Karen Munoz

Show Notes

In this episode of Celebrating Justice, Karen Munoz, partner at Dolan Law, shares her inspiring journey from being the first in her immigrant family to graduate college, to becoming a leader in the field of wrongful death and catastrophic injury law. 

Karen discusses her passion for mental health advocacy, emphasizing the importance of wellness and mindfulness in the legal profession. Her work as a yoga instructor has played a critical role in maintaining balance in a high-stress field. Additionally, Karen highlights her approach to trauma-informed lawyering, focusing on how lawyers can better support clients dealing with significant emotional and psychological challenges.

In the Closing Argument segment, Karen shares a moving story about a wrongful death case involving a Mexican family that underscores the disparities in the healthcare system, particularly for non-English speaking patients. This experience deeply shaped her view on justice and her mission to advocate for those who are often overlooked by the system.

Chapters

1:12 – Why did you want to become a trial lawyer?
7:52 – What makes you unique?
16:37 – A case that matters.
23:46 – Karen’s “Closing Argument”

Key Takeaways

• Community and Mental Health Advocacy: Karen’s involvement with the Illinois Lawyers Assistance Program (LAP) emphasizes her commitment to addressing mental health challenges in the legal community.
• Trauma-Informed Advocacy: Karen’s approach focuses on understanding clients’ trauma and using that knowledge to better communicate and represent them.
• Mental Health and Wellness: As a certified yoga instructor, Karen believes in the importance of mindfulness and meditation for managing stress in the legal profession.
• Diversity in Law: Karen highlights the need for more diverse representation in the legal profession to better serve immigrant and working-class communities.
• Justice for All: In her Closing Argument, Karen discusses how the wrongful death case of a Mexican family illuminated the disparities in healthcare and the importance of empathetic legal representation.

Transcript

[Theme Song Plays]

Karen Munoz:
Let me put myself in their shoes for a second. Like, they just lost a child. What you see in the mental health profession is there’s small trauma and big trauma, right? What’s small and what’s big is subjective. It depends on the person. People carry their loss, literally, in so many different ways that it’s our job as advocates to find it and be able to tell their pain and story.

Narrator:
Welcome to Celebrating Justice, presented by the Trial Lawyers Journal and CloudLex, the next-gen legal cloud platform built exclusively for personal injury law. Get inspired by the nation’s top trial lawyers and share in the stories that shape our pursuit of justice. Follow the podcast and join our community at triallawyersjournal.com. Now here’s your host, editor of TLJ and VP of marketing at CloudLex, Chad Sands.

Chad Sands:
Welcome back, friends, to Celebrating Justice. Get your mental health hats on because in this episode we hear stories from yoga teacher, wellness advocate, and partner at Dolan Law, Karen Munoz. To get to the stories both inside and outside the courtroom, I asked her, Karen Munoz, why did you want to become a trial lawyer?

Karen Munoz:
So I’m the first born of immigrant parents who came from Mexico. I have two younger sisters, and I was the first one to get a college degree. My big plan was to become either Dana Scully from The X-Files or some sort of combination of Alias and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So, to that end, I got my undergrad in criminal justice, psychology, and political science, thinking that I would go into law enforcement and develop into a forensic psychologist or a profiler. And in order to, you know, go back to grad school, I kind of needed some money. So, I got my first job at a law firm.

And I’ll tell you a funny story. I worked at a pharmacy for five years throughout college, and I was able to meet such interesting people with diverse jobs and backgrounds. And so when I started getting ready to finish college, I asked everyone who I knew as a customer, and I was like, “Hey, I just need a job that has a salary.” So they were able to get me into very different job interviews. I called, you know, Alderman here in Chicago. I left messages pretty much everywhere. So long story short, I get a job interview at a law firm in the building that I still work in. I’ve worked in this building for 21 years now.

