but mainly lawyers practicing in the trenches.

Until a decade or so ago, I thought that pedigree referred to dogs, not people. I was misinformed. If I could cartoon, I would draw a pure-bred Golden Retriever puppy (not that I know what a purebred looks like, but work with me here) sitting anxiously at the feet of a lawyer who barks (pun intended) commands to the puppy, who looks confused and uncertain. “Pedigree” shouldn’t and doesn’t matter.

What matters is the kind of lawyer you become, the kind of lawyer you are, 10, 20, 30 years out. In fact, there is a school of thought that thinks that where you went to law school is irrelevant, that pedigree should be confined to canines. There’s evidence that a focus on law school pedigree does not help firms hire successful attorneys.

Malcolm Gladwell thinks that once out of law school, lawyers should adopt a version of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Employers shouldn’t ask where you went to law school, and you shouldn’t tell them where. Works for me and probably many others. Law school pedigree confers a false sense of security about a person’s ability to be a good lawyer.

Whittier is gone. A lamentable bar passage rate doomed it, since if you didn’t have a ticket, you didn’t get to participate. I lay at least part of the failure at the feet of the school. Declining enrollment, difficulties in finding jobs, tuition increases, and student debt all contributed. However, at the end of the day, it’s the bar passage rate that controls a school’s success, and Whittier either should have flunked students out who didn’t have a decent chance to pass or provided more help to those who were floundering.

Many Whittier grads today are solos and small firm lawyers, the kinds of lawyers we need if we ever have any hope of increasing access to justice — in other words, “people lawyers.” Kudos to Whittier, which had a very diverse student body, a pipeline for the profession in terms of diversity and inclusion, something very much needed if the profession is to reflect ever how we truly look. The more inclusive the better.

Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.

Home DNA kits are bringing sperm and egg donor anonymity to an end. The popular holiday present has provided a new mode of easy access to reliable information on our genetic makeup and, more importantly to some, our genetic relatives. Donor-conceived persons are now finding out information that was previously kept intentionally unavailable — the identity of their genetically connected donor parent.

While the reality of information access has changed practically overnight, the law, at least in the United States, has been slow to shift. In some countries — Australia and much of Europe, to name a few — donor anonymity is not an option. These countries give donor-conceived persons the ability to have access to their biological history, even where a donor would prefer to remain anonymous. In many countries, this means that upon becoming a legal adult, the donor-conceived person will learn the identity of his or her donor.

The U.S. has been reluctant to regulate gamete donations, but we are starting to see the sprouts of change. In 2011, Washington State was the first to challenge sperm and egg donor anonymity with a law that requires sperm banks and egg donation agencies with gametes from Washington State to provide the donor’s medical histories and, importantly, full names to donor-conceived persons upon turning 18 years of age. Of course, the law has a major caveat. The agencies and banks are only required to provide the information if the gamete donor did not affirmatively opt out of being identified.

California is now taking a similar path — only with a little more effort to help out donor-conceived persons. As of January 1, 2020, California’s new Health and Safety Code Sec 1644.3, will lead to additional donor identity disclosure. The new law provides that:

(a) On request of a child conceived by assisted reproduction who attains 18 years of age, a gamete bank licensed in this state … shall provide the child with identifying information of the donor who provided the gametes, unless the donor signed and did not withdraw a declaration under paragraph (2) of subdivision (b) of Section 1644.2. If the donor signed and did not withdraw the declaration, the gamete bank shall make a good faith effort to notify the donor, who may elect under subdivision (c) of Section 1644.2 to withdraw the declaration and agree to release the donor’s information.

So even if the donor did opt out of having his or her identity revealed, upon the request of a donor-conceived person, the gamete bank has an affirmative duty to notify the donor as to the request, and allow that donor another chance with withdraw the declaration. The law didn’t go so far as to insert a guilt trip call from the child desperate to have knowledge of their biological parent, but close enough.

The new law goes on to provide that regardless of whether the donor signed a waiver, the donor-conceived person or, prior to the age of 18, his or her parents, shall have a right to the donor’s non-identifying medical information. Theoretically, the parents and donor-conceived person should already have that from when they went through the donor process. But it is still good to have legal confirmation of the child’s right to access information that could be important to the donor-conceived person’s health.

I spoke with California assisted reproductive technology attorney Amira Hasenbush about the new law. She thought it was a positive step for those conceived via gamete donation. She pointed out an interesting quirk in the law. In cases where the clinic failed to offer or keep a copy of a donor’s waiver, the clinic will be obligated to disclose the donor’s identity. Of course, she also noted that based on her experience with donors and recipients, it is not the donors who are as concerned about anonymity — and for those who are, they can choose to stop donating. She finds that it is more commonly the recipient parents who fear the repercussions of a  donor entering their child’s life. The law in California is clear that the gamete recipients are the legal parents, but for some, the fear appears to be more about the emotional impact than the legal impact.

Time — a lot of time — will tell the impact of this new law. The effective date of January 1, 2020, applies to gametes collected after that date. Meaning that the first child to turn 18 from such gametes will not occur until at least 2038. And, at this rate, we may all have been taken out by a hurricane by that time.

Ellen Trachman is the Managing Attorney of Trachman Law Center, LLC, a Denver-based law firm specializing in assisted reproductive technology law, and co-host of the podcast I Want To Put A Baby In You. You can reach her at babies@abovethelaw.com.

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