Beyond the Courtroom: Why Lawyers Give Back

By Paolo Longo, Bichler & Longo, PLLC

When people think of lawyers, they usually picture briefs, depositions, and courtrooms. What they don’t often see is the work many of us do once the case files close for the day.

At Bichler & Longo, our practice is built around representing Florida’s first responders. The police officers, firefighters, and corrections officers who get hurt doing a job the rest of us rely on. That work has given us a front-row seat to a crisis that doesn’t always show up in a workers’ compensation claim: the toll the job takes on a first responder’s mental health.

That’s why we’ve been proud to support Survive First, the Central Florida nonprofit founded by Doug and Karen Monda. Doug is a retired narcotics agent who nearly lost his life to a suicide attempt in 2013 after years of unaddressed trauma. Rather than stay silent about it, he and Karen turned that experience into an organization built to make sure other first responders don’t reach that same breaking point alone.

Survive First runs on a simple but powerful model: peer support from people who’ve actually worn the badge, educational seminars for departments and agencies, wellness support groups, and a Treatment Assistance Fund that helps cover the cost of mental health care for responders who can’t afford to wait. Karen, who serves as a trustee of the Florida Police Chiefs Association’s Education and Research Foundation, has helped push that work into the policy conversation statewide, not just the nonprofit world.

For us, supporting Survive First isn’t charity in the abstract. It’s connected directly to the clients we serve every day. A firefighter with a shoulder injury and a first responder wrestling with PTSD often walk through the same door because the job broke something, and the system wasn’t built to make that easy to fix. Standing behind an organization that treats the invisible injuries with the same urgency as the visible ones felt like an obvious extension of our work, not a departure from it.

We’re not unusual in this. Lawyers across Florida quietly show up for causes that have nothing to do with billable hours: coaching youth sports, sitting on hospital boards, funding scholarships, running food drives. Some of it never makes the news. But it’s worth saying out loud occasionally, because it says something about what draws people to this profession in the first place. Most lawyers didn’t get into this work because they love paperwork. They got into it because, somewhere along the way, they wanted to help people who were stuck.

Supporting an organization like Survive First is a reminder that the help doesn’t have to stop at the edge of a legal claim. Sometimes it means writing a check. Sometimes it means showing up at a 5K or a gala. Sometimes it means simply telling the men and women who protect our community that someone outside their department has their back too.

Doug and Karen Monda built something in Survive First that didn’t exist before they built it. The least the rest of us can do is help keep it running.

Paolo Longo is an attorney with Bichler & Longo, PLLC, a Maitland-based law firm representing Florida’s first responders. Learn more about Survive First at survivefirst.us.