Why young lawyers are shying away from leadership

When Emily Xu began studying law, she envisioned following a conventional career path: a clerkship followed by a graduate position at a law firm, then a steady climb up the ladder. But it didn’t work out that way. Xu landed an in-house paralegal role while she was at university – and never went back to the traditional route.

“We all have this idea of a legal career being one where you start out at a law firm, and then you work your way up to associate, senior associate and eventually partner, but the partner track didn’t really appeal to me,” she says. “I just fell in love with the in-house environment, and it really opened my eyes to a different way of seeing how a legal career can pan out.”

A short career break last year, after two years in the profession, during which Xu met with more than 30 lawyers across in-house, private practice and government for informal coffee catchups, reaffirmed her decision to work in-house.

“I made sure I connected with people from different backgrounds and who had different experiences. It made a big difference in informing my career decisions,” says Xu, who’s now corporate counsel and assistant company secretary at Ticketek Entertainment Group. “I’ve got exposure to a good variety of work, including corporate governance, risk management and compliance. That’s what really attracted me to in-house.”

Looking to the future, Xu says senior management isn’t part of her plans right now. “I don’t think I see myself as a general counsel,” she says, adding that she might consider a leadership position if she were to pivot to a commercial role in a field like financial services.

For decades, the measure of success in law was clear: make partner, lead a team or perhaps run your own firm. But today’s crop of lawyers isn’t so sure climbing the ladder is what they want in the future. Many early-career practitioners are questioning whether a top job is worth the stress, long hours and blurred work-life boundaries. They’re redefining what ambition and success look like in a profession that’s racing to keep up. 

Conscious unbossing at work

In corporate workplaces in Australia and across the world, young professionals are increasingly choosing to opt out of a traditional climb up the management ladder. Dubbed ‘conscious unbossing’, this shift stems from changes in workplace values and how younger generations – especially Gen Z, born between 1995 and 2009 – view corporate hierarchies and leadership positions.

Gen Z is 1.7 times more likely than previous generations to avoid leadership positions to protect their wellbeing, according to research by DDI. A UK poll by Robert Walters found that more than half (52 per cent) of Gen Z professionals don’t aspire to middle management, with 72 per cent preferring an individual route to career progression over managing others.

Career coach Daniel de Vries, who specialises in Gen Z professionals, says decisions to consciously unboss are often made holistically alongside broader lifestyle and career priorities. Young people are less willing to take on or aspire to leadership positions by default, instead weighing the benefits against the drawbacks.

“They’re looking at what responsibility and leadership roles mean to them both in their career and also for the impact it has on the rest of their life and what kind of rewards they are seeing for it in the short term,” de Vries says, noting that this cohort is much less motivated by financial gain than previous generations of workers. The DDI research cites a desire for flexible work, better work-life balance and purposeful work as drivers of conscious unbossing.

“It’s not just, ‘I’ve got a career and so the end goal must be progressing from junior roles to the most senior role’ – that whole old-school, linear career path, where everyone wants to be successful and success automatically equals, in the legal field, being a partner,” de Vries adds.

For Joy Xu, an anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing lawyer at Dentons, success in law is less about a “specific title” and more about the “capability and positioning” she builds over time.

“I would define success as having a strong and differentiated skill set, having exposure to complex and meaningful work and being in an environment where I can continue to grow and feel comfortable,” says Xu, who began her career in 2024. “Most important is having a level of autonomy over the direction of my career.”

She says that when she first entered the profession, she aspired to work long hours, build a client base and eventually become a partner. “But after trying that path, I realised it wasn’t as appealing to me as I had expected,” she explains. “I could feel quite early on that physically I started to experience things like back pain. Mentally, I noticed my mood changing. I could already see what long-term burnout might look like.”

She agrees that early-career lawyers are more conscious of the trade-offs of climbing the career ladder. “I don’t see people rejecting hard work or progression; it’s about each individual finding the right balance for them.”

Seeking agency and autonomy

Law has long embraced practitioners with an individualistic streak, particularly in private practice where partners and other senior people often shun people management roles. “They might be doing managing, but they don’t want to be labelled as that, and instead have succeeded on their own personal, technical capacities,” says Dr Felicity Bell, deputy director of UNSW’s Centre for the Future of the Legal Profession.

