A US teenager, 16-year-old Chase Nasca, spent the last few months of his life consuming TikTok content that promoted or normalized self harm and suicide. Then he committed suicide.

While many of the videos he watched did not violate TikTok’s content rules individually (although nearly 10 percent did), all together they created exactly the kind of repetitive pattern the company had recognized as unsafe in 2021 and designed a safeguard to interrupt. A safeguard that Nasca, like 15 million other TikTok users, was not given the benefit of. That decision was consciously made by TikTok as an experiment they ran for a year to test whether the safeguard reduced the number of daily active users in the protected group (who were 90 percent of users), a business concern that was evidently more important than what happened when other teenagers were repeatedly consuming those images of suicide.

As it turns out, suicide is what happens. Nasca died in February of 2022.

A subsequent review of Nasca’s account found it had become trapped in a bubble filled with videos about suicide, self-harm, depression, loneliness, and hopelessness. During the final two weeks of his life, 73 percent of the 7,563 videos served to Nasca had themes of mental health struggles, suicide awareness, loneliness, relationships, or sadness.

Nasca’s parents filed a lawsuit against TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, claiming Chase had no history of mental illness and primarily used the app to look up motivational workouts and pop culture. However, the lawsuit alleged that TikTok’s algorithm overrode his search history and actively targeted him by flooding his “For You” page with more than 1,000 unsolicited, highly graphic videos glorifying suicide and self-harm.

TikTok’s legal team successfully argued that the case should be dropped based on Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which immunizes online platforms from liability regarding content created by third-party users. Nonetheless, a number of suits involving addiction have been settled by TikTok right before trial and the Ninth Circuit has allowed several such suits to proceed despite the Section 230 defense.

The conclusion that emotional intelligence researchers easily reached? While it’s well established that other humans can spread a mood through emotional contagion, social media itself is expert in manipulating mood.

A secret, psychological experiment that Facebook conducted in 2011 was the harbinger of the TikTok fiasco. Facebook manipulated the News Feed algorithms of almost 700 thousand randomly selected users to test “emotional contagion”—whether online exposure to positive or negative emotional content could alter the real-world moods and posting behavior of users. The study concluded that those who were exposed to more positive content had more positive postings and similarly those exposed to more negative content made more negative postings. Although the secret aspect of the experiment became arguably more notorious than the study results, no real steps were taken to reduce the likelihood of intentional manipulation of emotions via social media.

Both of these experiments’ findings are fully in line with the more personal version of negative content repeatedly spewed by misbehaving algorithms–rumination. Universally acknowledged as not useful in any way, rumination is particularly common in lawyers who are prone to go over again and again what they perceive to be mistakes. What exactly went wrong? What else went wrong? How injurious were they to the lawyer’s reputation, career? What else could have been done? What would the better outcome be? Lashing oneself with guilt and self-deprecation for extended periods of time., rumination is a recipe for feeling and acting worse, not better. A self-delivered penance for what is likely a self-assessed and highly-inflated failure does not improve the next round of decisions. It actually lowers one’s confidence and infects future action with fear.

Social media can manipulate your mood. So can you.

As the title of the article states, “AI Outperforms Law Professors in Stanford Law Study.” And how was that?

Sixteen law professors from highly regarded law schools were asked to evaluate 3000 answers to 40 reasonably complex contract questions. And 75% of those answers written by AI were judged to be superior to those written by human law professors.

As the lead researcher said, “We focused on law precisely because it requires judgment, nuanced reasoning, and the ability to navigate ambiguity—not just factual recall.” The conclusion was: “The AI systems performed comparably to the best human instructor in the study.”

While the researchers ventured that their study indicated “AI tutors can offer high-quality, on-demand support that complements classroom instruction,” it’s the other part of that thought that may have critics unhappy–that AI “may broaden access to expert guidance.” Access to expert guidance apart from the humans who have historically provided that guidance, that is.

