A Conversation with Bob Levant

What does wellness mean to you?

Wellness starts on the mental side for me. Because if I'm not oriented mentally, spiritually, and emotionally, then the classic practices like exercise, getting your workout in there, they're not as meaningful and quite frankly, could be counterproductive. So it's a mindset. Wellness is a mindset, that's as simple as I can put it.

When you say counterproductive, what do you mean by that?

They end up becoming obligations, or they hang over your head. Things that you feel like you have to check off the box, when they're supposed to be feeding your soul.

That's so well said.  What are your wellness practices?

I have a daily diet of yoga, so depending upon the day in the schedule, that'll be the time when I meditate, or I'll have a separate meditation practice. I try to be kind to myself and flexible, but Yoga is just naturally a part of my day, usually early in the morning, sometimes twice a day. And I do try to find time to meditate each day, sometimes it's three minutes a day, sometimes it's a walk, it's a moving meditation. One of my big wellness practices is just checking in with myself. Emotional awareness, and remaining non-reactive is critically important to my overall wellness routine, and hasn't always been that way, which we can talk about. That's a big part of it for me.

Let's talk about it. How do you practice emotional awareness? What goes into it?

There are a lot of great tools and books out there. There's one that's set apart for me, which is Search Inside Yourself, the book that outlines the mindfulness program at Google. That book is a very practical, usable, relatable kind of guide to emotional awareness and emotional intelligence. I just pay attention all the time to how I'm feeling and how things are impacting me, particularly within the practice of law. But also, as I've expanded out into creating Iron Advocate and building it, I try to be in a flow state. Not reactive to my own anxieties and worries about what it is or what people think of it, or what it's going to be next. That's a big part of my day, to try to remain in a flow state, which sometimes is working less at something rather than more. I value that a lot, at this point in my life, trying to flow.

How do you find your flow state?

By not working so hard to get there. And again, I think it's being nonreactive to things whether that's within the classic practice of law, or within some of these other things that I'm doing connected to the practice of law. Obviously, Iron Advocate is a big part of my life and my days right now. I work with a lot of lawyers, performance training and coaching, teaching, and I really try to embody what I know is the best version of myself as an advocate. Over the last stretch I've seen, through results and my own performance, as well as my own enjoyment of being in the practice, it all comes from being aware of what I'm feeling, not reacting to people and things around me without processing it. I think that at the end of the day, probably what's gotten me to a flow state is that front end work on the emotional awareness. And really breathing and trying not to react. The practice of law is just a powder keg of reactivity. Everywhere you turn.

When you were first beginning to incorporate these practices into your lifestyle, what were the things that allowed you to learn and do these things that are now habits? At the beginning, when they're not habits, learning to pay attention to your emotions and what's going on inside of your head? That's hard, and it takes practice. What do you think allowed you to get to this point? What steps did you take?

The motivation was wanting to live differently. And quite frankly, wanting to be the best lawyer and advocate I could be, and having some idea that I was holding myself back from that. I muscled my way through the first decade and a half practicing. I've been at it for 25 years, the first four to five as a public defender in a big city are a blur. I didn't take care of myself, I didn't deal with any of the emotions, I lived in a state of fear and terror. And I just kind of muscled my way through. And then that becomes pattern making. And so, I got by on outworking most people, and having some talent. I had success and, for a while, that was enough. But at some point in time, I wanted to be better than that. That led me to start a long process of evaluation, and my partner on the podcast, Jeff Riebel, is a big part of that. We've been talking through the struggles, and we've been friends for 25 years. So he's been a large part of that. And that was the birth of Iron Advocate: “Why don't we just put this dialog out there?” I don't think you get there by quote-unquote  “working at it.” You get there by opening your heart and your soul and your mind to the idea that there is another way to process emotions. Particularly for crazy Type A. I'm an insane Type A person, that's how I'm wired. You can't rewire yourself. You can learn to maximize your wiring and tap into your strengths and understand your weaknesses. But you can't rewire yourself.

Did you have a rock bottom experience? What lead you to say “this is not sustainable. I need to change my ways.”? And then how did you even come across mindfulness? When you were deciding that you needed to make some changes, how did you know that this was the direction to go in?

