I was just about to begin a presentation in Chicago when my phone buzzed in my pocket.

Anyone who has stood at a lectern knows that moment. The quiet before you begin. The room is settling. The adrenaline rising. And then that unmistakable vibration — persistent enough to demand attention, but subtle enough to be ignored, at least for a moment.

Despite the pull I felt toward the phone, I made a quick calculation in my head. Was this an urgent client matter? Could it really not wait for an hour? What if it were my brother? What if something was wrong?

I left the phone in my suit jacket and went on with my presentation.

Looking back, I am grateful for that decision. Grateful that I was able to do what lawyers do so well — focus, perform, deliver. But more than that, I am grateful that I did not receive that profoundly jarring news while standing in front of a room full of people, responsible for appearing composed, confident and in control.

As soon as I stepped off the stage, I made my way to the speaker’s room and pulled out my phone. There was a missed call and a voicemail from a friend who never called unless she truly needed something. Not a casual texter. Not someone who checked in just to chat.

The message was short: “Please give me a call when you have a minute.”

I knew immediately this was not good.

I called back, and within moments, the world tilted. One of my friends had been found alone and deceased in her home. She was 66 years old. Healthy. Vibrant. Full of plans.

Gone.

What followed was not orderly grief, but a cascade of questions that came faster than I could process them. When had I last talked to her? What had we talked about? What had I said? What had I not said? Why hadn’t I called more often? Why hadn’t I followed through on all the promises we made to get together “soon?”

That word — soon — is one lawyers use with alarming frequency.

I almost see my life playing back like a slide deck, each image a missed call, a rescheduled lunch, a dinner postponed because of a filing deadline, a trial, a deposition, a meeting that “couldn’t possibly wait.” I replayed not just the last year, but the last two years. How much time had passed while I was busy being responsible, professional, dependable?

The previous month had been grueling. I do not think I had slept in my own home more than two nights. I had not had time to go to the doctor, the Kroger or even the dry cleaner. I told myself those were the reasons I had not been a better friend. That this was just a particularly busy stretch.

But grief has a way of stripping us of our excuses.

I was reeling — not just from the loss of my friend, but from the realization that, had someone handed me a clock with a finite number of hours left, I had not been living my life the way I would have wanted to. What if I only had six more years? Had I made time for the people who mattered most? Had I lived fully outside of my professional obligations? The answers were unsettling.

There is something about the practice of law that is uniquely allconsuming. It sweeps us into a vortex that is difficult to see from the inside and even harder to escape. We are trained to be vigilant, responsive, anticipatory. Deadlines do not forgive distraction. Clients do not pause their crises because we are tired or grieving or overwhelmed.

Over time, the profession places blinders on us. We race from deadline to deadline, convinced that if we just get through this hearing, this trial, this busy season, then we will slow down. We will reconnect. We will take better care of ourselves and each other.

But “after this” rarely arrives.

Lawyers are, at our core, deeply compassionate people. We take on other people’s problems for a living. We step into the most difficult moments of our clients’ lives and try to steady the ground beneath them. That compassion is what makes this profession honorable. It is what makes us effective advocates and trusted counselors.

But it is also our downfall when we fail to extend that same compassion inward.

We are often far kinder to our clients than we are to ourselves. We accept stress, exhaustion, missed meals, missed milestones and missed relationships as the cost of doing business. We treat burnout as a badge of honor and busyness as proof of worth. Somewhere along the way, many of us lose sight of the fact that we are human beings first and lawyers second.

The loss of my friend was a stark reminder that time is not promised and that relationships do not remain on hold indefinitely while we manage our professional responsibilities. The people we love do not experience our intentions; they experience our presence — or our absence.

As president of the Tennessee Bar Association, I speak often about professionalism, mentorship, excellence and service. These values matter deeply. But none of them exist in a vacuum. A profession that does not care for its people is not sustainable. A lawyer who has nothing left to give — to friends, to family or to themselves — will eventually have nothing left to give to clients either.

Compassion must start with ourselves. That means recognizing limits. It means acknowledging that rest is not weakness, and boundaries are not failures. It means understanding that taking care of our physical and mental health is not indulgent — it is essential to longevity in this profession.

Compassion must also extend to the people who stand by us while we practice law — the spouses, partners, children, parents, siblings and friends who accept canceled plans and late nights more often than they should have to. They do not measure our commitment by our intentions or our explanations. They measure it by our time.

None of this is easy. The practice of law has not suddenly become less demanding. Technology has, in many ways, blurred the lines between work and life even further. But awareness is a starting point. So is honesty.

If this column prompts you to make one phone call you have been meaning to make, to schedule one lunch you have postponed too many times or to take one afternoon for your own wellbeing without guilt, then it will have served its purpose.

I do not know how much time any of us has. None of us do. What I do know is this: the work will always be there. The question is whether we will look up often enough to be there for the people who matter most — before “soon” becomes “too late.” |||

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HEIDI BARCUS is a shareholder in Lewis Thomason’s Knoxville office where she practices health care liability law. Before joining Lewis Thomason, she served as a staff attorney and assistant general counsel at the University of Tennessee Medical Center, a Level IV trauma center. Barcus received her law degree from the University of Tennessee College of Law (now Winston College of Law) and is a past chair of the American Bar Association (ABA) Law Practice Division and currently serves on the ABA’s TECHSHOW Board. She is chair of the Knoxville Bar Foundation and a former president of the Knoxville Bar Association.

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