I go to this interview—it’s downtown, the Loop. I’m born and bred Chicago, so I understand CTA here, but the Loop is like an old and different beast because the Loop goes in different directions at different times. So, I took a train, and I was about five blocks from where I needed to be. By the time I got to the interview, I was kind of sweaty, and I realized that I had one black sock and one blue sock. And I was like, “Oh Lord.”

So, I go up and introduce myself to the receptionist and say, “Hey, I’m here for this job interview. What should I do?” And she said, “Oh, sorry, the job’s been filled. Sorry about that. We didn’t notify you.” And so, it was literally like the cartoons where the person hangs their head and goes, “Wah-wah.” And there I am staring at my black and blue socks.
But as the door is about to close, she says, “But wait, I understand they’re hiring next door. You might want to check in there.” So that’s the firm I’ve been at since 2003, since I finished college. I loved the work that the lawyers were doing so much. I’ve been doing the same thing my whole career, which is representing plaintiffs in wrongful death cases and serious catastrophic and traumatic injuries. And needless to say, it derailed my intention to become a profiler or work in law enforcement.

I became so deeply interested in the stories of the clients and what brought them to the law firm. People were from all over, different walks of life. And one of the things I started to notice was there weren’t a lot of people like me, and there weren’t a lot of lawyers who looked like their clients, spoke like their clients, came from similar backgrounds—working class, immigrant backgrounds, you know?
It’s a predominantly white, male profession when I started. We’ve gotten a lot better at it. I think we’ve made tremendous strides in diversifying the legal community, but there’s still a lot of work to do. That was one of my motivating factors to apply to law school because I wanted my parents to be able to have access to lawyers like me—lawyers who spoke the language, lawyers who understood what it means to be a lawyer in a system where the odds are stacked against you. There’s a privilege that comes with certain backgrounds that, if you’re from that privileged background, you may not even realize you have. So, it makes it a lot harder to connect with your clients who don’t have that same kind of privilege.

And coming from a background where my parents didn’t know this country, didn’t know its customs, its culture, I got the best of both worlds because I retained a lot of my culture—I’m Spanish-speaking—but I also learned so much about American culture. And more importantly, I got the education that I needed in order to help others who maybe weren’t as lucky as me.

Chad Sands:
And so were you working at the pharmacy while you were in law school, or was that when you were an undergrad and then you went to law school after the pharmacy?

Karen Munoz:
I was working in the pharmacy. I was actually a technician for five years, but I worked through all of college. And I began actually as a secretary, like a receptionist, at this law firm. I can tell you that I’ve literally had every single job that you can have in a law firm, starting from answering phones, dropping off packages—you know, back when we would run filings to court. I’ve been a secretary, I was a legal assistant, and then when I went to law school, I became a law clerk. And then, finally, I became an associate, and now, you know, I’ve been a partner here since, I want to say, 2018.

Chad Sands:
You were working at the pharmacy, and then I think it was really smart of you to ask all of your customers at the pharmacy. All people need pills, right? So there are all walks of life walking into a pharmacy.

Karen Munoz:
All walks of life from everybody. And it was a pretty… If you’re familiar with Chicago, it was just east of Wrigley Field. And so it’s a very diverse community, lots of different things going on. So I met people who worked in the FBI, the DEA, people who were doctors, people who owned small businesses. It was awesome.

Chad Sands:
And then you interviewed and started as… Did you say the secretary? Is that right?

Karen Munoz:
Yeah, I was a receptionist.

Chad Sands:
Rolling calls?

Karen Munoz:
Rolling calls, yeah. I started in the night program, which would have taken me four years to finish, but I just couldn’t do another four years. So I finished in three, and I worked crazy hours to make sure that I could still full-time work but also get the classes I needed. So there’d be days where I’d be at work at seven in the morning, go to a 10 o’clock class, be back to work, and then go back at six o’clock for the six to nine class. Back then, I had a lot of energy. I still have a ton of energy, but not as much as I used to in my early 20s.

