Jordana Confino describes burning out as a practicing attorney and Googling “how to be happy.” Criminal defense attorney Josh Baron spent time in a job where he found himself hoping for a small accident to justify staying home.
Both highlight common (and often glossed over) experiences in the legal industry of struggling with mental health with no clear path forward.
Mental Health Awareness Month in May draws a lot of conversation around high rates of stress, burnout, substance abuse disorder, and other mental health challenges in the legal profession. But when it comes to practical guidance, the conversation dwindles.
The Happy Rainmakers series has spent a great deal of time in conversation with coaches, practitioners, and attorneys who work directly with lawyers on well-being and career sustainability. This article goes beyond general wellness tips to share what our guests have identified as the specific causes of mental health challenges for attorneys and the practical, actionable solutions they recommend for building a successful and sustainable career.
The profession-specific drivers of the mental health crisis in law
Many of the mental health challenges lawyers face stem from conditions unique to the profession. For example, the legal field actively selects for perfectionism, leading many attorneys to operate under constant self-imposed pressure. The structure of legal work exacerbates this, with attorneys logging output in six-minute billing increments, striving for annual hour targets that leave little built-in space for recovery.
And because genuine recovery time is rarely built into a legal career, chronic stress builds up over the years.
This environment often creates a significant gap between achieving professional success and personal well-being. You only have to look at the NALP 2024 Lawyer Perfectionism and Well-Being Survey to see this in action. 50.6% of highly perfectionist lawyers also reported high depression scores, suggesting that the attorneys most likely to hit their performance metrics were also the ones most at risk.
The experts and attorneys we interviewed explain what these specific factors are in the day-to-day experience of a legal professional.
Perfectionism isn’t what’s driving your success: Jordana Confino, founder and CEO, JC Coaching & Consulting
Many lawyers view their ruthless inner critic as the engine of their success, but Jordana Confino discovered the opposite during her own experience with burnout. She found that the very perfectionism attorneys often treat as a badge of honor is actually a fear- and shame-based approach to achievement that drains energy rather than sustaining it.
“You have gotten here despite your ruthless inner critic and drill sergeant, not because of it,” she told us. “You’ve gotten here because of your talent and your intelligence and your effort.”
Her work draws from research showing that well-being fuels performance rather than competing with it. Law rewards perfectionism at every career stage. The research links it to depression, and nothing in the profession’s feedback loop tells you when it’s become a liability.
What to do with this:
- When you catch yourself in a self-critical spiral, ask whether that thought is making you more effective or just more drained.
- Replace one critical thought per day with what you would say to a colleague in the same situation.
- Before your next high-stakes task, take five minutes to do something that produces a positive emotion. Research shows this improves performance even for attorneys who believe urgency is what sharpens their work.
Diagnosing burnout before making a large decision: Jessie Brown, lawyer and coach
Burnout is common in legal careers and frequently misread. Attorneys who reach a point of disengagement often conclude the problem is the career itself, when the source is more specific. Jessie Brown addresses a moment many attorneys reach, where they feel disengaged enough to consider leaving the profession entirely.
Her first step is a diagnostic question before that decision gets made.
“If a lawyer thinks they want to leave the law, I might ask them: could you tell me about a time where you felt engaged in your work? Maybe you even experienced a flow state.” If the answer is never, that points toward a career misalignment.
But most of the time, she finds, the problem isn’t the profession.
Mindset contributes to burnout alongside workload. “Catastrophizing, rumination, anxious thinking, and perfectionism can really contribute to stress and add to burnout,” she said. Managing workload is part of the answer, but so is examining how you’re thinking about it.
What to do with this:
- Work through her diagnostic question: when was the last time you felt genuinely engaged in your work? If the answer is never, that points toward misalignment. If it’s months ago, that points toward burnout.
- If you’re considering leaving your firm, first ask whether you’ve proposed an alternative arrangement. Jessie’s clients have created roles that didn’t exist before, and stayed.
- Look at one habit contributing to your workload. Are you saying yes to everything? Renegotiating a deadline is not a weakness.
Treating self-care like recovery instead of a reward: Kelli Proia, founder, Logicate
Chronic self-care deprivation is a significant factor in the mental health landscape for attorneys. Kelli Proia, founder of Logicate, observes that most lawyers she works with have spent 15 to 20 years in a state of chronic self-care deprivation. This pattern, operating on the belief that sheer force of will can compensate for the absence of sleep or recovery, directly contributes to the high rates of mental health issues seen in the legal field.
This mindset is one that elite athletes abandoned long ago because it is unsustainable. Proia applies an athlete’s framework, noting that elite athletes build recovery into their training model, but lawyers treat recovery as optional. As she states, burnout is often as much about the absence of restoration as it is about workload volume.
What to do with this:
- After your next major deadline, block the following day on your calendar before looking at what’s coming.
- Identify what brings you back to center and treat it the way elite athletes treat recovery: part of the performance model, not a reward for finishing.
- Start with one protected hour this week that belongs to recovery, not productivity.
What changes at the practice level
A lot of attorney burnout traces back to two specific habits: not protecting time for focused work, and not holding limits on availability. Neither gets examined until the exhaustion is significant enough to force the question.
Research on workplace stress going back to the 1970s shows a consistent finding: workers with high demands and little control over how they meet them report significantly worse mental health outcomes than their peers.
And the legal industry is a prime candidate for this based on the way attorneys are asked to work. Availability expectations set early in client relationships become defaults and workdays built around interruption make hours impossible to account for by the end of the day.
