Jodi Ritter, a partner at Coffey Modica, shared her personal story from working in the King’s County DA’s office and how she came to pivot her career, finding new opportunities at Coffey Modica.
Danielle Braff | August 12, 2025
Eighty stab wounds and a severe disfigurement convinced Jodi Ritter to rethink her career as an assistant district attorney in Kings County in Brooklyn, New York City. Ritter prosecuted a case in the early 2000s, promising her client a spot in the Witness Protection Program in exchange for her testimony against her abusive husband. But her husband tapped the woman’s phone and learned of the plan.
“He locked her and the kids in the basement and stabbed her about 80 times in her face and neck in front of the kids but didn’t kill her,” Ritter says.
The woman wore a scarf over her face to hide her disfigurement, and when she popped into Ritter’s office, it was a constant reminder of how Ritter had failed her.
“I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat and got very sick,” Ritter says.
The stress led to a few rounds of diverticulitis (a gastrointestinal disease), and Ritter had surgery to remove her colon.
This was the final straw for the prosecutor, who realized that her secondary trauma could take her life. She left the district attorney’s office, eventually landing as a partner at Coffey Modica specializing in insurance defense litigation in Tarrytown, New York.
Ritter’s experience sheds light on a lesser-known but profound challenge within the legal profession: secondary trauma. For many attorneys and judges, the emotional toll of handling distressing cases can accumulate, creating lasting psychological impacts.
Balancing act
In a 2003 study of attorneys, mental health providers and social workers, researchers found that lawyers had the most frequent and severe symptoms of this secondary trauma. And a 2021 study examining 10 articles dealing with secondary trauma found that nine of the 10 reported elevated levels of secondary trauma in the legal profession.
“As a prosecutor, you’re supposed to be a strong woman, advocating for the victims,” Ritter says. “You don’t realize that you’re falling apart.”
The numbers alone paint a troubling picture, but personal stories reveal the extent of these struggles more vividly. For David Lever, the founding partner with Lever & Ecker in New York City, a case in 2004 brought him to a breaking point.
The case revolved around a grandmother and her 4-year-old grandson who sustained life-threatening injuries after they were hit by a driver who stole a car and was fleeing from the police.
The grandmother had multiple surgeries, including a leg amputation, and her grandson sustained a coma and a fractured skull with disfiguring facial lacerations.
In addition to the catastrophic injuries, Lever also had to deal with serious challenges trying to prove liability against a police department when there was no proof of physical contact between the police car and the stolen vehicle.
The case was taking such a toll on Lever that his wife ultimately intervened.
“While she was extremely proud of me for my dedication and commitment to represent this family as best I could, she said I needed to find a way to separate our personal life from this family’s ordeal, so that I could maintain my personal well-being, focus on my own family, and recognize how fortunate we were to have a healthy family of our own,” he says.
Despite the personal sacrifices involved, many attorneys strive to balance the intense demands of their profession with their family lives—a challenge that Lever knows all too well.
Lever made a commitment to himself and his family, devoting his home time to being present.
“If I was unable to do this, then I would need to decide if being a lawyer was worth it,” he says.
Compounding the trauma
It’s not just a single case that strains most lawyers, however. As Emily Lewis, a criminal justice program managing attorney with the Animal Legal Defense Fund in Portland, Oregon, explains, the accumulation of trauma across multiple cases can be especially damaging.
“It is layering of the secondary trauma from each individual case that has the biggest potential to negatively impact my mental health on a day-to-day basis,” Lewis says.
Not surprisingly, a nationwide study of 13,000 lawyers in 2023 found that 28% experienced depression, 19% reported anxiety, 21% had alcohol use problems, and 11% had problems with drug use.
Mercedes Diego, a partner with Cohn Lifland Pearlman Herrmann & Knopf in New Jersey, says she turned to family and colleagues in her law firm after dealing with an especially difficult case in the early 2000s.
Diego was preparing to start a family when she was defending a father whose parental rights were ultimately terminated because of drug addiction.
“Considering the strong ties between my parents and me, it was difficult for me to fathom that this father didn’t move heaven to do whatever was necessary to not lose his parental rights,” Diego says.
While talking about the case with a support system helped Diego, she says she ultimately shifted her practice, choosing less emotionally taxing cases.
“There’s something to be said for shifting your area of practice to one that doesn’t keep you up at night, conflicted between your obligation to your client and thinking about the other side,” Diego says. “I am much happier these days practicing commercial litigation and representing businesses in disputes.”
How to traverse the trauma
But even this type of work is stressful and can be emotionally draining.
Erin Gleason Alvarez, an arbitrator, a mediator and a negotiation consultant and the founder of Gleason Alvarez ADR in New York City, says she makes a plan to address the emotions that arise from her cases. Most of the time, that plan involves a deep breathing and meditation practice to help her handle the angry, frustrated, anxious and often-unhappy people who are seeking her help.
However, not all attorneys find respite in routines such as meditation. For Georgia lawyer M. Jared Easter, balancing his emotional well-being required physical outlets, as well. Easter decided to be an attorney because he is passionate about helping those in need.
But nothing could have prepared him for the emotional toll that these needs took on his mental health. In 2022, in Acworth, Georgia, a man was struck by a car while he was walking on a sidewalk. It was a minor impact, but the man fell backward and hit his head, resulting in a traumatic brain injury, Easter says. The man couldn’t remember his wife or his children, and he was unable to care for himself. Less than two years later, the man died.
“We had surveillance video of the incident, and it was so heartbreaking to see a man with so much pep in his step and a huge smile lose so much in an instant,” says Easter, a partner at Williams Elleby Howard & Easter in Georgia.
It took a lot of exercising and music making to clear his brain. He also extols the virtue of therapy.
“Therapy can be such a positive experience for attorneys struggling in our profession,” he says. “Sometimes I think people view therapy is something for weak people. But it’s just the opposite. It takes a strong person to be willing to look inward to help themselves.”
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