Really good question. It was a series of: the further my career got, and the more success I had, the more complex the cases became, the more complex the practice became. I thought I was taking care of myself. I ran marathons, I exercised - which I didn't do early in my career. And listen, the physical exercise is enormously important. A physical practice is critical. I don't care if it's walking around the block or walking around your office building, getting up and moving is critical for lawyers, it's critical for the creative process. But it can't be done in a vacuum. It's got to be done with the mind, it's critical for the creative process. So, I stumbled and bumbled my way, I found my way to yoga. It's been almost a decade now. For the first year, it was just being in a hot yoga room and wanting to sweat and work out. Through that, and conversations and a lot of reading. I'm a big fan of reading, which I didn't do early in my career.

It feeds on itself, once you start doing it, and then I really started seeing it in the practice. Oh, I have more space here. I'm seeing my case differently. I feel differently walking in the courtroom. And then I could connect it to success. And that's a motivator, because at the end of the day anybody who's doing a heavy dose of litigation wants to win. They want to make money and win. To be successful. If you can connect those dots to a mind body practice, then it helps to feed on itself.

Absolutely. It's not just litigation, I think anyone who's the type to go to law school is that super Type-A, I've-gotta-win-at-everything type of person. We've talked before about how the vast majority of lawyers, to understand the importance of incorporating some sort of wellness practice, need to understand how that's going to make them more successful. It's not just going to be “Oh, I'll be happier” or “Oh, I'll be healthier down the line.” For this shift in our legal culture to really happen, we need to make it clear to individual lawyers, law practices, legal divisions in companies, that this is this is going to help all of us become more successful. What were the changes that you started to see early on, and then over time, as you became more wellness focused?

Just on that point, a big part of Iron Advocate is that there will be people who are unhappy in the law, not feeling fulfilled, who leave the law. But part of our vision is that we want people to maximize their experience IN the law. We're not saying you have to stay, but a lot of people leave because they don't take the path to try and to find fulfillment, peace, and success inside the law. They run from it instead of run to it. That's a big part of what we talk about, it's high stress and high pressure, but there is a path.

Leading into your next question about when did I start to see the connection between the practice and my results. A couple of years into really starting to pay attention to it. Use the yoga practice for something more than just a physical practice. One of my favorite yoga sayings is that yoga teaches you to become comfortable in uncomfortable positions. And that's the practice of law. It really is, you are in uncomfortable poses or positions all the time.

I remember the first time I heard somebody say that, and I was like, that is what's starting to happen to me, and I can connect it to that kind of understanding. And then I started to really embody that as part of the mindfulness practice, which is that a really rich mindfulness practice puts you in a position to be comfortable in uncomfortable situations. Whether that's the Thanksgiving family dinner with the crazy relatives that could be fun, or could be stress filled. All this stuff that comes with family dysfunction, or work dysfunction, or jury trial, or whatever it might be. The mindfulness practice is the key to just finding comfort in all those spaces. So that was the unlocking thing for me. And then it just becomes being committed to it without making it some kind of regimented “I have to be mindful, I gotta be mindful today.” That's not going to work either. It just starts to become a way of life.

The last piece is when you start to realize you're going to stub your toe all the time. Particularly somebody like me, who's just wired to always be a recovering control freak. It's really hard to be mindful when you're a control freak, right? Anybody who's done the volume of trial work that I've done is a control freak, on some level. If you weren't before, you certainly become one trying cases, because you want to try your case in a flow state, but you're trying to control everything that the jury is watching, everything around you. As much as possible, you want to be in control of it because you don't get an instant replay. You want to control what's happening before the jury's eyes. So, as a recovering control freak, you have to have acceptance that the mindfulness practice is a lifelong thing, and you're going to stub your toe, you're gonna have days that you're not particularly mindful, you're going to be reactive to your kids or to a co-worker or to somebody, and that's okay, too. You try to do better next time.

That's such an important point. I think so many of us, maybe all of us, struggle with being perfectionists. I'm really trying to emphasize this point that wellness is a journey and a practice. It's not about perfection. As you said, one day, maybe you’ll lose your cool, something's not going to go exactly as you want.

How many TIMES a day is the question. Right?

