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Editor's Note: This story is adapted from ALM's Mid-Market Report. For more business of law coverage exclusively geared toward midsize firms, sign up for a free trial subscription to ALM's new weekly newsletter, The Mid-Market Report.

Efforts to raise awareness about stress in the legal profession have reached law firm leaders. But if the first step is admitting there's a problem, then there are many subsequent steps, steeper ones at that, before the issue is addressed.

“There's good stress and there's bad stress,” said Joseph Guiliano, a founder of Haley Guiliano, a 40-lawyer IP law firm that a year ago completed its spinoff from Ropes & Gray.

Good stress, Guiliano said, “involves pressure situations and tight deadlines.”

“Most of the time, people get excited when they're dealing with professional challenges. You're looking to get to the right answer, do what you're trained to do,” he said.

“The types of stress that people have a harder time dealing with are institutionally induced,” according to Guiliano.

For partners, institutionally induced stress at a large firm might involve rainmaking difficulties, as conflicts could mean having to turn away a large proportion of potential client engagements. “All you can do is run the opportunity through a [conflicts check] system,” Guiliano said.

As for associates, they want to be given meaningful work early in their careers—probably earlier than they're ready for it. At a smaller firm, associates can be given those opportunities and managed more closely by a partner “on a controlled basis,” Guiliano said, adding that many large firms, conversely, have “very defined milestones.” Those milestones—coordinating a document review in year one, a deposition in year two, an oral argument in year three, and so on—can feel “hobbling” to associates, and create stress, he said.

There are also other potentially stressful management issues, such as accounting and staffing: ”Sometimes getting to the bottom of a problem is difficult in a larger institution,” he said.

That's not a criticism of Ropes & Gray, a multinational firm with upward of 1,100 lawyers, or any other large firm, Guiliano said: “When you reach a certain size, you can't help but impose some of these stresses.”

Keith Donovan, managing partner of 70-lawyer Delaware-based firm Morris James, said, “What I try to do here is remind our younger lawyers that their job is to professionally develop into excellent attorneys. It's not their job as a very young lawyer to have a pile of work so they can meet a certain billable hour requirement.”

Avoiding the billable grind, Donovan said, is ”easier said than done, but certainly on the younger side of things I think we do a pretty good job of encouraging the professional development.”

According to Anthony Sylvester, a founding partner of 26-lawyer Sherman Wells Sylvester & Stamelman of Florham Park, New Jersey, it's not merely the concept of tracking time that can create stress.

“The idea that you're competing internally—it can be counterproductive,” said Sylvester, whose firm spun off from Riker Danzig Scherer Hyland & Perretti in 2014. ”It depends how you quantify performance.”

The measure should be quality—most importantly client satisfaction—not quantity of hours, he said.

There's also the nonquantifiable issue of how to handle people: “It's not a matter of working not as hard; it's about adapting,” he said.

“What difference does it make to me whether I get a brief at 4 p.m. or 9 p.m.?” Sylvester said. “But the difference to the person writing it can be extraordinary.”

At a large firm, Guiliano said, there might be an annual associate billable hour benchmark of 1,900 or 2,000, though with an unwritten rule that anyone short of 2,200 or 2,400 hours is falling behind.

“It wasn't by design, but when you look at our hours profile … we have a very flat curve,” with nearly everyone hitting the 1,800-to-1,900-hour mark, whereas a larger firm might have more people at the low and high ends of the bell curve, he said.

That 1,800- or 1,900-hour mark “tends to be most people's comfort zone,” Guiliano said. “You can force people to work more,” but those situations tend to breed inefficiency and unhappiness, he added.

Indeed there's often a cultural difference between large law firms and midsize or smaller ones—a difference of familiarity versus facelessness, collaboration versus unbridled competition, open communication versus strict hierarchy. But simply fostering a certain culture, without taking a more active approach to the problem of stress, isn't enough, firm leaders said.

At 100-lawyer Much Shelist of Chicago, “We're trying to evolve as the studies evolve, and trying to be responsive to our attorneys and our staff to continue to support their mental well-being and physical fitness,” said Jennifer Gallinson, director of attorney recruitment. ”We have to create an environment where people like what they do.”

As with other firms, stress-busting at Much Shelist starts with simple ideas, including a weekly lunch on Wednesday. “It's this sacred time where we bring all of our attorneys together … to connect on a personal level,” she said. There are also annual physicals, a weekly farmer's market in the summer months, and a planned office remodeling that includes a relaxation room for attorneys and staff, she noted.

Lunch and yoga are nice gestures, but Gallinson agreed that professional development is key to happy employees.

“Our practice group leaders really know what each person is working on,” she said. “We rely on those chairs to distribute the work and to monitor the work. … They can say, 'We know that you have a vacation coming in mid-August, so we're not going to staff you on this deal right now.'

“We're able to tailor each attorney's individual career path a little more,” Gallinson said. noting one associate who brought forward her plans to launch a company. “We allowed her to step back.”

At Sherman Wells, firm leaders organized a presentation encouraging attorneys to voice concerns about struggling colleagues, and designated two firm employees to whom such concerns may be routed—anonymously and without retribution, according to Sylvester.

Donovan, of Morris James, said: “We do a lot of things to try to infuse opportunity for the people who work here to engage with one another. Whether it is a firm event, a holiday party, a retreat, taking time out of the day to recognize certain employee service milestones—all of those opportunities allow people to feel more comfortable talking to each other and air their concerns.”

“From a leadership standpoint, it's important to me that everyone in this law firm, everyone in this environment, is respectful to each other,” Donovan said. “If we start there, it helps us bridge the gap to whatever stress or conflict may arise.”

As for open-door policies, implementation is simpler than functionality, according to Guiliano.

“Firms do that. The question is whether people really are comfortable taking that opportunity,”  he said, noting a sense pervading many firms, particularly larger ones, that lawyers can't simply walk into each partner's office.

“For a firm our size, it's kind of easy” to instill a culture of familiarity and collegiality, he said. “The advice to larger organizations is, do whatever you can to try to create cells”—working groups of 20 to 40 people that are possibly, but not necessarily, delineated by practice area.

“Promote the good stress and help eliminate the bad,” Guiliano said.