Professor Michael Legg, Dr Bell’s colleague and director of the Centre for the Future of the Legal Profession, says what’s changing is that partners may have less independence and agency to manage their workload, which can make partnership less attractive to younger practitioners.

“I can see people going, ‘I worked [very hard] for 15 years to become a partner and then I find out that actually I’m still just meant to work [very hard] to generate billable targets’,” he says. “There is no ascendancy to this higher level where they’re suddenly able to decide what they want to do, because they’re in this large law firm that’s been corporatised. That is a turn-off for some lawyers.”

He notes there’s also broader recognition of the diversity of legal careers, with a growing number of practitioners, like Emily Xu, skipping private practice and beginning their careers in in-house roles.

“There was a perception at one time that in-house is where you would go if you weren’t able to make it as a partner. But now people are like, ‘Why would I want to be a partner? I’ve got this other role where I’m going to have a more dynamic career where I’m closer to the business and I’m involved in something broader and larger’,” he says.

Ruth Beran, national career strategist for the College of Law, says the emergence of – or aspiration to – portfolio careers in law also makes leadership positions less attractive because they’re one of a growing number of options available to young lawyers.

“I saw one student recently who in the long term wants to be a legal specialist in an area, but she also wants to potentially work in consulting and academia – she wants to have it on her own terms, and to have control over her hours and her workload,” she says. “Gen Z and early career workers have seen portfolio careers in other fields and they’re trying to work out how they can get it in law.”

Going to the bar

So strong is the desire for purposeful, flexible work and autonomy over one’s career that while many young practitioners do not aspire to become a partner or general counsel, a growing number are set on becoming their own boss.

Beran, who mainly coaches students and graduates who aren’t doing their PLT internally through their law firms, says she sees a lot of young lawyers who want to become barristers.

“I generally don’t have a student who comes to me and says, ‘My long-term goal is to become partner.’ I will sometimes get students who aspire to get into top-tier law firms.

“But I have many, many more who say, ‘I want to be a barrister’,” she says.

“There’s an element of this generation wanting to be independent and seeing themselves practising in the sorts of roles where they get to call the shots.”

Bell and Legg have noticed a similar pattern – “a lot of people who are really good lawyers want to go to the bar,” says Dr Bell – which they attribute to the changing nature of law firm practice.

“A lot of the law firms now, when it gets to the tricky stuff, they hand it across to the bar,” Legg says. “The large law firms make money out of process – large pieces of litigation or a regulatory investigation or a due diligence. They’re set up to handle massive amounts of paper and complexity, and that might generate good money, but I don’t know how interesting it is.

“It’s not just that the current generation may be changing, the practice of law in law firms is also changing.

On their own terms

Despite the challenges, Dr Bell and Prof Legg believe that early-career lawyers aspire to lead in some capacity – but they want to do it on their own terms. “The people who are currently in leadership roles had to, effectively, change themselves to fit with the model that the law firm operated on. And the current generation doesn’t seem as willing to do that; they seem more willing to push back against it,” Prof Legg says.

If lawyers are less willing to mould themselves to traditional leadership roles, firms may need to rethink what progression looks like by offering more flexible pathways, varied definitions of success and leadership positions that don’t hinge on partnership. Firms that fail to adapt risk losing capable lawyers not because they lack ambition, but because the structures on offer no longer align with how that ambition is expressed.

Beran says these changes need to be reflected in how firms attract and retain talent. “Law firms that are attracting the talent are the ones that are demonstrating, firstly, that they have a culture that’s supportive of their employees, and secondly, that they train or mentor them,” she says, noting that graduates who feel unsupported will “just leave”.

Joy Xu frames the shift less as a break from tradition and more as a broadening of it. “There does need to be some evolution in how careers are structured – not necessarily a complete overhaul, but perhaps a broader reclamation that there isn’t just one model of success or pathway in law, and that different people may contribute in different ways, whether that’s through technical expertise, cross-functional roles or non-traditional pathways,” she says.

“It’s less about one side needing to change and more about both sides evolving together.”