Can a global push alleviate lawyer burnout?

American Dena Lefkowitz was five years into a promising legal career when she realised she hadn’t read a novel since she started practising law. So, she joined a book club.

“My boss, the managing partner of the firm, heard that, and he exploded. He said, while pointing his finger at my face, ‘You don’t have free time. Your time is my time’,” remembers Lefkowitz, who spent much of her 20-year career practising in Pennsylvania and now lives in Delaware where she runs Achievement by Design, a coaching consultancy for lawyers.

“Imagine what that does to the morale of a five-year-out attorney, a young woman who’s hoping to have a life, have a husband, have fun. I hesitated to buy tickets to anything in my legal career because I didn’t know if I was going to be able to go to the concert, the theatre or attend the event. I didn’t show up to many family events because work was always calling.”

Lefkowitz says the expectation that lawyers are always available is the “number one problem” contributing to high rates of burnout across the profession. And it’s not just in countries like the US that are notorious for an often alarming lack of work-life balance where lawyers experience high rates of burnout.

Burnout in the legal profession is a global phenomenon, with lawyers everywhere from the UK and Europe to Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Australia reporting the negative impact of work on their mental wellbeing. A landmark 2021 International Bar Association (IBA) report – the first of its kind to analyse wellbeing issues at a global level – found one in three lawyers in 124 jurisdictions across the world say their work has a negative or extremely negative impact on their wellbeing.

In response to this global problem, an expanding international coalition is investigating the causes of burnout, exploring strategies to prevent and reduce it, and working to safeguard wellbeing across the profession – offering valuable insights for the Australian context.

Snapshot of global lawyer burnout

In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified burnout as a legitimate occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It’s characterised by three dimensions: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, negativity or cynicism related to work, and reduced professional efficacy.

Write pioneering burnout researchers Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter in their 2022 book The Burnout Challenge, “The burnout syndrome occurs when people experience combined crises on all three of these dimensions, most of the time … They are experiencing high stress, a hostile job environment, and a pessimistic evaluation of themselves.”

Global lawyer burnout statistics are alarming and so too is country-specific data. In the US, a 2024 Bloomberg survey reports 55 per cent of lawyers are experiencing anxiety, 56 per cent disrupted sleep, 44 per cent low energy and concentration, and 25 per cent issues in personal relationships. “Those factors are the exact factors that lead to burnout,” Lefkowitz says.

The situation in the UK is similarly worrying. The Law Society’s 2023 Insights Panel Survey on Mental Health found 37 per cent of solicitors were experiencing burnout, 71 per cent disturbed sleep, 67 per cent anxiety and 39 per cent ‘extreme’ or ‘severe’ levels of workplace stress.

In high-pressure Hong Kong, almost half (49 per cent) of the general workforce reported suffering from burnout in 2024. In 2022, 65 per cent of lawyers were feeling anxious or on edge and 43 per cent said they had experienced mental health problems in the past year.

“Anecdotally, I know quite a few lawyers who have experienced what can likely be characterised as burnout, across the spectrum of job roles and seniorities. I’m sure many lawyers would say the same, which is unsurprising given the stresses and demands of the role,” says Dickie Mok, a former Hong Kong competition and regulatory lawyer who now works as counsellor.

Here in Australia, an alarming 61 per cent of Australian workers report experiencing burnout, according to a 2024 report by Mental First Aid Australia. Among lawyers – of whom 33 per cent work more than 50 hours per week – around one-third are experiencing moderate to severe levels of psychological distress.

“Regardless of location, practice area or stage of career, it’s burnout across the board in the law industry globally,” says Emi Golding, director of psychology at the Workplace Mental Health Institute. “We’re seeing that in the people that we work with, and it’s reflected in the research.”

Probing the main drivers of lawyer burnout

Many of the factors contributing to lawyer burnout are similar the world over. Law Society of England and Wales president Richard Atkinson cites “workplace stress, anxiety, emotional distress, poor work-life balance and high expectations” as major drivers.

Kim Wolf Price, chair of the New York State Bar Association Committee on Attorney Well-Being and chief strategy and diversity officer at Bond Schoeneck & King, says demanding clients, mobile devices that facilitate 24/7 availability and type-A, driven, task-oriented lawyer personalities are common contributors across the profession. “All the things that bring people to the profession are also things that can sometimes exacerbate that anxiety and burnout feeling,” she says.

High-pressure environments exacerbated by tight deadlines and the billable hour are other shared experiences, Golding says. “Whether it’s deadlines for court dates or it’s billing by the hour or by the minute, there’s always time demands that are in place.”

Geographic location also plays a role. It’s perhaps no surprise that some of the top places for law – New York, Washington D.C., London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, and Sydney – are synonymous with overwork and hustle culture.

“In hubs like New York and London, if everybody’s working the same way, it becomes the norm and stress levels rise,” Golding says. “And there’s that extra lawyer culture that you layer on top of the local culture, which makes it even more pronounced.”

