In-House Counsel

Burnout Or Boreout? Which Is Worse?

Unfamiliar with boreout? It’s a term to describe being bored out of your mind along with crises of both meaning and growth. It’s stagnation, but more than that.

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We all know about, and many of us have experienced, burnout. It’s on the rise this year, and not unexpectedly, due to what’s happened over the past 16 months. Job satisfaction is headed in the wrong direction, junior and midlevel associates are feeling the burn (and not the Bernie Sanders kind) of declining well-being, and nearly half of the attorneys surveyed report a decline in their well-being. This is not good news for all of them and for the profession at large. You can replace everything but your health. You don’t want that to hit the skids.

What about boreout? No, that’s not a typo. It’s a term to describe being bored out of your mind along with crises of both meaning and growth. It’s stagnation, but more than that. While the pandemic may have exacerbated boreout, it’s not new. It’s a feeling of “if I have to review one more canned document sent by agent counsel or write one more motion to compel, I will totally lose it.” Having a lack of motivation or a lack of interest in the job does not bode well for the career path, and being stuck in the same-old same-old is just as paralyzing.

It’s hard to work up the courage to tell your boss that you would like something new to do, something new to learn, something that sparks your interest, rather than just being that hamster endlessly trudging on that wheel. Part of the practice that has always interested me is the opportunity to learn something new, whether it’s about an aspect of the client’s business that I had known nothing about, whether it’s an area of law that is new to me. (And there have been way more of those than I could have ever imagined when I started out: data security? privacy?) I have always thought that you could reignite enthusiasm for the practice by stretching into other areas. For example, given boom-and-bust cycles, transactional lawyers learning bankruptcy law as, often, those deals structured in the past are now in the toilet, the life cycle of a business gone bust.

What if you are either burned out or bored out, and you dread going back into the office? Now that many are returning to work, how will meetings be handled? Hybrid? Will command in person performances aka “presenteeism” be required? One Biglaw firm with an office in Atlanta really really really wants peeps to return to the office, saying that “It’s not simply a function of being able to bill hours. There is more to being a lawyer than simply the capacity to bill 2,000 hours a year.” Please tell that to anyone who doesn’t meet the billable hours requirement. So, as someone asked, “is this the new normal or the new better?”

A recent article in the New York Times questions the need for meetings in the headline: “Meetings. Why?” The subhead asks two salient questions: “Does this need to be a meeting? Does anything?” Those are very Zenlike, going to the heart of why we have meetings and whether they really accomplish the goals of the meeting.

As the author, Caity Weaver, notes, meetings are opportunities to gather with “people we hate.” We lawyers live (but not necessarily thrive) on meetings: with clients, with opposing counsel, with partners, with associates, with corporate law department colleagues. There is nothing worse, at least to me, than time spent in a meeting where absolutely nothing gets done, no decisions are made, it’s just endless navel-gazing, endless dithering, endless blithering, and endless circling round the drain. Running meetings like they were prepandemic is not going to work, nor, I think, do we want them to.

What are participants doing while in that meeting? Texting? Googling? Do they look up from their devices at all? Are they engaged even just a little? The existential question is really whether the meeting is necessary to accomplish the meeting’s goals if peeps are not paying attention (and hard to do in these times of attention deficit). Meetings are often the scourge of in-house counsel.

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As a former in-house counsel in charge of litigation wherever it was, I loved Mark Herrmann’s recent ATL post.

My client was sued in places that we didn’t even know existed. Our litigation manager would pull out his trusty national road atlas to figure out where in the country that venue was and the closest reasonably big city to find local counsel. It’s never fun to lose a case, especially when the financial stakes are high and in an unfamiliar jurisdiction, but I always preferred outside counsel to overestimate what we might lose and include not only what the compensatory damages might be, but attorneys fees, ours, and theirs. Those numbers add up. Prepare your client for the worst scenario.

To all those newbies who aspire to in-house positions or who are newly ensconced in them, understand that being in-house is far from the bed of roses as some would portray it. While you only have one client, you still have many masters. Too many counsel were overly optimistic about our chances, but they weren’t the ones who had to deliver the bad news as to why the case had gone off the rails. That may well be your task, found in the job description rubric of “other duties as assigned.”

Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.

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