Chad Sands:
No, I wish we all did. So you’ve been doing this for a while, from the ground up, now all the way to partner. How do you distinguish yourself from other trial lawyers? What makes you unique?

Karen Munoz:
There are a million things, but the ones I want to talk about with you… Yoga has been a saving grace in my life. I would not still be practicing law if I hadn’t found it very early on in my practice. It was, as you know, probably talking to many trial lawyers. We do have a lot of energy. We have a lot of anxiety. It’s a stressful profession. And we aren’t necessarily given the tools or talked to about what the practice is really like.

Yoga has helped me navigate the challenges inherent in the practice. And so I have been a teacher of yoga for over a decade. I’m big into mindfulness and meditation. I’m a certified teacher, and that opened a lot of doors for me in the legal community because it led to a lot of volunteer opportunities.
As you know, there’s been a big mindfulness and wellness movement in the profession, with a lot of different organizations stepping up and recognizing we have a problem that needs to be addressed. And so to be a part of that has been an amazing part of my journey, and that opened a lot of doors. I’ve done a lot of work with the Chicago Bar Foundation, Illinois Lawyers’ Assistance Program. I’m on their board. I care deeply about mental health and I care deeply about having a community that is healthy. And that means, you know, mentally, emotionally, and physically, to me. Because I’ve seen firsthand… I’ve had colleagues who weren’t so fortunate as me.

I’ve seen the stress and the toll that it can take, especially when you suffer in silence. So being on the board of LAP has really opened another path for me to help others and help support others who may not have the ability to work through a lot of the problems they’re facing on their own for a variety of reasons, right? Stigma is a big one.

Which kind of connects me to the other thing that I think sets me apart from other trial lawyers: my experience with clients who have trauma. Right? So I represent people who literally have had their lives turned upside down overnight. They have lost family members. They have lost their livelihood. They are disabled. All of these things are obviously very distressing and taxing.
So, learning how to be with clients who have trauma has been, I think, something that is very difficult to do for a lot of lawyers, because we operate with our thinking brain and we solve people’s problems. We love to help find solutions. And sometimes what the client needs isn’t necessarily a solution at the moment that you’re in contact with them. What they need is someone to listen.

Chad Sands:
I did a webinar with an attorney, and he talked about traumatic exposure response and, you know, especially in personal injury and in these law firms, how the staff and the attorneys are exposed to this trauma, and in return, they experience kind of this trauma themselves.

Karen Munoz:
I think the traditional approach has been kind of to suck it up. It’s been kind of like, “Hey, you know, this is part of the job you signed up for, and you just have to do what you can with the resources that you have and to the best of your ability.” And that’s not good enough. Quite frankly, I mean, it leads to burnout, it leads to depression.

We’ve got some pretty bad numbers when it comes to problem drinking, substance use, anxiety, depression, and even suicide. So to tell someone who doesn’t have the tools, “You’ve got to suck it up,” I mean, that’s just not going to cut it, because you’re going to see people leave the profession who otherwise, if they had the right support, right tools, right resources.

And sometimes it just starts with a supervisor or a colleague just listening and feeling heard and validated that, yes, you are experiencing these symptoms as a result of the work that you do. And that’s completely normal. Not experiencing that would be abnormal, because we’re human, at the end of the day.
We’re not robots. You know, we don’t have AI lawyers yet. It’s completely normal. It’s what makes us human, right? It’s our empathy, it’s our compassion, it’s what makes us good lawyers. And to say, you know, you’ve got to shut that part of who you are off, it only makes the problem worse.

Chad Sands:
To kind of go into that a little bit more… And I’ve had a conversation with Brian Cuban about this, actually, in volume one.

Karen Munoz:
Big fan of Brian, yeah.

Chad Sands:
Yes. Do you think the plaintiff’s bar or trial lawyers, personal injury attorneys, they have a higher level of substance use, or do you think they’re, you know, compared to other practice areas? Just kind of curious from your experience.

