The lawyer’s disappearing attention span

The modern working day is full of interruptions. Email, Teams and instant messages, a phone that lights up on your desk, an alert for every meeting and every update. Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at the University of California, Irvine, has spent two decades measuring how long people hold their focus on a single screen before switching away, and the number is getting smaller. In 2004 it was about two and a half minutes. Now, it is closer to 47 seconds, and each time that attention breaks, it takes an average of twenty-three minutes to come back to the task properly. For many jobs, that just means less gets done in a day. For lawyers, it is a serious professional risk. Long stretches of dense reading, close argument and careful drafting leave little room for a lapse in concentration.

David Field is Acting Chair of the Minds Count Foundation, set up after the death of a young solicitor, to take the mental health of the profession seriously.

“In many ways, the thing that lawyers sell actually is their cognitive function,” he says.

“And they need to look after it. None of us are superhuman.”

Put that way, the stakes become clearer. Everything a lawyer charges for including the advice, the drafting and advocacy in a courtroom, comes out of a mind concentrating on a problem. So, the thing quietly making that concentration harder to hold on to, like the constant pull of screens, messages and notifications, is not a small annoyance on the side of the job. It is eroding the actual product lawyers sell. Where a single lapse can mean a missed document error or a worse result for a client, that makes distraction a professional risk, not just a minor personal inconvenience.

If attention is what a lawyer sells, then a working day built to break it up puts the work itself at risk, along with the clients who rely on it.

It is not about willpower

There is a temptation to treat focus as a matter of discipline, and a distracted lawyer as someone who just needs to try harder. The research, however, does not support that. In a study of attention and the legal profession, law scholar Lauren Newell explains that our brains run on two competing systems. One is deliberate, the kind of focus we choose to apply when we sit down to read a long contract or affidavit. The other is involuntary. It responds to any sudden change like a flash, a buzz or a ping. This is in the same way it would respond to a predator or a threat, because for most of human history noticing the unexpected was what kept us alive. That involuntary system nearly always wins. Left alone, Newell writes, the brain’s natural state is not focus. It is distraction.

Technology is built to press exactly on that weakness. Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, admitted in 2017 that the platform was designed to take up as much of a user’s time and attention as it could, and that the people who built it understood that and did it anyway. Every notification is designed to trigger that same involuntary reaction, and the deliberate, focused part of the brain usually loses. The cost is real even when nobody touches the phone. Researchers at Florida State University found that a single phone buzz from a message a person never opened was enough to raise their error rate on a demanding task.

So, a lawyer who keeps getting pulled off the page is not careless or lacking willpower. The technology is doing what it was designed to do, and it happens to be very good at wearing down the one thing legal work depends on most, sustained concentration.

What it costs in practice

Mark Gunning has spent close to 25 years at the Bar, and he works the way most barristers do, alone for long periods of time with long documents.

“Being on my own is the best way for me to concentrate on the task at hand,” he says, “whether it’s reading cases or reading a lengthy affidavit and exhibits, and getting across all the facts.”

That kind of work does not survive being chopped up, and Gunning is direct about what goes wrong when it is.

“If you’re not across the facts because you can’t concentrate on reviewing the evidence properly,” he says, “that then affects your ability to inform the judge of what your view of the facts might be. And if a judge senses that you’re not across the facts, that will become apparent.”

When concentration slips, nobody usually notices straight away. Maybe an argument doesn’t get made. An inconsistency goes unnoticed. The case ends up a little weaker than it should have been, and the client never finds out why. Gunning has watched the conditions for concentration get harder over his career. Even in court, he says, a phone lighting up on silent is hard to ignore. Since the pandemic, he says, video meetings booked at short notice have made barristers and solicitors reachable in a way they never used to be, and that has made the working day both more onerous and longer.

