A sued physician can usually keep seeing patients while the case runs. A sued founder has to keep raising money, keep recruiting, keep selling, keep the board calm and keep the team from reading the complaint, all while the thing that made them good, their judgment, is running on a threat response.
A lawsuit puts your body on high alert, and locks it there for years. A moment of calm is not enough, because the attack is relentless, totalizing and cyclical. This pain does not stop on its own. It needs active intervention. We are that intervention.
The pattern is consistent. First weeks: obsession. The complaint read a dozen times, the facts rehearsed to anyone who will listen, sleep gone. First months: a split. The founder is either in the case or hiding from it, and in neither mode running the company. The long middle: the company drifts, hiring slows, decisions get deferred or made badly, and the founder becomes someone the team manages around. Investors notice. The case usually settles. The company sometimes does not recover.
The case is the lawyer's problem. The founder is the company's problem.
What a board member said to us about a portfolio CEO in a co-founder suit.
What you can control
Not the case. Your state of mind, and how the trauma of litigation affects your team, your investors, your revenue and your family. Sleep is the leading indicator: when a founder in litigation stops sleeping, the company's decision quality drops within the month. Treat your own recovery as a company priority, because it is one.
Tell the board briefly, in writing, with counsel's review. Boards do not panic about lawsuits. They panic about CEOs who seem to be panicking. Tell the team less than you want to: you have been sued, counsel has it, you cannot discuss details, priorities have not changed. Then show up Monday with the same agenda.
What we do
This is a specialty. The clinical word for the overall pattern is litigation stress. The word we use at the Institute is legal trauma, because it is the more accurate diagnosis, and it calls for a particular approach. What we provide is the right diagnosis and systematic treatment, in the right order, over time.
Trauma is a strong current in the physiology. In litigation the sympathetic nervous system is locked on hyperarousal. Switching over to the parasympathetic, or braiding the two, does not work, because, like war, litigation keeps coming at you. A new approach is needed. The Legal Trauma Recovery Method™ teaches you how to harness that pain for creativity and performance. Pressure becomes focus.
It is taught in a one-day Executive Retreat with other founders and executives in litigation, ongoing circles, and private work timed around depositions. Case facts are never discussed; everyone in the room has their own suit to not talk about.
Twelve weeks of audio practice, a one-day retreat and small circles. Nothing is recorded, nothing is charted, and you will never be asked what happened. Education and coaching, not psychotherapy, so no clinical record exists and nothing is discoverable.
The suit will take the time it takes. It does not get to take you.
For investors and boards
If you have a portfolio CEO in litigation, this is the intervention that protects your investment. See programs for venture and private-equity firms.