There’s no question that making legal advice more available and at a reasonable cost is a holy grail for the profession. Or at least so we say. But now that that may be feasible, are we ready for the fallout? Sophisticated legal advice at the expense of the over 140,000 lawyers who graduate from law school every year, who are likely already way behind in the nuanced reasoning, not just factual recall, that AI can provide at the click of a mouse? Is serious specialization going to be necessary to even claim that human lawyers can give AI a run for its money?

There are courts that now require sworn statements that AI was not used in the preparation of pleadings, or at the least, a disclosure as to which segments were written with the aid of AI and an affirmation that those parts were independently checked for accuracy.

That may be history soon. Perhaps the new attestation will be that in service to our clients, we have fully utilized every tool available to us, including the superior “nuanced reasoning” that AI can provide.

Did you hear the one about the Netflix exec who was fired from his million-dollar job after participating in a trust exercise at a company retreat?

Seems like there should be a joke in there somewhere, but that’s not how he took it. He’s suing Netflix because they used an admission during a trust exercise–that he had taken a medically supervised ketamine treatment for depression after the death of his mother, a treatment which is, by the way, legal–as part of the reason for firing him.

What were the comments? To never trust a trust exercise. Big brother is always watching you and will use whatever methods they have to find out everything they can about you. And eventually use it against you.

It’s a sad state of affairs. Both as commentary on the perceived integrity of these trust exercises and the perceived integrity of the companies using them. It will be interesting to see if the courts accord such admissions any protection based on the stated situation: that the participants are in a safe space where they can trust others with their private lives.

Muir has just returned from attending the 10th Annual Congress on Emotional Intelligence held in New Haven, CT by The International Society of Emotional Intelligence (TISEI) and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

In a quick highlights review, here are some of the takeaways:

  • Peter Salovey’s and John Mayer’s initial article on emotional intelligence in 1990 languished for over five years before it started to have an impact.
  • Having an emotional ally (whether someone related or not) who can provide consistent warmth, emotional safety and nonjudgmental feedback promotes emotional health.
  • Personal intelligence, where perception is critical, rather than “thing-oriented” intelligence is what makes us able to navigate better in our relationships.
  • Personal beliefs that emotions matter and that we have agency in managing emotions is a mindset that is self-fulfilling, predicting positive emotional states. And in leaders, that mindset promotes employees’ wellbeing.
  • Those who have the ability to accurately detect and calm their own heart rate have higher emotional intelligence and make more money.
  • Those workers who achieve their preferred emotional state while working (which may not be only positive feelings) through self-management in fact get better work results.
  • The MCAT, which is administered to those applying to medical school, includes an emotional intelligence portion.
  • Cortisol from stress blocks testosterone, which in turn shrinks muscles.
  • If emotions aren’t regulated, cortisol from stress results in downward freefall of memory ability after 99 seconds.
  • Women’s cortisol levels go up faster than men’s during stress but come down faster after the stress is regulated.

One disappointment is typical–while research continues to refine and clarify what exactly emotional intelligence is and how it can be measured, very little is discussed about effective interventions that raise aspects of emotional intelligence that we all say are teachable. What a conference that would be!

In a wrap up session, where over 35 nations were represented, one of the principals surprisingly chose to rant about his particular political view.

Safe space?

Daniel Lukasik, long an advocate for recognizing and addressing depression among lawyers, has written an article in the summer 2026 edition of The New York State Bar Association Journal entitled “Overcoming Loneliness in the Legal Profession.”

In 2023, Dr. Vivek Murthy, then US Surgeon General, declared loneliness a national public health epidemic, finding its effects on our mental and physical health comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and worse than those caused by obesity. That was followed up with an HHS publication on the healing effects of social connections and community.

Of course, that loneliness epidemic was aggravated in no small part by the country’s response to the epidemic just preceding it–the COVID pandemic. That response condemned everyone to very little professional or social interaction for close to two years. Disengagement from work, families and friends naturally followed. From surveys conducted after COVID, the Harvard Graduate School of Education assembled general data as to who was lonely, what was meant by that, what people saw as the reasons we were lonely and also possible fixes.

