The Largest Lawyer Mental Health Study to Date Just Told Us Something We Can't Keep Ignoring

I've been talking about stress in the legal profession for a long time.

Long before I called any of this The High-Performing Lawyer™.

Long before I developed the Stress Loop™.

And long before I started talking about Professional Capacity™.

For me, this wasn't originally an academic subject.

It was personal.

I practiced law for more than 20 years. I owned a law firms. I managed lawyers and employees. I dealt with clients, opposing counsel, deadlines, financial pressures, partners and all the other things that come along with practicing law and running a firm.

Eventually, my health collapsed.

I was dealing with symptoms that doctors struggled to explain, and I knew the way I had been living and practicing law was no longer sustainable.

Ultimately, I left the practice.

But I never stopped trying to understand why practicing law affected me the way it did.

In fact, I've spent roughly the last 20 years, beginning while I was still practicing, trying to understand something I think the legal profession still hasn't adequately answered:

Why does practicing law create so much unnecessary stress for so many extraordinarily capable people?

And perhaps more importantly:

What can we actually do about it?

A major new study gives us another reason to take those questions seriously.

Nearly Half of Lawyers Reported High Burnout

Patrick Krill and Justin Anker recently published When Demands Equal Distress: An Updated Understanding of Lawyer Mental Health and Well-Being in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

This wasn't a survey of a few hundred lawyers.

The researchers surveyed 39,036 employed lawyers recruited through 28 participating jurisdictions, making it what the authors describe as the largest multi-jurisdictional survey of actively licensed lawyers conducted to date.

Some of the numbers are difficult to ignore.

47.5% reported high or very high work-related burnout.

41.1% said their time in the legal profession had been detrimental to their mental health.

27% had considered leaving the profession because of mental health, burnout or stress.

And only 39.1% believed their employer was doing enough to support lawyer mental health and well-being.

Read that last number again.

After years of discussion about lawyer wellness, fewer than four out of ten respondents believed their employer was doing enough.

Meanwhile, 81.3% said it was important or very important for the profession to devote greater effort to reducing mental-health and substance-use problems among lawyers.

There is a pretty substantial gap between those two numbers.

This Isn't Just a Lawyer Wellness Problem

This is where I think the conversation needs to change.

When nearly half of lawyers in a study are experiencing high or very high work-related burnout, this isn't simply a wellness issue.

It's a performance issue.

It's a retention issue.

It's a leadership issue.

And ultimately, it's a law-firm issue.

Law firms spend enormous amounts of money finding talented lawyers, recruiting them, training them, mentoring them and developing them.

Then we act surprised when some eventually decide:

I can't keep doing this.

The new research found that more than one-quarter of respondents had considered leaving the profession because of mental health, burnout or stress.

Think about the economics of that for a moment.

What does it cost a firm to lose a talented lawyer after investing five years developing them?

Or ten?

What happens to client relationships?

Institutional knowledge?

Other lawyers who have to absorb the work?

What happens when the people absorbing that work are already struggling themselves?

This is how an individual capacity problem eventually becomes an organizational performance problem.

Working More Eventually Stops Working

One of the most interesting findings in the study involves hours.

Among lawyers working 31–40 hours per week, 39.9% met the study's high-burnout threshold.

Among lawyers working 71 hours or more, that number rose to 69.5%.

The researchers found similarly substantial increases in depression, anxiety and stress among lawyers working the longest hours.

And they made an observation that should get the attention of every managing partner:

At some point, extremely long hours may create a “law of diminishing returns.”

That makes intuitive sense.

There is a point where asking an exhausted brain for another three hours of sophisticated legal thinking doesn't necessarily produce three additional hours of sophisticated legal thinking.

Which gets directly to something I've been teaching:

Capacity is the engine. Performance is the output.

You cannot indefinitely increase the output while ignoring what's happening to the engine.

But I Think There's Another Part of This Conversation

The researchers appropriately point toward organizational changes involving things such as staffing, workflow, excessive workloads, schedule predictability, flexibility, recovery opportunities, supervision and work-life boundaries.

Those things matter.

But I've spent years exploring another part of the equation.

How much stress are lawyers experiencing that isn't actually required by the practice of law?

There is pressure inherent in being a lawyer.

Clients will be difficult.

Judges will make decisions you don't like.