Right, it's gonna happen throughout your day. And I think part of the mindfulness practice is to be able to say, okay, that happens, that doesn't mean that's going to happen always.

I'd love for you to talk about the huge successes that you've had as a result of bringing in the yoga practice and the mindfulness. We've talked about coming up with some of your most powerful openings and closings on the yoga mat. How does that happen?  

A lot of times the biggest problems in the case, when you're talking about doing trial work, they're not going to be solved inside of case law. The biggest problems, or the things that you can maximize the biggest in a jury trial, they happen by getting outside of your own head. Getting out of your own way and expanding the way you can think and portray those issues or problems, dilemmas, things you want a jury to be passionate about, creativity, passion, righteousness, true advocacy. They don't happen inside your own head, they happen by getting really deep inside yourself, and then outside yourself as how other people view it. It's the anxiety that prevents you from doing that. “I have to solve this problem,” “I have to figure out what I'm going to say to the jury,” “I better write this down on my legal pad, or I'm going to forget it.” By the time you get close to a trial, you know your case better than you could ever imagine. The question is, are you going to let yourself know it that way? Are you going to let yourself embody it and feel it? That's where the rubber hits the road. That's the intersection of mindfulness and trial advocacy, are you going to let yourself find that flow state?

I have a lot of examples, but here’s one that I think will resonate. In May 2018, I tried a big civil rights case that ended in a $10 million verdict for my client, and the case involved a young man who was wrongfully incarcerated. It involved what I tried to place as a blatant lie, the officer had said that my client shot at him for reasons that I can really only guess at when it clearly hadn't happened.

And I tried the case for all the marbles. I opened by telling the jury, this guy was the monster in my clients nightmares. It was one of these things where, if they buy it - obviously I believe it to be true - you're putting all the chips in. But at the end of the day, every case like that is about damages, what's the jury going to give? The problem in the case was, my client was a young guy. Worked at Home Depot, didn't have real lost wages, he had been in jail for about four years. His lost wages were relatively minimal compared to what I thought that the value of the case was. So the problem, for the years I litigated the case and did depositions and did the discovery, was how do you quantify that? Do you tell the jury what his lost wages were? Or do you not? You can't give the jury a number, you can't suggest numbers other than lost wages. So at the end of the day, I wrestled with it. The night before closing, I still hadn't solved it, and I was leaving the courtroom that afternoon. I started walking toward the conference room. I gotta figure this out, I gotta get my legal pad out. After all these years, I still have that same tendency, I gotta sit down and write this.  So I stopped myself, I said, “Levant,” which is how I refer to myself when I'm talking to myself in my own head, “you've got to get outside your own head.” So I went for a run and I found a hot yoga class. I went, and by the time I was done it was going on eight o'clock in the evening before I even consciously thought about the case again.

When I sat down, it didn't take but a couple of minutes to start. I had a close friend of mine, a lawyers whose name is Ray Driscoll, who was knocking around with me, and said, “get out your phone, and let's count the days he was in jail, and the hours and the minutes.” So how many minutes was this guy in jail as an innocent man?

When I got rolling in the closing, I stopped, just stopped, dead in my tracks, and I asked the jury if they were comfortable closing their eyes for a moment, or just sit quietly. And I didn't say anything else. And I just stopped talking. And I looked at the clock, it was an old ornate courtroom in Philadelphia City Hall, and I just let the clock run for a minute, silently in the courtroom. And then I shared with the jury how many minutes this young man had been in jail as an innocent man, which was 1,980,000 minutes. So that's a $2 million place they can start, right?

That doesn't come from inside your own head. That doesn't come from leaning over a legal pad and writing over and over again, “my client was in jail for four years,” “my client was in jail for four years.” So, those kind of connections.

It’s so powerful. When you told the bit about just the minutes I got chills, because that's powerful.

I struggle to tell those stories. Jeff gets on me all the time, he's like “you gotta talk about this stuff.”

I agree with Jeff. I second him. You’re an example of what a lawyer can achieve with a mindfulness practice. Lawyers need to know why these wellness practices are going to make them more successful. It's one thing to just say, “Well, you'll be less reactive” and, “You'll be more aware,” and “You'll be able to think more clearly,” and that's all very good. But the demonstration of what you've actually been able to accomplish is how you're going to reach most people. So, yes, you should continue to be open about that because it's really powerful.