Stop explaining when you say no: Jeralyn Lawrence, founder, Lawrence Law
The difficulty of setting clear limits on availability keeps attorneys in the always-on, never-recovering state that produces chronic stress. As Jeralyn Lawrence puts it, you don’t owe an explanation when you decline.
“Oftentimes we find ourselves saying, no, we’re not available, and then we go on to explain why we’re not available. Stop doing that. You don’t owe anybody that explanation.”
Her script works at any career stage, too. All you need to do, she says, is state: “Thank you so much for thinking of me. It just unfortunately doesn’t work this time, but please think of me next time.”
For attorneys in service roles, she recommends “yes, but let’s talk about when” instead of declining outright. If 10 partners give you 10 same-day assignments without coordinating with each other, surface the conflict rather than absorbing it silently.
What to do with this:
- The next time you decline something, use her script without the explanation: “Thank you so much for thinking of me. It just unfortunately doesn’t work this time, but please think of me next time.”
- If you can’t decline outright, try “yes, but let’s talk about when.” Name your existing commitments and ask where the new request falls in the priority order.
- Set a 24-hour email response policy and communicate it to one client this week.
Planning as a mental health practice: Gary Miles, The Free Lawyer
The constant sense of fragmentation and lack of control that many lawyers feel is a primary driver of professional dissatisfaction and mental health challenges.
Gary Miles works with attorneys who succeed externally but end the day not knowing what they got done. His diagnosis is usually the same.
Most of them, he shares, are not using their time intentionally. They answer every email as it arrives and take every call in the moment. Every interruption gets absorbed without a structure to contain it. As Gary states, “We own our time. We can decide how we use it.”
What to do with this:
- Pick one hour tomorrow and turn off all notifications. Work on one task and compare what you produce to a typical fragmented hour.
- Batch your communications: return calls in one block, answer emails in another.
- Set your response time expectations with new clients upfront. That single conversation shapes the entire relationship.
What fulfillment actually requires
Changing how you manage your time and communicate your limits can reduce chronic stress. It doesn’t answer the question of whether the work itself is producing what you want from a legal career.
Research from Perceptyx found that workers with high career fulfillment are 2.5 times more likely to report improved mental health year over year. The legal profession’s feedback mechanisms (compensation, billing targets, book of business size) measure output. They don’t measure whether the work producing that output is satisfying. Josh Baron and Kara Perry each address a different piece of that question.
Why compensation isn’t enough: Josh Baron, criminal defense attorney
Criminal defense attorney Josh Baron came to this topic through his own experience in a job that left him hoping some mornings for a small enough accident to justify staying home.
In the legal industry, there is a pervasive assumption that prestige and compensation should automatically translate to high satisfaction. Baron found a framework from psychology, self-determination theory (SDT), that directly pushes back on this idea and explains why lawyers with strong compensation can still be deeply dissatisfied.
SDT defines two separate kinds of needs. Hygiene factors (pay, rest, a functional work environment) are necessary to prevent misery. Crucially, once you meet these basic needs, doubling or tripling your pay won’t lead to a proportional increase in satisfaction. This is why Baron frequently hears lawyers ask, “Why am I not four times as happy?”
For attorneys experiencing that gap, the framework names what’s producing it. Dissatisfaction despite strong compensation is what happens when hygiene factors are in place but satisfaction factors aren’t. The factors that produce satisfaction are different: competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
What to do with this:
- Look at the last month of your work against the three satisfaction factors: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Low scores across all three point to a specific gap.
- This week, reach out to one client or colleague with no billing agenda. Relatedness is the satisfaction factor most accessible at any career stage.
- If you’re dissatisfied despite strong compensation, check whether your hygiene factors are in place. If they are, the source of dissatisfaction is in the satisfaction factors.
Joy as a daily practice, not a destination: Kara Perry, founder, Just Brilliant
Building on the internal factors that create satisfaction, another component of fulfillment is a daily practice of cultivating well-being. Kara McCarthy Perry reframes joy as something that runs alongside the hard parts of legal work, not something you earn after clearing the calendar.
“It’s not something that we should have to wait for,” she told us. The version of joy she describes is less about celebration and more about contentment, gratitude, and appreciation. She calls it “joy management” as a counterpart to stress management. “Gratitude and appreciation, practicing it in the sense of joy as an emotion and a practice, it’s really a survival technique.”
Her practical starting point is five minutes, spent before checking the phone, reflecting on what went well the previous day. “Just those five minutes, for me, feel not only joyful, but a bit empowering for my day.”
What to do with this:
- Tomorrow morning, before checking your phone, spend five minutes on what went well yesterday.
- Add novelty to one mundane task this week: a different soundtrack, a different location, a small change that makes a routine feel less automatic.
- When you feel the pull to check email the moment you wake up, notice that you’re starting on someone else’s agenda.
Where to go from here
These guests came from different angles, including positive psychology, productivity coaching, self-determination theory, and personal branding. But they all shared how practices that address attorney mental health aren’t generic wellness advice. They’re meant to work alongside the demands of a legal career and factor in how you structure your time, how you manage client expectations, and whether the work you’re doing is aligned with your goals.
Taken together, their answers map to the framework I use in my work with rainmaking partners: the Six Pillars to Be(coming) a Happy Rainmaker. If you haven’t taken the 6 Pillars Assessment, it’s a free tool to help you see where you stand across each one.
For the current data on attorney well-being, see State of Lawyer Mental Health in 2026.
To watch the full Happy Rainmakers video series, visit our YouTube channel.
If you’re a rainmaking partner wondering whether your current firm is a factor in what you’re experiencing, schedule a conversation and let’s talk about what your exact right, perfect-fit firm could look like.