But we know that loneliness is not a recent development in the general population and certainly not among lawyers. Long before COVID, a study conducted in 2016 by the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation and the ABA’s Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs documented lawyers’ significant levels of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and even thoughts of suicide, in each case several times greater than the occurrence among the general population, concluding that “the consequences of attorney impairment . . . are profound and far-reaching.” Additional research added that lawyers are lonelier than any other profession. Lawyers went on to experience even greater distress than other professions during COVID. And that loneliness has not been relieved, as a survey taken as recently as 2024 again found that lawyers are the loneliest of all professionals.

Loneliness not only has profound impacts on our mental health but also leads to poor cognitive function and to physical ailments such as high blood pressure, stroke, obesity, Parkinson’s’ disease, cancer, heart disease, and early death.

All of this and other information is reiterated in Lukasik’s article. Here are his suggestions for how to start chipping away at such a devastating scourge.

  1. Take advantage of talk therapy and find peer support
  2. Delete addictive apps, put down your phone and build authentic connections
  3. Maximize micro-connections, despite their fleetingness
  4. Volunteer

Those suggestions, as Lukasik elaborates on them, are in accord with those made by the people Harvard surveyed:

    1. Reach out to family and friends
    2. Learn to love yourself
    3. Learn to be more forgiving of others
    4. Find ways to help others

    Time may be of the essence is more ways than one. Making time for these important endeavors may give you more and happier times ahead.

    At 1pm EDT on Friday, July 17, 2026, Muir will make a live presentation on “Emotional Intelligence in Negotiation, Litigation, and Leadership” for MyLawCLE. A related presentation on ethics follows. You can have free access to Muir’s talk by registering on MyLawCLE to create an account and then using the promo code EmotionalIntelligence26 at checkout. The code is good for either the live event or a later recording, but not both. You can also access the presentation at the Federal Bar Association. We look forward to you joining us!

    Ronda Muir gave a presentation entitled Beyond Words: Communication in the 21st Century on Thursday afternoon, June 25th, at the Annual South Dakota State Bar Association convention held in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Kudos to the organizers, fellow presenters and staff who arranged for beautiful weather and made the event so successful.

    A few questions at the end of the talk deserve to be repeated and the answers expanded now that there’s no concern about running out of time.

    A gentleman rightly reminded everyone that reading literature (both fiction and non-fiction) is a good exercise to increase emotional intelligence because it helps us understand emotions–how they developed and what happened over time, and also how to manage emotions, since we read about what management strategies did or did not work in those scenarios. Similarly, music (particularly classical, including opera) exercises our emotions. The passages in a musical narrative often stirringly arouse our feelings–of tentativeness, fear, aggression, a swelling of pride or love and eventual relief, joy or grief. That experience reinforces our physical experiences of various emotional states, our ability to identify those states and also helps us understand how those emotions may evolve over time.

    One question highlighted how lawyers’ tendencies toward skepticism, introversion, abstraction, urgency, low sociability, and high pessimism can work together to lower our ability to initiate and build strong relationships, or at least our comfort in doing so. And that discomfort is easily perceived and experienced by clients and others we work with who don’t have those same tendencies.

    A gentleman asked what can be done to improve the decline in emotional intelligence of law students during law school. Some efforts are underway, replicating some of the changes that have been made in medical schools. Classes on mindfulness (meditation) and stress management help students learn how to better balance their emotions. Requiring work to be done in groups and teams offers lessons in successful social interaction. Students interacting with real clients in school legal clinics allow them to get frank feedback from clients, professors and other participants on more than just their pleadings. Professional development classes that focus on communication and ethics classes that encourage empathy also provide opportunities to develop higher emotional intelligence. It would be a big step forward if law schools required a basic emotional intelligence assessment to be completed either with applications or early during law school, as many professional schools–medical and nearly every business school–are doing.

    Two of the last questions related to emotional management. A woman asked how to better approach interviewing a potentially abused child, a daunting task. To start with, letting go of the anxiety and any early disgust or anger about what might be disclosed is important. Those emotions would be conveyed to the child by emotional contagion, particularly because of the lawyer’s clearly higher status. Recognize those emotions and use meditation practice to let those emotions “flow down the river.” Meeting the child with openness, compassion, trust and patience would be very helpful in building a relationship. Being non-reactive and non-judgmental about whatever is disclosed would also encourage openness.

