"From top to bottom, left to right!"

The Kind Lawyers Conversation Day 2025

 22 August 2025

Work Club Olderfleet

477 Collins Street, Melbourne, VIC 3000

Conversation Day is a bold, thoughtful exploration of what it means to practice law with kindness, integrity, and authenticity. This isn’t just about theory — it’s about shifting mindset and culture, and giving practical guidance on how lawyers can align their values with their day-to-day work, even in the toughest professional environments.

Through candid conversations, we’ll unpack the concept of Kind Lawyering: what it is, what it isn’t, and why it matters. We’ll explore how cultural norms have shaped the legal profession, the ethical and relational impact of kindness, and how to hold your ground without losing your humanity. Whether you're just starting out, or have decades of experience, this event invites you to rethink the role of kindness in legal work - as an ethical obligation and arguably the most important professional skill for lawyers in an AI-driven era.

PROGRAM

Morning Sessions

Session 1 – Kind Lawyering Isn’t What You Think It Is

What really gets in the way of kindness in law?

Aggression, competitiveness, bullying, and toxic culture are easy to blame. But what about silence, inaction, doing nothing because “it’s always been done this way”?

Kindness doesn’t just fail when people are unkind or aggressive. It fails when good people look away. When they stop questioning, stop caring, stop believing the system can be better, or that they have the power to change it.

This session invites honest reflection and collective curiosity. It’s about noticing the invisible forces that keep us stuck and exploring the deeper work of kind lawyering: TKL’s four foundations for kindness - accountability, connection, alignment, and community.

Session 2 – Kindness: An Ethical Duty or a Personal Choice?

What if kindness wasn’t optional?

 Many of us were taught in law school, or as junior lawyers, that zealous advocacy of our client’s interests, which has seemingly turned into aggressive advocacy, and seeing kindness and vulnerability as weakness.

 Therefore, we’re used to thinking of kindness as a personal value, something we bring to work if we want to. But what if kindness has an ethical dimension? What if it’s not just a choice, but a duty?

 This panel explores kindness through the lens of legal ethics:

• Are our professional obligations around competency, honesty and courtesy enough, or could (and should) kindess be recognised as a separate obligation?

• What happens when our duties to the client, the court, and the profession seem to pull in different directions? Is it contrary to our fundamental ethical duties as lawyers, to take a “kind lawyer” approach?

• Can kindness be strategic and ethical? Or does using it as a tool risk compromising its integrity?

• In emotionally charged matters, where does kindness sit alongside candour, truth-telling, and vulnerability? And are there ethical grey zones where kindness might blur, backfire, or be misunderstood?

 Kind lawyering isn’t about “being nice”. It’s about whether kindness has a rightful place in our ethical framework - and what changes when we treat it that way.

Afternoon Sessions

Session 3 – The Kind Lawyer Archetype Doesn’t Exist (Yet)

Legal culture doesn’t just shape what we do. It shapes who we’re allowed to be.

This session explores how privilege impacts who feels welcome in the law and who has to contort themselves just to fit in.

We’ll look at how the profession quietly rewards sameness: in background, tone, even life stage - and how that makes authenticity costly. From cultural background to gender, age to life experience, we’ll explore how these dynamics show up in subtle ways, and why diversity and inclusion aren’t side issues but central to the kindness movement.

This is about expanding what is seen as professional, valuable, and enough.

Workshop 1 – From Aggression to Advocacy: Practising Kind Communication

A hands-on session exploring how language can support or sabotage client outcomes.

We will focus on how lawyers communicate under pressure - especially in writing, and notably the difference between assertive advocacy and reactive aggression. Through real-life scenarios and interactive exercises, participants will learn how to regulate tone, shift unhelpful default habits, and communicate with purpose.

We’ll introduce the “10 Commandments of Kind Communication” as a practical anchor for correspondence, supported by a framework to assist you to make choices that lead your clients closer to resolution, and not further away.  We seek to show you how to sharpen your message, reduce harm, and build influence through brave advocacy, rather than force.

Workshop 2 – The Long Game: Kindness as a Professional Strategy

Kindness isn’t just interpersonal. It’s strategic.

While the earlier workshop (Aggression vs Advocacy) drills into real-time interactions and response to conflict, this session will ensure we look at the macro, aka ‘long-game’ behaviour:  How kindness supports outcomes across sustained matters, team dynamics, and emotionally complex decision-making. Think of it as the internal strategy: how we hold tone, regulate emotion, frame communication, and protect clarity when things are messy. Not reactive conflict handling — but deliberate, future-focussed application of values and strategy.

You will leave with a practical toolkit for using kindness strategically in legal practice, including tone and timing tips, a reverse case study to challenge old habits, a “say this, not that” guide for difficult moments, and a self-audit to identify where kindness tends to slip.

Session 4 – Wellness Deconstructed: The Cost of Caring in Complex Systems

Wellness isn’t soft. It’s structural.

This session unpacks the emotional cost of legal work, including vicarious trauma, moral injury, and emotional enmeshment. We’ll explore the difference between empathy and over-identification, and how to maintain boundaries without losing compassion.

Expect tools for sustainable practice, and a reframing of kindness as clarity with required care, not martyrdom.

Speakers to be announced soon. Stay tuned!