Opposing counsel will piss you off.

Deals will fall apart.

People will miss deadlines.

Associates will make mistakes.

Clients won't pay.

There will be uncertainty.

There will be enormous responsibility.

I'm not interested in pretending we can eliminate those things.

But pressure and stress aren't necessarily the same thing.

Imagine an email from a client creates a problem at 4:47 in the afternoon.

You deal with the immediate problem in five minutes.

But then you keep thinking about it.

You replay the conversation.

You argue with the client in your head.

You imagine what might happen tomorrow.

You complain about it to your spouse.

You're thinking about it while eating dinner.

At 9:47 that night, the original event is long over.

The event lasted five minutes.

The stress lasted five hours.

Where did the other four hours and fifty-five minutes come from?

That's the question that changed how I understand stress.

Lawyers Need More Than Better Ways to Manage Stress

For decades, much of the conversation has been about managing stress.

Meditate.

Exercise.

Take vacations.

Practice mindfulness.

Set boundaries.

Get more sleep.

Use your firm's wellness resources.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things.

I use some of them myself.

But I've become increasingly interested in a different question:

What if we could prevent some unnecessary stress from being created in the first place?

That's fundamentally different from managing it after it already exists.

It's why I developed what I call the Stress Loop™:

Trigger → Interpretation → Resistance → Emotion → Reaction

Most lawyers become aware of stress somewhere toward the end of that process.

They're angry.

They're anxious.

They're overwhelmed.

They're lying awake at 2:00 in the morning.

But by then, the loop has already been running.

The real opportunity is learning to recognize what's happening earlier.

Because once you can see the pattern, you have a chance to interrupt it.

Every Unnecessary Stress Loop Costs Something

This is where stress becomes a performance conversation.

Stress consumes capacity.

So does rumination.

So does carrying yesterday's problem into today's work.

So does constantly switching attention.

So does never recovering.

So does mentally working long after you've stopped physically working.

The energy isn't disappearing.

It's being redirected.

Energy consumed replaying an argument isn't available for sophisticated thinking.

Attention fragmented by unnecessary reactions isn't available for clients.

Mental capacity consumed anticipating problems isn't available for creativity, leadership or judgment.

And when this happens repeatedly across dozens or hundreds of lawyers, something that looks like an individual stress problem becomes a law-firm performance problem.

That's what I call the Capacity Cascade™:

Professional Capacity™ → Professional Performance → Team Performance → Law Firm Performance → Organizational Outcomes

The individual lawyer is where the cascade begins.

But it doesn't end there.

Maybe Lawyers Don't Need to Become More Resilient

This study reinforces something I've increasingly come to believe.

Most lawyers don't need someone else telling them how to work harder.

They're already ridiculously good at that.

And I'm not convinced the answer is simply teaching them how to tolerate more.

Maybe we need to teach lawyers something very different.

How to recognize unnecessary stress before it consumes hours of their day.

How to interrupt the patterns that unnecessarily drain their energy.

How to recover.

How to protect their attention.

How to respond rather than automatically react.

And ultimately, how to regain greater access to the judgment, energy, clarity and capability they already possess.

That's what I mean by Professional Capacity™:

How much of your best self is actually available right now?

The lawyer hasn't necessarily lost their capability.

They may simply have lost access to some of it.

And that's a very different problem to solve.

Twenty Years Later, I Think We're Finally Asking Better Questions

I wish I understood all of this when I started practicing law nearly three decades ago.

I wish someone had taught it to me before my own health forced me to reconsider how I was living and working.

They didn't.

So I've spent much of the last 20 years trying to understand it for myself.

The new research doesn't provide every answer.

No study does.

But 39,000 lawyers have given the profession a pretty substantial signal.

Nearly half reported high or very high work-related burnout.

More than four in ten said their time in the profession had harmed their mental health.

More than one-quarter had considered leaving because of mental health, burnout or stress.

And fewer than four in ten believed their employer was doing enough. 1-s2.0-S0165032726013327-main.pdfPDF

We can keep treating those numbers as a wellness problem.

Or we can start asking a bigger question:

What would happen if law firms became as intentional about protecting and developing their lawyers' professional capacity as they are about developing their legal skills?

I think that's a question worth answering.

Read the entire study here- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032726013327?via%3Dihub