Karen Munoz:
That’s a really interesting question, and I’m intimately familiar with a lot of the studies, again, because of my work at LAP and my school career. And I can tell you that the professions that are impacted the most—it doesn’t mean you can’t be a lawyer in a different practice area and be impacted—but it’s criminal law, it’s immigration law, you know, dealing with asylum cases, trafficking cases, prosecution, public defenders, any sort of criminal law, personal injury, medical malpractice, of course, public interest law, where you’re hearing people’s stories of losing their housing, of losing their benefits, of being part of the domestic violence court system.

There’s a lot of different… Those are the, I would say, like, family law is a big one. But in terms of any studies where they’ve broken it down by practice area and then by problem, I have not seen… I think we’ve been a little slow to address a lot of the issues that impact the profession because, again, there’s still a lot of disbelief that it’s possible or that it’s occurring in the frequency and intensity that it is. But we know that it is. I mean, you can… It’s anecdotal, but it’s also… You look at the studies. The 2016 study done by Patrick Krill and the Betty Ford Foundation is one of the biggest ones that surveyed, like, 13,000 lawyers.

And we have, I think, a 6 percent average of depression across the country with the general population, and the study had 21 percent of lawyers surveyed hitting that depression mark. Same thing with anxiety, depression, and stress. You ask people, “Do you experience stress? Would you wish that you had gone into this career?” And the numbers… If people are honest, it’s like…

Chad Sands:
If you had one tip to give to help battle stress, you know, for trial lawyers and others, would it be yoga? Or what would it be?

Karen Munoz:
No, it’s different things for different people, like different strokes for different folks. Yoga was my saving grace. It’s really just, honestly, it’s being in tune, right? Because you can’t begin to address a problem if you don’t know there is one. So, I think a lot of it has to do with the lack of self-awareness, a kind of mentality that somehow you’re immune from human suffering, that you’re not vulnerable, you’re not weak.

And I think I see that a lot in just the trial law profession itself—that, you know, you’re an advocate, right? You can’t show any weakness. And I see this a lot come up with issues in professionalism and civility. And that you have this image or maybe it’s your work culture where you have to act a certain way, and you can’t give an inch to your opponent.

And I think that’s a dangerous way of being, because, again, at the end of the day, we tend to want to work with and like the people in our orbits, and our orbits include judges and opposing counsel who aren’t there to make your life miserable. They’re there to do their job to the best of their ability because they have a job to do just like you do.

That doesn’t mean we can’t be civil, right? And I think sometimes clients also demand this approach because that’s what they’ve been conditioned to believe, you know, an aggressive lawyer should be. But you can be an advocate, and you can be nice at the same time. You can have the law on your side, you can argue it, but there’s no need for some of the stuff that you see these days with briefs full of hyperbolic language. Social media has made things a lot worse, and I don’t want to get started on TikTok lawyers.

Chad Sands:
Well, good. Well, let’s go away from TikTok lawyers, and let’s talk about a case that had an impact on you. I know it’s hard to choose one, but could you share a story about one case you’ve had?

Karen Munoz:
When thinking about this, it wasn’t necessarily a case that came to mind, but more so the approach. And I think I touched upon this just a little bit. But being trauma-informed and using trauma-informed lawyering in the practice is something that I have refined and I continue to work on every day. And I’ve kind of come up with my own little thing to remind myself every time, you know, a new case comes in. And I call it IAA, but it’s Identifying, Acknowledging, and Adjusting.

And really it’s working with clients to be on the lookout for signs of trauma, like emotional distress, behavioral changes, physical symptoms. So, when we have a new case come in, you get to know the client really well because you’re working with the client and their family sometimes for years. And I think there’s sometimes a misapprehension or a misunderstanding that if a client’s not calling you back right away, or if a client’s not doing the things you’re asking them to do, it’s because they just don’t want to or they don’t care or they’re not interested.
To me, those are signs that there’s something else going on here, and we need to be vigilant and make sure that we’re monitoring the client and not giving them too much to do, too much pressure. Because, quite frankly, they’ve just had their lives turned upside down. So their case may not necessarily be a priority. It might be, “I just lost my husband, and I don’t know how I’m going to pay my mortgage.”
And so getting back to you about a question you might have, that’s really, really important to the lawyer. It isn’t the same for that client who’s literally like, “I don’t know if I’m going to lose my house,” or “I’m navigating grief.”