    The other question was how to react to the contagion of emotions that we are all exposed to but sometimes don’t want to experience. Again, emotional management skills are useful. Those unwanted emotional states are easily transferred to us, but we can manage how we react by again using mindfulness practice to recognize and then let go of the worst emotions. Some people can redirect their emotions by referring to scenes that give them pleasure or make them feel calm–such as imagining beautiful outdoor scenes or reliving memories of pleasant interactions or favorite places.

    The typical example of a time that calls for emotional management is when–on our way to the first dinner with our prospective in-laws, or an important meeting with the managing partner, or a presentation to clients–we spill coffee all over ourselves.

    What to do? Recognize the feelings–anxiety, frustration, fear, anger–and realize they aren’t going to put you in a situation where you get what you want out of the upcoming meeting, that they may in fact be contagious, making the meeting even worse for everyone. Then manage those emotions to get the outcome you would like. Set those unhelpful emotions aside, let them flow down the river, truly let go of them, and focus on conjuring the emotions that will be useful, that you want communicated: openness, trust, patience, warmth, curiosity. Despite the coffee stains.

    On Thursday, June 25th, Ronda Muir presented Beyond Words: Communication in the 21st Century for the Annual South Dakota State Bar Association Convention. Fellow presenter Mary Beth Beasley also spoke that afternoon on legal writing. See the upcoming blog entry for further information on a successful conference of organizers, presenters and audience members–and their questions.

    Tony Frost, a lawyer, chartered accountant and certified coach, is in addition a lecturer in the Masters program at the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), where he also consults with their Law and Justice Program. He’s developed some tools for lawyers that you might find useful regardless of the continent you’re on.

    “A Lawyer’s Capability Toolkit” addresses capabilities generally, including the value of emotional intelligence, and “Accelerating a Lawyer’s Professional Judgment in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” as the title suggests, concentrates on judgment (and wisdom) during this new chapter in legal practice, also as enhanced by emotional intelligence..  

    Note the Toolkit’s shout out to Muir’s Beyond Smart! Everywhere in the world…

    Artificial emotional intelligence is almost here. Chat bots, as we’ve discussed, are displaying empathic skills that are getting their developers into legal hot water for encouraging, empathically, murder and suicide.

    Now an AI voice is being introduced that not only speaks conversationally in multiple languages but that also listens carefully to you and mimics your personal style of speaking–the tone, pacing and emotional cues it hears.

    Albert Mehrabian claimed in the 60s that effective communication is comprised of as little as 7% words and as much as 93% tone, speed and other vocal qualities along with body language and facial expressions (which can reveal emotional states). While his findings are often misstated, they are meant to serve as a guide when there is some ambiguity among the elements as to the message being conveyed. Research confirms that in an ambiguous situation, people rely more for meaning on those emotion-carrying cues like tone and facial expression than on whatever the words claim to express. It is those nonverbal cues that they trust.

    Thus the introduction of Inworld’s new cloning voice–Realtime TTS-2–hits a further benchmark in making AI emotionally intelligent. The voice can hear your tone, pace and emotional cues and then mimic those elements in its responses to you and can do the same with others it communicates with. Not only is that emotionally perceptive and empathic, but that simple strategy of mimicking someone’s communication style, called linguistic mirroring, has been found to make the message more persuasive, building rapport, trust, and comfort.

    For example, mimicking the opponent’s style in negotiation is a powerful tool that has been calculated to create a significant improvement in rapport with the other side. In one study of lawyers mirroring both writing styles and verbal styles of judges, legal teams who mirrored a judge’s preferred verbal style saw their chances of winning more than double.

    The era of emotionally intelligent AI is coming and this voice cloning technology that is able to capture the emotional components of communication–tone, pace and other emotional cues–is likely to be more persuasive to you and others who are conversing with it. This is the beginning of AI-generated trust. A development to be watched.