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The most sustainable shift I see in the firms that get this right isn’t a new app or an extra day of leave. It’s mental health and wellbeing literacy, writes Danielle Buckley.
Law has always selected for high achievers. Typically, it demands long hours, relentless deadlines, high stakes, and a culture that rewards pushing through rather than pulling back. Interestingly, we have a new pressure added into the mix with the growing use of AI. In the little extra time lawyers have now, they also need to learn how to use new platforms, bots, and patiently wait through system updates. The pressure of law hasn’t changed; if anything, I’d argue it’s increased. What has changed is our understanding of what that pressure actually does to the human body and brain, and what we can do about it if we want to sustain high performance and avoid burnout.
For years, the legal profession has treated wellbeing as a soft add-on: an EAP number in the intranet footer, a yoga session before a conference, a poster in the lunchroom. Well-intentioned, but disconnected from the real drivers of stress in a law firm – the billable hour, the always-on client expectations, the adversarial nature of the work itself, the perfectionism that got so many lawyers into the profession in the first place. Today, the science is indisputable. If we want different outcomes, we need a different starting point. That starting point is science.
The typical stressors are structural, not personal
When lawyers burn out, the instinct is often to look at the individual – they should have managed their time better, set better boundaries, and been more resilient. But the stressors in law are largely structural: unpredictable workloads, high-stakes decision making under time pressure, exposure to conflict and adversarial dynamics, and a billing model that ties income to hours worked rather than energy sustained. Layer onto that the perfectionism and high personal standards that are almost prerequisites for succeeding in the profession, and you have a system that is, by design, activating for the nervous system – constantly.
Understanding the nervous system changes the conversation
This is where science becomes genuinely useful, not just interesting. Our nervous system is designed to move between states of activation and recovery – a healthy rhythm of stress and rest, sometimes called oscillation. Activation isn’t the problem. Lawyers need to be sharp, alert, and switched on to do their jobs well. The problem is when the nervous system stops oscillating – when there’s activation without adequate recovery, day after day, week after week.
When that oscillation stops, the body doesn’t downshift. It stays in a state of chronic activation, and that’s what leads to burnout. This matters because it reframes burnout entirely. Burnout isn’t a single bad week or a rough trial. It’s not something that happens overnight. It’s a slow burn – the cumulative cost of a nervous system that never gets the chance to come back down. By the time someone is signed off work, exhausted, or questioning whether they can continue in the profession, the process has usually been building for months, sometimes years.
Why law firms need to think differently
If burnout is a slow burn, then waiting until someone is in crisis is the most expensive and least effective place to intervene. A scientific approach means shifting the focus upstream – to early signs, not late-stage symptoms. It means law firms designing ways of working that build recovery back into the system, not as a perk, but as a performance requirement. And it means moving away from generic wellbeing programs towards strategies built around how a particular firm and its people actually work – because a policy designed for a boutique litigation practice will not serve a large corporate firm in the same way. When I’m talking about recovery, I’m not talking about a week of leave at a health retreat – although that would be nice. Recovery looks like learning, how to use evidence-based scientific methods to turn on the parasympathetic nervous system and oscillate. This can be done in a matter of minutes as we move between meetings, and strategies can be embedded into how we already work that are simple and effective.
Wellbeing literacy is the lever
The most sustainable shift I see in the firms that get this right isn’t a new app or an extra day of leave. It’s mental health and wellbeing literacy – helping lawyers understand how they think, feel, and function, so they can recognise their own early warning signs before they escalate. When people understand what’s happening in their own nervous system, they stop interpreting exhaustion, irritability, or disengagement as personal failure and start seeing them as signals worth listening to.
And listening to those signals is what allows lawyers to do something about them – to build in the recovery their performance depends on, to acquire the skills that let them work at a high level without burning out doing it, and to sustain that performance across a career, not just a case. That’s the real opportunity here: not choosing between high performance and wellbeing, but understanding the science well enough to know they were never actually in competition.
Danielle Buckley is a registered and coaching psychologist specialising in the legal profession.