So it’s learning—basically learning from your clients. Experience is the best teacher, because we have to acknowledge that our clients in this profession, and what we do, we’re handling the most fragile thing that’s happened to them, usually, right? It’s not all the time, but… What we see in the mental health profession is there’s small trauma and big trauma, right? What’s small and what’s big is subjective. It depends on the person. Something that we might see as minor, like, “Oh, it was just a scary car accident, but, you know, luckily, it could have been a lot worse.” That might be the worst thing. And we all are genetically, biologically, psychologically, emotionally—our experiences determine how we respond to those events.

Conversely, you might have someone who’s completely dissociated, who you think is maybe kind of goofy, but they’re dissociated. They may not be able to tell you the story in a chronological order because their brain has not processed things the way a normal brain has because it’s impacted by trauma.

So, acknowledging that our clients are here because something bad has happened to them, and we need to acknowledge that and meet them where they are. Because to expect anything different is crazy to me, because we know how trauma changes the brain. And I think we can be more compassionate, understanding, when we understand there’s a science to this. There are neurobiological changes, and grief is a hell of a thing, you know what I mean?
You don’t have to have any sort of PTSD going on. Grief… You know, they just added prolonged grief disorder as a mental health diagnosis in the DSM, so it’s a legitimate, recognized disorder. And when you’re in personal injury and plaintiff’s law, grief is what we deal with. It’s the name of our game.

And to not acknowledge that, to me, seems really counterproductive to the client’s well-being.

And then the last thing is just adjusting, right? Modifying how we communicate with them, knowing when to back off, meeting them where they are, being flexible, meeting them in a neutral turf, right? You don’t have to have them come to your office. You can go to their house. You can say, “Hey, let’s go walk and get a coffee.” That can be also very helpful too.

I’ve learned through different therapeutic techniques, which I kind of borrow from, even though it’s very clear, you know, I’m not your therapist. I’m not a mental health professional yet, and even if I was, it would not be appropriate for me to have that role, right? I’m an attorney, and that would be a separate role. But meeting people where they are is so important, and not putting expectations or judgments on them, because they’ve already gone through enough.

And I think sometimes lawyers inadvertently, because they’re not aware of what’s going on, they’re not aware of trauma, it’s not really part of something that they… We’re not trained in this, right? There are a lot of resources out there to get educated on it, but understanding that our clients are suffering significantly, and we need to adjust our approach, and we need to meet them where they are.
And we need to use language that is soft and empathetic and allows them to build a relationship with us that is based on trust and understanding.

Chad Sands:
I think you said two things that are really interesting. One is just always remembering what the client’s going through, right? And maybe it’s easy to keep calling or asking why they haven’t filled out this form yet, or, you know, the law firm’s always worried about a hundred other things. But, yeah, really taking a moment and really thinking about, “Oh, maybe they haven’t called me back or filled out this form because they’re kind of distracted with something a little more important that they can’t stop thinking about.”

Karen Munoz:
A hundred percent. It’s a client-centric approach. It’s a client—look, standing in their shoes, that’s all. You don’t need a mental health background. It’s just a matter of, “Hey, let me put myself in their shoes for a second. Like, they just lost a child. What would I be feeling? How would my life be different?”

You know what I mean? Just being able to take yourself out of your stuff for a few minutes to imagine what their life is like. You know, I have clients who have been in mass shootings, right? And you’re like, “How are you even able to leave your home?” Right? And also being able to say, like, “Those are good things that you’re doing, if you’re able to leave your home,” and validating your clients when they do take steps.

