Nobody’s surprised anymore when they hear lawyers are burned out. What might surprise you is how many of them are.
The American Bar Association’s 2025–2026 Survey of Lawyer Well-Being is the largest study of lawyer mental health to date. It found that 47.4% of lawyers screened positive for high burnout. More than a third reported high or very high conflict between work and family, and 27% said they’d considered leaving the profession altogether because of mental health, burnout or stress.
If you run a firm, the obvious next question is what you can do about it. You can’t take the pressure out of practicing law. You can, though, look honestly at whether the way your firm runs is making that pressure worse.
Start with the Hours
The ABA found a direct link between hours worked and well-being. The more attorneys worked, the higher their risk of depression, anxiety, stress and burnout. Among those working 71 or more hours a week, 67.1% had high burnout.
Some heavy weeks are part of the job. Trials happen, deadlines stack up, clients have emergencies. The real issue is when long hours stop being the exception and become the only way the work gets done.
So it’s worth asking yourself a few uncomfortable questions. Are your attorneys regularly working nights and weekends? When someone takes a vacation, do they come back to a pile they can’t dig out of? Are people doing work that someone else could be doing? And does your culture quietly reward whoever is always reachable?
If you’re nodding along, a new wellness program probably won’t fix it. The workload is the problem, and that’s where to start.
Make it Possible to Unplug
That 35.9% figure on work-family conflict shows up in habits most of us have stopped noticing: answering email at the dinner table, taking a client call from the beach, logging back on after the kids are asleep, feeling guilty about being out for an afternoon.
You can’t decide how every attorney spends their evenings. But you do decide whether stepping away is realistic at your firm. That could mean better coverage when someone’s out, clearer expectations about when people need to be available, cross-training so no single person is the only one who knows the answer, and a hard look at how much of your attorneys’ time goes to work that doesn’t need a law license.
Practicing law is always going to come with stressful days. The point is to stop treating constant availability as the cost of success.
Notice Before Someone Wants Out
More than one in four lawyers has thought about leaving the profession. And by the time a good attorney tells you they’re done, the problem has usually been building for months, if not years.
That’s why it’s worth paying attention to more than billable hours and results. Look at who’s carrying the most, who hasn’t taken real time off in a while, where work keeps getting stuck, and who has quietly become the person everyone leans on. Then have the workload conversation early, before someone hits a wall.
Only 39.1% of lawyers in the ABA study said their employer is doing enough to support their mental health and well-being. You don’t need to become anyone’s therapist, but how you lead has a real effect on those numbers.
Sometimes the Way You Practice has to Change
Attorney Angel Leal learned this the hard way. After years of pushing nonstop to grow his firm, burnout started taking a toll on his health and his family, and it left him unable to enjoy the success he’d worked so hard for.
What turned things around wasn’t a new mindset about stress. He changed how he worked. He got deliberate about his time, started taking care of himself, and handed off responsibilities he’d been holding onto instead of trying to carry everything.
His story is a good reminder that burnout doesn’t have to mean leaving the law. Often it means changing how you practice it. Angel talks more about what he did in the Great Practice, Great Life episode From Burnout to Thriving Law Firm: What Angel Leal Did Differently.
Building a Healthier Firm
No single policy or program is going to solve what the ABA found. Better systems and delegation also aren’t a substitute for professional mental health care when someone needs it.
Still, as a firm leader you shape the environment your attorneys work in every day. You decide how work is divided, whether there’s coverage when people are out, and whether taking time off is actually supported. You can build a team that shares the load and stop measuring commitment by how quickly someone answers a 10 p.m. email.
When nearly half of lawyers are dealing with high burnout, it’s tempting to write that off as just the nature of the profession. We’d argue it’s a good reason to rethink how the profession gets practiced.
If this hit home and you’re ready to lead your firm differently, schedule a call with Atticus to see how we can help.
