How do you know a lawyer is lying? If they say they aren't overwhelmed.

That's a less cynical take on an old joke about the integrity of lawyers. But if you want to get meta about it, any time a lawyer attempts to ignore the stressors of the job rather than confront them, they are, in a sense, lying to themselves.

It's not a victimless lie—ignoring work-induced stress can diminish the lawyer's capabilities to help their clients.

“Paramount when you take on a client: You've got to serve them, everything they need,” said Alan Bush, a mediator in Houston and Conroe. “But before that even begins, I think a lot of it is getting your own heart ready to be able to deal with what you're gonna deal with.” 

“If I'm not at peace and I'm all stressed out and bent out of shape, I'm going to be thoroughly ineffective,” he said.

And that deficient work can compound stress that has a trickle-down effect on the rest of a lawyer's life. Maybe that stress manifests in how they relate to a spouse or their children, or themselves when alone, or opposing counsel.

“Sometimes you have a really unreasonable, kind of a jerk on the other side of a case who demands quick action that they're not entitled to. And how you respond to that really matters,” Bush said. “Can you respond reasonably and with grace? Or do you fire back and just heat up the case and make that relationship spin out of control? So client stress isn't the only thing. For litigation practice I'd almost say that opposing counsel stress is just as big.”

That oppositional element in lawyering can't be overstated. According to Jim Dolan, a therapist and executive coach in Dallas, that tension can take its toll on a lawyer.

“The fact that whenever they're working on a case, someone on the opposite side is working just as hard to destroy their case—that creates a lot of emotional distress,” he said.

Dolan said that, so often, people who come to him are seeking a quick fix for the reduction of their work stress. But he said the most sustainable, long term solution is in how lawyers build their lives outside of the law practice to absorb and neutralize that stress.

“The issue is not so much how to have quick and snappy techniques for dealing with stress when it happens,” he said. “The method is to build a life outside of law practice that has built into it activities, relationships, pleasures in life that mitigate the stresses of law practice.”

By way of example, Dolan lists bowling leagues and knitting circles—almost facetiously as if to emphasize that it really doesn't matter what the pursuit is—and plenty of exercise as aids for absorbing those stressors, placing the greatest emphasis on the relational elements within those pursuits.

For Bush, his foundation is Christianity. “That's a big part of where I draw my peace from,” he said. “You'll talk to other lawyers, and they'll say they've got something different they're relying on for peace. Some may meditate, some may read, some may exercise. And those are pieces of it for me.”

Establishing Boundaries

Say a lawyer has those foundational elements in place and has built a life from which they can derive peace and pleasure outside of law. But the business of law will always be trying to encroach on that life. In an always-on culture with smartphones that are as ubiquitous as the pockets that hold them, work is never done and is always chiming, chirping and buzzing to remind lawyers of that fact.

“There really has to be an intentional sense of building a boundary around how often, when or if you are accessible,” Dolan said.

“Particularly the younger lawyers are so driven by fear and competition that being always on, of course, feels like and looks like you are being successful,” he said. “You've got it going on, people want you, you're handling multiple cases, you're up until 9 o'clock, 10 o'clock at night returning emails. And that might be a necessity early on, but there has to be an understanding that at some point you have to start transitioning out of that and plan for it ahead of time.”

Bush manages those demands with a protocol that emphasizes a quick response to the matter, even if it doesn't settle it.

“You've gotta have very quick reach back. It rarely takes me longer than about two hours to get back to a client in some way. And that might be just as simple as calling or emailing back,” he said. “Figure out the issue, and then set up longer contacts or an answer later.”

“But you can't just ignore it, because if you do, it builds up and you lose control of your priorities and everything becomes urgent,” he said.

Ultimately, Dolan says, that triage for legal problems and how lawyers approach it requires “being honest with yourself about your own human limits and capabilities, and the fact that we're not put onto this earth, or came into being, to be a 24 hour, 7 day a week legal opinion machine.”

“There has to be a pre-existing understanding that life is worth living, and part of that is law practice, but not the whole thing,” he added. “And so many make it out to be the whole thing.”