Biglaw

Burnout, Flame Out, Or Timeout?

Burnout can affect anybody, and our industry isn’t doing enough to fix that.

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I wrote in this column a few weeks back about Biglaw’s problem with George Costanza Syndrome: the relentless pressure we place on one another to always be working, to always be striving for the next level. I focused at the time on associates, but shocking news from last week highlights the fact that the risk of burnout isn’t limited to the younger generation. The Global Chairman of Baker McKenzie, Paul Rawlinson, has taken a leave of absence to recover from the sheer exhaustion of running the second-largest law firm in the world.

It’s no secret that law is a demanding job. That was drilled into all of our heads from long before we took our first practice LSATs. But the game is changing. Attorneys of all stripes are on demand for their clients 24/7 — facing an ever-broadening pool of competition. Our work is being commoditized and devalued. Those market forces are increasing pressure on every single person in the legal space.

Just as the job of being a lawyer has gotten more difficult, the job of leading a law firm has increased in complexity and pressure exponentially. Mr. Rawlinson should be applauded for his decision. But the news is also a moment to ruminate on the issues facing practice group leaders, office leaders, and management teams across the country.

Keep Calm And Bill On

If a law firm leader’s job performance is measured in dollars earned, clients developed, and practice groups grown, all of those metrics have become more challenging to fulfill over the past decade. There are fewer dollars to go around, as industry growth has lagged behind attorney recruitment, and what growth we have seen has mostly been confined to the upper stratosphere of the legal profession. Alternative legal service providers are scooping up otherwise reliable clients with repeatable, commoditizable work. Maintaining staffing has become increasingly cutthroat, as more and more lawyers and practice groups come to think of themselves as free agents, and lateraling becomes ever more commonplace. Law firm leadership is a full-time job before you even remember that you’ve got to maintain your existing practice and client base, too.

I’ve said it before and will say it again: the genteel, golden age of Biglaw is over. We’re in a more rough-and-tumble age, and I see no signs that it’s going to get any gentler from here on out.

The classic, easy answer to an attorney’s job getting harder is for the attorney to get harder in response. We muscle through and keep our chins up. Keep Calm And Bill On. That strategy doesn’t work forever, though. And when it breaks down, it breaks hard. We’re all human beings, and we can only perform at superhuman levels for so long before something snaps. For Paul Rawlinson, who reportedly traveled to over 40 offices across six continents in the last two years, he finally hit bottom and tapped out, probably not a moment too soon. He’ll get some time to recuperate, reevaluate, and come back strong.

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Others don’t land so softly. Some attorneys flame out, quit their practices, and go sell cake pops, resulting in a happier and healthier attorney but a poorer legal industry that has lost a promising talent and learned nothing. Others turn to substance abuse, or suffer from stifling depression. Our industry’s mental illness and self-harm rates remain unacceptably high. We’re only now starting to recognize how poisonous the strategy of just toughing it out can be in the long term.

Biglaw Needs A Timeout

If the classic answer to the increasing demands of the legal marketplace has been to get tougher, let me once again advocate for a new approach: getting “realer.” We need to let go of the outdated concept of the inhuman, never-tired, always-working hero attorney and replace it with the vision of actual human beings, because that’s what we all are. We’re people, with physical and mental limitations, lives and families outside of work, and interests beyond briefing, drafting, and billing hours. We need to take better care of one another, at all levels, and take better care of ourselves.

Biglaw lawyers need a timeout. I’m not talking about the age-old kindergarten punishment. I’m talking about a moment of reflection — a time where we stop thinking about ourselves and start looking at what’s happening in the broader business world. Overwork and superhuman expectations aren’t limited to the legal industry, but we too often limit the resources available to our leaders to meet those expectations. Most CEOs have much larger executive staffs and teams than we do in the legal world. Lawyers don’t seem to think this is necessary, being happy to request their firm leaders serve as HR professionals, interior decorators, and partner dispute mediators, at the same time they’re driving the long-term strategy for the firm. This is not only bad for burnout, but it doesn’t make business sense.

We need to get comfortable letting practice group leaders, office heads, and management teams spend time on leading. That necessarily means that that managers will spend less time generating clients and grinding out hours. That’s not only scary for the firms because it could mean a revenue dip, but that’s also a terrifying prospect for most attorneys, since there is no guarantee the work will still be there when the leadership job ends. But trying to be a full-time lawyer and a full-time leader is a full-blown recipe for disaster. But if done right, the losses in the lawyer’s personal productivity will be gained by the profits that comes along with an effectively-run practice group, office, or firm. Firms and leaders that want to succeed need to know that effective leadership is a calling, not a side gig.

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The Value Of Community

We need to focus our leadership’s efforts on building places where attorneys want to work. There will almost always be a firm willing to pay us more if we lateral over. Creating a sense of safety, home, and community is something that a deep-pocketed competitor can’t buy.

Lastly, we need to be kind. In a cutthroat profession in an ever-more vicious world, our fellow firm members should be the people we can always count on. We’re lawyers, so we’ll always have our disputes, but disputes are no reason to forget that it’s human beings we’re sharing our careers with, not just a set of opposing viewpoints. We’re all in this together, from the managing partner to the freshest associate. Let’s start acting like it.

James Goodnow

James Goodnow is an attorney, commentator, and Above the Law columnist. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and is the managing partner of an NLJ 250 law firm. He is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management category. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.

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