Let’s chat about what you and Jeff are doing with Iron Advocate. What led you to start this community? What’s your goal? What's your goal?

Our goal at the end, it's to bring this dialogue to mainstream legal practice. What that exactly ends up looking like, and how we do it, Iron Advocate’s in a flow state. That's how Jeff and I try to operate. Jeff is enormously successful, runs this great family law practice out in Northern California, and comes from the same place as me. We started as public defenders in Philadelphia. Control freak, Type A, Division I college athlete, played basketball at UPenn. We've shared a lot of the same quote/unquote “struggles” on the journey to mindfulness.

What we hope to accomplish is what we're doing right now, which is have the dialogue and let people sift through it. Let folks know that this is behind us, because if you looked at us, and if you look at Iron Advocate’s website, the first thing you would think would not be “Oh, those two guys, look like they're really mindful.” Which is kind of the point of the site, you and I talked about that, that it's a couple of hardened, beat up, and learned drywallers who figured out that this is the best way. It took us a while to get there, and we got our bumps and bruises along the way. We just muscled our way through, and had some talent, and we were successful in spite of ourselves. And nowhere near as successful as we were once we figured it out.  

The what, or the why? We credit each other for where we are, both from a legal standpoint, as well as a mindfulness and wellness standpoint. We are each other's biggest support network. We also, like any people who've done the kind of work we've done all these years, can be unfiltered and see the world through a cracked lens. And that's the way we like it. There's pretty much nothing at this point in our lives that we won't put out there to talk about. We just decided at some point that the conversations we have every single day are probably worthy of the legal community hearing. And if they like them, great. If they don't, that's okay, too. That was what brought it. It's not easy. I have so much respect for what you're doing, and other folks. It's not easy to get the dialogue right, you don't just throw a podcast up and have it be effective, and hopefully ours is effective. Once we figured out this was something we wanted to take a run at doing, it was probably a good year and a half that we really teased out what it was that we wanted it to be, and that's still evolving. We've been blessed with incredible guests, so that's been helpful.

It’s really important to have an accountability partner for any sort of major life change. Do you guys use each other as an accountability partner? How do you push each other to, be your best selves, be your best lawyer selves, not just hide in the BS and pretend that the things that are happening aren't real?

Yeah, no question. You're The Wellness Esquire and I’m Iron Advocate, so we’ll put it in the lawyer context. It’s critically important for lawyers to have those kind of relationships. There’s the mentoring relationship, but what you’re talking about is different. It's a grittier and deeper kind of relationship. And that is really part of what you and I have been talking about with the mindfulness and the trying to be your best possible advocate. And as successful as you can be, you gotta get called out, because we're paid to be right or we're paid to advocate for a position, and you fall into this. Particularly the closer you get to a hearing or a brief being due, or a trial. It's gotta be the way you want people to see it or you do see it. We call each other out all the time professionally and personally.

On those trials I talked to you about, he was a big part of calling me out on various things. And so we do that. If we're on the phone, and one of us is talking to their kid, all the time we’ll be like, “Dude, let him talk would you?” His kid’s named Taj. “You're just telling Taj, how he’s supposed to feel. Just shut up and let him talk.” And he does the same thing to me. We do it on every level, we call each other out on everything.

I love that. That's so important. That typical lawyer mindset, the Type A and the perfectionist, we are typically not okay with showing vulnerability, not okay accepting that we might ever make a mistake, While we're in law school, we still think that we're supposed to get it all right. And we don't realize until much later on that, first of all, the learning has barely even begun. We're going to be learning and messing up and learning again, for the rest of our lives and careers. And that that's okay and expected. I think it's amazing that you have this really solid relationship where you're telling each other all the time in a supportive, encouraging way, “I don't agree with you, you could do better.” We've talked about the need for resilience, and I think one of the things that we're really missing in legal education and training in general is the human factor, that we are human beings. We're not robots.

