Haley Morrison, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Portland office, was featured in Super Lawyers, in “Sports Brain,” by Nancy Rommelmann.
Following is an excerpt:
Anyone who’s watched professional soccer has marveled at how, over this vast, green expanse, the best players know when to hang back and when to attack. Employment attorney Haley Morrison, an NCAA Division I soccer player at Colorado College who played several seasons as a semipro, knows that terrain.
“I love when I have an opposing counsel that’s an athlete,” she says. “It usually means they see the bigger picture rather than focusing on the minute issues that really don’t carry the day. There’s something about a sports brain that allows you to really focus on what matters at a given time.”
Sports brain, to Morrison, can also also be synonymous with knowing when to shift gears. In February, she left her Portland firm for Epstein Becker Green, which has offices nationwide. “It was a long and hard decision, but I’ve always had a primarily California practice,” she says. “It was time I went to a firm that had more California resources.”
Another example of shifting gears: While she no longer plays much soccer (“I can’t keep up with the fabulous younger players,” she says), during the pandemic, she began to take running more seriously. To put it mildly.
“I started doing ultra-marathons,” she says. “That’s where I get my stress relief. It’s what I do for fun.”
A typical weekend’s fun for Morrison might include back-to-back 100K and 50K races. There’s also an upcoming 250-mile trail race in Arizona, which Morrison mentions in by-the-way fashion even though it involves running in the dark alone, possible hallucinations, and deciding when to take a nap during what will be four solid days of running up and down mountain ranges with little support.
“You get there one way or another,” she says. “I like to just get out there and do it.”
During the pandemic, Morrison began to take running more seriously. “I started doing ultra-marathons,” she says. “That’s where I get my stress relief. It’s what I do for fun.”
If this puts stress on Morrison’s body, it doesn’t compare with the emotional stress she sees people go through in court.
“The most interesting cases that we’re dealing with right now have a lot to do with behavioral health and how that’s affecting the workplace,” she says. “People that have a propensity for anxiety, depression, bipolar, and some of those things were exacerbated so much by [COVID] isolation, by job insecurity and the general stress we’re all feeling.”
Morrison recently had one such case. “The [opposing] plaintiff sincerely believed all these horrible things happened to him,” she says. “He cried throughout multiple depositions. He’s having anxiety attacks, he can’t sleep. That’s really a challenge for his lawyer—and a challenge for me because you don’t want to beat up on the guy.” She says in the end they were able to get a good resolution for everyone.
While winning is good—“Who doesn’t love winning?” she says—goals can be moving targets.
“Achieving your client’s goals, whatever that looks like, can change, just like it can change in sports,” she says. “I love the resilience that requires. This is a hard job and there’s a lot about it that appeals to me because it is hard. You have to overcome all sorts of obstacles: a difficult opposing counsel, late nights, thorny issues, difficult client. You just never know what’s going to come. It’s always a new challenge.”
Whether it’s a 250-mile run or a lengthy trial, the key to Morrison is focusing on what you can control. “One of the beautiful things about any kind of sport event,” she says, “is you can really boil it down to its smallest elements. Have I had enough to drink? Did I get any food down? It’s very simple: bite-size goals, focus on particular problems and nothing else, relentless forward progress. That’s what gets you through.”