The IBA report also highlighted reduced wellbeing due to inequities related to age, gender, disability and ethnicity. “There are intersectional viewpoints which should be factored in,” Atkinson says. “Experiences can be varied due to personal circumstances and demographics such as women, people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, junior and disabled lawyers.”

Towards global consensus on best practice

Given the challenges are shared across borders, there’s growing consensus that some of the most impactful solutions to lawyer burnout might also be global.

Based on the findings of its report, the IBA created 10 mental wellbeing principles on which it says future efforts by the legal profession should be based and guided, including the importance of raising awareness of wellbeing, adopting formal wellbeing policies, addressing systemic problems and sharing good practices across jurisdictions.

In 2023, it also established a Professional Wellbeing Commission – a new, permanent body within the IBA dedicated to improving the wellbeing of lawyers and legal professionals around the world.

Desi Vlahos, an Australian lawyer, legal educator and workplace wellbeing advocate, has been appointed as co-chair of the commission for the next two years. “What we have been tasked with is not only furthering awareness around mental health in the legal profession, but also looking at different initiatives and jurisdictions, leveraging research from around the world, and elevating what is best practice around mental wellbeing in the legal profession,” she says.

Vlahos says the commission will publish international guidelines for mental wellbeing in legal workplaces next year, focusing on key issues like burnout and an “implementation framework of how to migrate towards best practice”.

She believes increasing job control and autonomy is one of the most effective strategies to combat burnout. “When lawyers have more autonomy over their workload and schedule, they experience a greater sense of control,” Vlahos says. “Lawyers need that –it’s very much inherent in the generalised population of lawyers, and it’s one of the most critical factors in preventing burnout.

“If we redesign roles to give employees more control over their work, whether it’s project selection or caseload management, they’re able to implement flexible work options which can make the work experience more sustainable and help avoid feelings of powerlessness or frustration.”

Golding says flexible work options, such as hybrid models, which became widespread during the pandemic, enhance lawyer wellbeing and help to prevent burnout.

“If you’re working across time zones, think about how you will manage that so it can be sustainable in the long term,” she says. “There might be a different solution for different team members, but being willing to have those conversations and create some flexibility around how people manage their schedules and manage their time is really, really important.

“One of the big myths about burnout is that in order to address it, we have to do less work. So having work-life balance means doing less work. But it’s not true – it’s not about that. It’s about finding a way of working that works for you.”

Enacting change at the local level

At the local level, change is also on the horizon. After the release of a 2021 report by the New York State Bar Association – the largest voluntary association for legal professionals in the US – on attorney wellbeing that found 37 per cent of lawyers had experienced a mental health-related problem in the previous three years, Wolf Price says they began implementing a series of “plans and programs”.

These include the ‘eight pillars of attorney well-being’ initiative, an annual Wellbeing in the Law week, and a focus on the role of law schools in building mentally healthy habits among practitioners of the future. “There are some law schools that are teaching classes on wellbeing,” Wolf Price says. “It’s a multi-pronged approach.”

Indeed, a growing number of firms around the world now offer programs for mental wellbeing. However, Mok cautions, “there is increasing evidence such programs are not enough to create durable improvements in wellbeing across the employee base at large.”

He cites a 2024 Oxford University study published in the Industrial Relations Journal that found traditional wellbeing programs, such as EAPs, counselling and stress management training, do not result in significant improvements in employee wellbeing. “This suggests that structural and behavioural changes to how work is done is required to effectively improve employee wellbeing,” Mok says.

Lefkowitz says better managing client expectations is something lawyers and law firms can do to reduce expectations of always being available. “When you take on a client, set their expectations for how quickly you’re going to get back to them, and the scenarios in which you will get back to them within 24 hours,” she says.

“Clients need to know that you’re going to be there in an emergency, but clients also think a lot of things are emergencies that aren’t. So, it’s your job as the professional to distinguish between those two and to set some expectations at the beginning.”

Wolf Price says the 2021 report explored another key issue for lawyers globally: the billable hour. “We talked about a realistic cap on billable hours or a target that may be more humane and still allows you to make money,” she says. “There was talk about these pushes where you’re hearing people billing incredible numbers, and that dialling that back a bit would be helpful.”

Lefkowitz says taking into consideration the full range of lawyers’ duties within billable hour targets would help to ease workloads. “Lawyers have to take continuing legal education classes. Lawyers have administrative responsibilities,” she says.

“And they have to make rain. It’s an industry that doesn’t have a sales force, so lawyers have to go out and beat the bushes for business. If you have a ridiculously high billable hour rate, they’re just stuck on a treadmill where they never can get ahead. There are other ways of billing clients that don’t promote workaholism.”

Ultimately, Vlahos explains, combatting global lawyer burnout is about “transforming organisational practices to better align with employees’ needs”. “That’s what the whole concept of work redesign is – playing to the strength of individuals to elevate and build wellbeing capital in the organisation, which ameliorates burnout and also leads to better productivity, better job satisfaction and better loyalty and trust within the organisation.”