Yeah, legal education. I am a believer in the Socratic approach. The fact that you have to train somebody's brain to work in a certain analytical way. I would never trade that, that's part of my secret sauce. But the way that we do the rest of it, the emotional piece. There's no emotional intelligence education going on in the law schools. It's holding folks back, it's holding the firms back. You and I are having a dialogue. On Iron Advocate, we had David Jaffe on, who's the Associate Dean at American. We just have to get the dialogue out there. We don't want to make people non-analytical, but you can be analytical and emotionally intelligent at the same time. And if you want to be a great advocate, you better be those two things. We should start early and often. We also need to recruit better and broader. We need to expand what lawyers look like, and what we think the law looks like.

Let's talk about the intersection and the important connection between wellness and law. What's missing right now? Anything new that we haven't talked about already? What do you think the biggest or easiest changes are that we can start to start making?

I think the biggest issue is that it's just not okay to be vulnerable. It's not okay to be scared. Episode Two of Iron Advocate, with Will Meyerhofer. Will's a recovering lawyer, a therapist in New York City. He's talked to countless lawyers that are suffering. He put it succinctly and simply, we gotta talk to each other and we gotta laugh at ourselves.  

Part of that dialogue was “30 Seconds to Living in a Dumpster” which is: you blow a deadline, the client finds out, case gets dismissed, client reports you to Disciplinary Counsel, you lose your law license, you lose your family, you're publicly humiliated, you'll live in a dumpster. We ran through that in like 30 seconds, because we all walk around with that all the time.  

It's so true. I've been networking with people for years, but only in the last couple of months have really deepened the connections that I make when I network. The amount that I have grown and learned in that time where I'm connecting on a deeper level and not being scared to show that I don't know the answer to this, and that I haven't tried that before, and I made a mistake over here. You waste so much time and energy and so many growth opportunities by not talking to people about what they're doing, about what you're doing, what you don't understand, what you're struggling with. The more and more I connect with people, I realize we are all for the most part dealing with the same issues. Everyone thinks that it's just them, whether it's more personal or more professional, but we're all struggling with similar issues. We're trying to pretend that nothing can touch us, it's all fine, we can get through it, and we don't need anybody's help. And that's when people burn out and fall apart. It’s not good.

Well said, and that goes for society at large. But the nice thing about what you're doing with The Wellness Esquire is focusing “teach what you know” and it'll expand outward. Quite frankly, the lawyers need it really badly. And obviously, my background, and Jeff's background, you're not expecting two white dudes to show up in the middle of your wellness conversation.

You don't, which is exactly why I think it's so valuable that both of you are doing it and the visual of the two of you together is fantastic.

About Bob Levant

Bob Levant is a coach and strategist who works with lawyers to define and execute upon their vision. During his own journey through the law, Bob learned countless lessons about the incredible benefits that come with being a lawyer as well as the negative impact that can occur in this too often harsh profession. A professor, trained personal coach, yoga instructor and master’s degree candidate in mental health counseling, Bob has helped coach and mentor many people both inside and outside the legal profession using his problem-solving and advocacy skills. Bob’s passion is to use his talents and ability to understand the emotional and psychological challenges of lawyers in helping them to reach their own potential.

With keen listening skills, a natural empathy and the ability to swiftly assess people’s strengths and gifts, Bob blends those qualities with a masterful understanding of the legal profession while supporting lawyers in tackling seemingly unsolvable dilemmas inside and outside of the courtroom.

Bob has logged tens of thousands of hours in trial and hearings in criminal and civil cases during a storied career that includes scores of not guilty verdicts. Bob has recovered millions of dollars in settlements and verdicts for clients in civil rights, personal injury and medical malpractice cases. In 2018, Bob recorded the largest ever civil rights verdict of its kind in Pennsylvania. Even though he is one of Pennsylvania’s most successful trial lawyers, he has possibly had more success in the complex problems and crises that he has navigated for clients outside the courtroom.

Bob has mastered the art of strategic problem solving through his work with clients facing the most complex scenarios. His clients have included college and professional athletes, elected officials, political power brokers and celebrities. Bob has navigated these clients through events that unfold behind the scenes and in public where decisions must often be made quickly but strategically, and frequently dealing with facts and media coverage that change by the moment.

Contact Bob@ironadvocate.com

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