> They offered to settle through mediation with a laughable amount of money which I can earn in less than 4 years. That sounds like you technically have adequa

> They offered to settle through mediation with a laughable amount of money which I can earn in less than 4 years. That sounds like you technically have adequate resources to legally throw the book at this situation. IMHO that's objectively the most (only?) important part. The problem is fundamentally solved. It's just a question of logistics. And on that note, it sounds like the emotional toll this has taken has been paralyzing. This is completely reasonable given the circumstances. Traumatizing events can indeed latch the emotions into a state that make it painful if not impossible to fight back from a position of strength. There was a thread on HN a little while ago about hiring executive/personal assistants (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29336234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29336234), with one comment that particularly leapt out at me (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29341375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29341375) as it really inspired an appreciation of the potential of what a good EA could be and do. In this situation, I think it might be interesting to find a good EA/PA or project manager to coordinate the litigation process and keep you out of the proceedings as much as possible. Their empathetic encouragement would help you with the day-to-day of keeping on keeping on, and their drive and aggression would help to represent your interests in those ways you currently cannot. This EA/PA/PM would also coordinate the process of getting you adequate psychological support to help patch together what can never fully heal :(. The shorter-term focus would be on getting you functional so the 1-10% of the litigation process you do still have to participate in is not utterly unpalatable, and the medium-/longer-term focus would naturally be on healing and optimizing/aiming for restoration wherever possible. The bittersweet caveat in this process is that, depending on how things play out, the transformative nature of this person's involvement in your life may mean that you may well retain a long-term professional working relationship for a very long time, or you may want to move on by leaving this person in the past and never talking to them again at some point. In terms of finding someone good, it could be useful to simply throw everyday busywork at them, the stuff you're already doing, so you have things to bikeshed about and duke out that aren't charged full of emotionally-fraught reference points. After you think you have a culture fit maybe you can relinquish one or two "we usually manage this" things, and if they don't blow those up then you can properly launch. A bit of a project, but it's probably better to take charge by limping along in slow motion rather than hand the keys over immediately only to realize everything's being misrepresented and you're being taken advantage of, which would certainly hurt a lot. The best part about all of this: it all fits into the scope of the lawsuit, so this person's costs would be able to be recouped as part of the final settlement, possibly independently to the agreed-upon payout.