About PMRI
About PMRI
Legal professionals are trained thoroughly in the law and hardly at all in the mental demands of practising it: hours of sustained concentration, decisions with consequences, constant interruption, and very little recovery. PMRI was founded by Sonja Cilliers and Maryke Swarts to close that gap.
The Founders
The Founders
A behavioural scientist who designs and delivers the programmes, and an advocate who co-develops them for legal practice.
Maryke Swarts
Neuro-Coach · Behavioural Specialist · Co-Founder
Maryke Swarts designs the neuroscience frameworks at the core of PMRI training and presents across the PMRI series. Her work focuses on performance, resilience and cognitive capacity in high-pressure professional environments, with particular attention to the structural demands of legal practice. She holds an Honours degree in Psychology and a BCom in Behavioural Sciences, is a registered Psychometrist with the HPCSA, and is an NLP Practitioner with over a decade of applied coaching in professional environments.
Connect with Maryke on LinkedIn
Sonja Cilliers
Advocate of the High Court of South Africa · 27 Years in Practice · Co-Founder
Sonja was admitted as an attorney in 2001 and has been a member of the Pretoria Bar since 2005, in legal practice since 1999, with most of those years spent in commercial and banking litigation. She co-develops the PMRI programmes and workbooks with Maryke, adding the legal reality to the neuroscience, and keeps every session grounded in what legal work is actually like.
Connect with Sonja on LinkedIn
Why PMRI Exists
“You can know the law thoroughly and still lose the case on a bad afternoon. Concentration, decision-making and composure are not fixed. They rise and fall with load, sleep and pressure, and they can be trained. That is the work PMRI does.”
What We Do
What We Do
We are a South African training institute based in Centurion. We teach legal professionals how the brain behaves under the load of legal work, and the practical habits that keep thinking clear and decision-making sound when the pressure is on. The training is practical, applied and built on published neuroscience.
Everything is designed for legal professionals from the start, around the particular demands of legal work. It is delivered in person to firms, legal teams and advocates, and online to individuals.
- Half-day and full-day sessions for law firms, delivered at your offices
- A multi-session programme for corporate legal and compliance teams
- Sessions for bar councils, chambers groups and pupil cohorts
- Recorded webinars with workbooks, from R450
- Two self-paced online courses
- A monthly column in De Rebus and a weekly column in LexisNexis Current Awareness+
Published Across
PMRI exists because legal training produces exceptional analytical minds and says nothing about how to sustain them.
Sonja Cilliers, PMRI
Work With PMRI
Work With Us
Whether you are a managing partner, a head of legal, a bar council or an individual practitioner, there is no charge for the first conversation. Email info@pmri.co.za or book a 30-minute call.Latest From PMRI
Latest Insights
The mind comes back: how legal professionals recover clear thinking under load
The fear underneath the silence runs deeper than burnout: perhaps I have already lost the [...]
15
Sep
Sep
What the profession will not name: the three loads legal professionals carry in silence
The profession has a rich vocabulary for hours, targets and burnout, and almost none for [...]
14
Sep
Sep
The divorce file you carry home: emotional regulation for legal professionals in family law
You sat with a client's worst year this morning and drafted a contract this afternoon. [...]
12
Sep
Sep
Holding the room: the difficult client, the high emotion and the practitioner who has to stay steady
The client is shouting, or crying, or blaming you for the law. You have to [...]
12
Sep
Sep
Other people’s worst days: secondary trauma in legal practice
The profession has no word for what happens to a practitioner who listens to the [...]
12
Sep
Sep
The letter that made you furious: staying regulated when the other side goes on the attack
You have read the letter twice and drafted a reply in your head that would [...]
12
Sep
Sep
The night before court: what anticipatory anxiety does and how to bring it down
Twenty years in, and the night before a hearing is still a bad night. It [...]
12
Sep
Sep
Why you are short with the people you love after a day of being patient with everyone else
You were courteous to a rude opponent, patient with an anxious client and measured with [...]
12
Sep
Sep