Because, again, we’re working with them for years, right? So you do see progress. I always encourage my clients to go to therapy. I think it’s a very valuable tool during the process. And sometimes that’s not possible, right? Especially in this day and age.

Narrator:
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Now here is this episode’s closing argument.

Karen Munoz:
One of my first civil trials as a brand new attorney involved a Mexican family. This family was obviously Spanish-speaking. They lived on the south side of Chicago. The wife and the husband were watching a soccer match on Easter morning. She was folding the laundry in the dining room while he was in the living room. As most people tend to do who are passionate about sports, there’s a lot of noise and hollering when something goes right or wrong. And so she was hearing these noises from him, and that experience I’ve lived so many times as a child because that’s how I was raised. My dad would be watching something on TV, a baseball game, and my mom would either be washing dishes or folding laundry or putting things away.

So anyway, she’s folding her laundry, going along, and all of a sudden she stops hearing noises coming from the living room. So she says to him, like, “Hey, what’s going on with the game? Did it go out?” And there was no response. So she walked over from where she was to the couch, and he had slumped over.
She called 9-1-1 in Spanish. The ambulance came. No one knew really what had happened, and they took him to the ER on Easter morning. And because they were not, you know, native English speakers, they were just left in the hallway while they were short-staffed and dealing with other emergencies.

Unfortunately, my client had had an ischemic stroke, and we know that if someone has had an ischemic stroke, there’s treatment that can be given called tPA. But because no one really took the time to examine the symptoms or take a look at, you know, what the paramedics had noted, they delayed getting an MRI of the brain. And so by the time they figured out what was going on, he had a brain bleed. It was too late to do anything. And so he went on life support. After a few days, the family had to make a horrible and terrible decision, and they pulled life support.

So, this case went on for several years because there were a lot of different defendant parties involved. But I got to know the family really well, and I connected with them in a way that maybe I had not connected with other clients, given our shared cultural values and just my ability to really put myself in their shoes and imagine, “What if that had been my parents?”

The most damning part was that he could be here today. This could have been prevented. We have the medicine; they just weren’t listening, they weren’t paying attention.

This case went to trial about three or four years later, and I was lucky enough to be part of the trial team. There was a moment where the wife was testifying. She carried her purse with her everywhere she went. And she spoke very little English, so we had an interpreter. An impromptu question was asked: “We see you bring your purse every day and have it up there with you. What do you have in there?”
Before the interpreter could really finish the question, she pulled out a picture of her husband that she carried with her every single day. And at that moment, when that happened, we didn’t need any words. It was completely unscripted. It was not part of what was going to be asked. It was just kind of a curious, “What do you got in there?” She could have pulled out a CD player or a box of Kleenex.

That spoke more about her loss and the damages that this family had. And she was in such mourning still, years later, that she just literally carried him around

everywhere. So her loss, without words, was so profound, and it really impacted everyone in that courtroom. So much so that before the case went to verdict, the defendants made an offer, and the family accepted.

That was one of the driving factors in my practice moving forward. I wanted to let my clients tell their story. I wanted to be an advocate and speak for those in the moments that they can’t speak for themselves. I unfortunately learned that the healthcare system treats people of color and lower socioeconomic status much differently, and I really learned to dig into the story because there’s always more than what’s there on the surface. And it could be as simple as something in someone’s bag, but people carry their loss, literally, in so many different ways that it’s our job as advocates to find it and be able to tell their pain and story effectively so that they receive some measure of justice.

Chad Sands:
That was trial lawyer Karen Munoz. Thanks for sharing your stories, Karen. To learn more about Karen, visit dolanlegal.com. All right, I’m Chad Sands. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Narrator:
You’ve been listening to Celebrating Justice, presented by CloudLex and the Trial Lawyers Journal. Remember, the stories don’t end here. Visit triallawyersjournal.com to become part of our community and keep the conversation going. And for a deeper dive into the tools that empower personal injury law firms, visit cloudlex.com/TLJ to learn more.