Given how much technology has changed, it would be easy to assume young lawyers, having grown up with constant access to phones and screens, are worse at concentrating than the generations before them. Gunning doesn’t see it that way. He does not think the juniors coming through are any worse at concentrating than he was. If anything, he says, they are sharper than he was at his age. The lawyers haven’t changed. The number of things pulling at their attention has.

Protecting his own focus against that, Gunning says, comes down to habit more than anything else. The gruelling weeks in court are bearable because they alternate with quieter stretches that let the mind reset, and he is convinced that staying fit matters more than people think. In the years he ran regularly, he could concentrate far better than he can now.

Blaming the wrong thing

Anna Fischer, Growth and Wellbeing Manager at the Law Society of NSW, has noticed the profession is not really talking about this at all.

“I have not seen a theme of organisations asking how do we get our people to focus for longer,” she says.

It isn’t only that technology interrupts lawyers constantly, either. It’s that the same technology has multiplied how much they’re expected to get through in one day. Email replaced the letter, and the expected load of a day’s correspondence climbed, in Fischer’s words, from a handful of items to maybe 2,000. The small pauses between tasks, the ones a mind uses to reset after each interruption, have been squeezed out entirely.

Push a mind that’s already fighting constant interruptions through that kind of volume, and it starts making small mistakes, and the person blames themselves for it.

“These are physiological processes, not moral processes,” she says.

In other words, the mistake isn’t a sign of a careless lawyer. It’s a sign of a mind that has been interrupted and overloaded past what it can absorb. Fischer’s advice starts with taking that seriously rather than pushing through it.

“The brain tries to tell you what it needs,” she says.

“If you feel yourself thinking, ‘I can’t do this, I’m exhausted, I need a break,’ take the break. Lean into it.”

That advice is real and it works, but noticing the signal is only half of it. If the real cause is a workload that runs people past the point where they can concentrate at all, telling them to rest is not enough on its own. The fix has to be the workload itself. Fischer wants firms tracking the work they hand juniors, and boundaries held in practice as well as policy.

Australia’s Fair Work Act 2009 now includes a right to disconnect, in force since August 2024, letting employees refuse to monitor or respond to work contact outside their hours, unless the refusal is unreasonable. Close to two years on, it remains largely untested, with only a handful of disputes reaching the Fair Work Commission. A stronger protection may sit in work health and safety law. Since 2022, model regulations adopted in every state except Victoria have required employers to identify and manage psychosocial hazards, including high job demands, as a matter of legal duty. Field sees this as part of a slow shift in how workplaces are expected to treat their employees’ mental health, though he doubts most organisations have yet developed the sophistication to work out which of their own habits, including their use of technology, are contributing to the problem.

It is about to get harder

Whatever the profession decides to do about this, it is running out of time, because artificial intelligence (AI) is about to change what a lawyer is for. AI tools are quickly taking over the shallow, mechanical parts of the job like finding the law, drafting the standard clause and building the chronology. This leaves lawyers with the harder work that only careful thinking and sustained concentration can do.

“Genuine insight, opportunity, wisdom,” Field says, “can only be produced with thought and consideration and care and effort and experience.”

AI can already tell a client what the law says. What it cannot do is tell them whether acting on it is wise. As Field puts it, a chatbot might tell a client that something is legally available. It won’t tell them it’s wrong from a societal or community perspective, or that a customer or stakeholder would see it very differently, and that a good lawyer would steer them away from it regardless of what the law technically allows. That kind of judgement is what will still be worth paying a lawyer for, and it is exactly what an overloaded, distracted mind is worst at producing.

This is the heart of the problem. What a lawyer sells is attention, held steady on a hard problem for as long as it takes, and it has never been more valuable or harder to hold. The profession has spent years learning to take the mental health of its lawyers seriously. The ability to concentrate belongs in that same conversation, and the firms that work it out first will hold an advantage that only grows over time. They will still have lawyers who can think clearly, in a profession where clear thinking is fast becoming the scarcest thing it has to sell.