Empower Trial Consulting started the way a lot of good ideas do, not in a boardroom, but in a moment of recognition. During COVID, Kara found herself sitting beside her husband, an elder abuse plaintiff attorney, watching him navigate some of the most painful human stories imaginable with zero clinical training to support him or his clients. As a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, she saw a profession full of people who genuinely cared, but who were drowning without the tools to do this work sustainably or safely. So she called her best friend, Negar, a Psychologist and workplace trauma specialist, and we asked ourselves: what if we fixed that?

That's the origin of Empower Trial Consulting, a woman-led consulting practice built at the intersection of clinical expertise and legal culture. Together we bring decades of combined experience in trauma-informed care, mental health, and organizational wellness. We are not outsiders looking in at the legal profession. We are deeply embedded in it, as partners, as advocates, as professionals who understand what it costs to do this kind of work day after day. The legal profession has not been looked at as a helping profession for far too long, and we are here to change that.

Attorneys experience depression, anxiety, and burnout at rates significantly higher than the general population, and secondary traumatic stress is almost entirely unaddressed in formal legal training. No one is teaching attorneys how to sit with a survivor of elder abuse or a family who just lost someone in a catastrophic accident, and then go home and be okay. When we began speaking with attorneys across specialties, the response was immediate and consistent. They needed this, and very few people with genuine clinical expertise and a real grasp of what legal work actually feels like had ever thought to offer it.

The challenges are real too. We are a small women-owned business navigating a profession historically resistant to vulnerability. We've learned to speak lawyer, meeting legal professionals where they are with language that respects their identity and demonstrates concrete professional ROI, not just personal wellbeing. 

When an attorney walks out of one of our trainings and tells us they finally have vocabulary for what they've been carrying, or that they went home and were actually present with their family for the first time in months, that is the change we are talking about. We are not selling a product. We are offering a framework that helps legal professionals reconnect with why they chose this work in the first place, and gives them the tools to keep doing it without losing themselves in the process.