From Pain to Impact: 3 Stories of Resilience in the Legal Profession [Featured Conversations]

Zeno Temple is a litigation professional, nonprofit executive, and recent graduate of Western New England University School of Law whose work is dedicated to advancing public service, civil rights, access to justice, and community empowerment.

Throughout his career, Zeno has served in the legal, nonprofit, and public sectors, contributing to litigation, legal research, civil rights enforcement, consumer protection, and community-based advocacy. His experience spans government agencies, law firms, public interest organizations, and legal clinics, where he has supported investigations, litigation strategy, client advocacy, and policy initiatives.

Zeno is the Founder and Executive Director of the Just Us Movement, which he created while in law school, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that expands access to legal education, civic engagement, health equity, and leadership development. Under his leadership, the organization has launched programs that connect communities with legal resources, promote civic participation, and create opportunities for historically underresourced populations. In recognition of its impact, the Just Us Movement was awarded a 2026–2027 Massachusetts Bar Association Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Accounts (IOLTA) Grant.

A respected community leader, Zeno was recognized as a 2026 BusinessWest Difference Maker and received the Western New England University Black Law Students Association Community Service Award. He is passionate about using the law as a vehicle for strengthening communities, protecting individual rights, and expanding access to justice for future generations.

Through his work and lived experiences, Zeno continues to demonstrate how resilience, purpose, and service can create lasting change for individuals and communities.

There is a particular kind of moral wounding that lives in the gap between what an organization says it values and what it actually asks of the people doing the work — especially in the sectors we trust to care for others. It is the accumulated cost of serving inside systems that were never designed to honor the humanity of those working within them. Dimple Dhabalia spent nearly two decades in that gap, and she came out with a map.

Dimple Dhabalia, Esq. is the founder of Roots in the Clouds, a leadership coaching and consulting practice that works at the intersection of moral injury, institutional betrayal, and collective grief. Her approach is built on a framework she calls moral cartography — the practice of mapping the terrain of organizational trauma so that leaders can locate where they are, name what has been wounded, and find pathways back toward integrity, care, and sustainable service. Drawing on spiritual ecology and the wisdom of land-based traditions, she looks to nature as a guide for repair and regeneration as foundations for systemic change. She works with mission-driven professionals and organizations across government, humanitarian, and nonprofit sectors, offering individual coaching, organizational consulting, and spaces for community and collective care.

Her award-winning book Tell Me My Story — Challenging the Narrative of Service Before Self, laid the first coordinates of her map — a rigorous, honest challenge to the culture of “service before self,” and a call for organizations to fulfill a genuine duty of care that creates the conditions for workers to reclaim their humanity as the foundation of the work, not an obstacle to it. She continued that conversation as the creator, producer, and host of Service Without Sacrifice, a limited series podcast that moves through the book’s story-healing arc in conversation with practitioners, healers, leaders, and researchers navigating the terrain of occupational trauma and moral injury.

What runs through everything she builds is a refusal to rush. Moral injury doesn’t resolve on a quarter’s timeline, and grief does not yield to a workshop. Dimple’s practice is rooted in sustained presence — the discipline of staying, naming, and accompanying people through pain and hardship without trying to fix or fast-forward through it. She is an ICF-accredited coach and a sought-after speaker whose work asks a foundational question: what becomes possible when we stop asking people to abandon themselves in order to serve?

That same question led her to create love in action — empathy cards for different seasons of being human. The first collection — seasons of grief + loss — was born from the experience of losing her mother and from years of watching leaders and institutions default to minimizing collective grief rooted in systemic harm, a form of moral injury in itself. Each box is an empathy practice in physical form designed to be shared with one person over time. Not a gesture. Not a solution. But a ritual of care and connection unfolding slowly between two people, acknowledging that empathy is more than a feeling — it’s love made tangible across the long arc of grief.

Through Roots in the Clouds Dimple is on a mission to restore the language of connection through moral imagination — the belief that we have the capacity to hold pain and possibility together and that when we refuse to abandon our humanity, service becomes sustainable.

Daniel T. Lukasik, Esq., is a 1988 graduate of the University of Buffalo School of Law and serves as the Judicial Wellness Coordinator for the New York State Office of Court Administration. Before his appointment, he practiced as a trial lawyer for more than thirty years.

Dan, a mental health advocate and law professor, has delivered more than 250 presentations on stress, anxiety, burnout, and depression across the U.S. His mental health work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN, WebMD, The National Law Journal, ABA Journal, Law360, Bloomberg Law, and many other national and international media outlets. He has also delivered more than 100 CLE programs to law firms and at law conferences nationwide.

He has received numerous awards, including the “Distinguished Alumni Award” from his alma mater for helping destigmatize mental illness in the legal profession, and the New York State Bar Association’s “Public Service Award” in partnership with the Erie County Bar Association for establishing a depression support group for lawyers in their community. Dan is also an adjunct professor of law, where he teaches a class he created, “Mental Health and Well-Being in the Legal Profession,” and has guest lectured at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania on this topic.

He is the producer of two short documentaries on mental health that premiered on PBS. “My Brother Lost in Time: A Bipolar Life,” about his relationship with his younger brother, who lost his life to suicide, and “Travels with George: A Journey Through Depression, Connection, and Friendship,” about a relationship with a nine-year-old child he began mentoring ten years ago and how it helped heal him from depression.  Finally, he is also the creator of two websites www.lawyerswithdepression and buffalodepressionproject.com

You can learn more about Dan and contact him on his website at www.lawyerswithdepression.