Dear Advy,
I’m passionate about access to justice and take on pro bono work as often as I can. But lately, I’ve been feeling emotionally exhausted, especially when I can’t do enough to help vulnerable clients. Any tips on avoiding burnout while balancing my commitment to public interest law with self-care?
Sincerely,
Giving but Drained
Dear Giving,
Burnout is a very real problem in all workplaces, but it often strikes legal professionals especially hard. The Phase 1 Report of the national well-being study showed that burnout is a particularly serious and widespread issue for our profession. Not only is the need for your help almost infinite but because outcomes in legal disputes are often not perfectly in line with what parties want to happen, the effort you put into serving your clients is sometimes rewarded with the client blaming you for what went wrong. Those are two essential ingredients for burnout.
Before we get any further, a definition is in order. The same national study referenced above uses the following definition:
Burnout is a concept that measures the degree of fatigue and exhaustion a person experiences due to their work (Kristensen et al., 2005). Burnout can lead to cynicism, detachment, and an undervaluing of personal accomplishments (Schaufeli et al., 2017).”
Burnout can bring about headaches, stomach or other digestive complaints and other physical effects of stress. It can also sap you of the very things that brought you to the work in the first place. Your patience, empathy, enthusiasm, focus, and confidence in yourself are qualities that are among the first casualties of burnout.
The first step to preventing and managing symptoms of burnout is recognizing that you have it or are developing it. You have already noticed your emotional exhaustion, so you good for you for having that insight. You can get more certainty about whether you are experiencing burnout by speaking with a trained counsellor who can provide an outside perspective. There is a formal inventory or test for burnout called the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory, but you are better off taking it with the help of a qualified professional who can not only guide you through the assessment but also work with you on solutions. Your jurisdiction’s lawyers’ assistance program can put you in touch with the right people to help you.
“It’s all well and good to recognize the problem.” you’re saying, “…but what do I do about it?”
Not to sound like a lawyer here, but the answer is “It depends”.
A key to mitigating burnout is to identify the specific triggers that cause you to experience it and then come up with ways of compartmentalizing them, delegating them, developing systems to manage them or possibly of eliminating them altogether. You say that you feel emotionally exhausted when you can’t do enough to help vulnerable clients. What exactly exhausts you? Is it telling people things they don’t want to hear and often getting a bad reaction? Do you become exhausted while doing client intake because you’re experiencing secondary trauma hearing what the client has gone through? Is it billing and collecting fees that’s bringing on these feelings (for the cases you don’t take on a pro bono basis)? Is it dealing with frequent demands for updates in periods of a case when there is nothing to report? Is it the task of selecting one case to work on while having to leave others without your help?
Working with your counsellor, make an inventory of the specific things you do in a day that bring on this emotional exhaustion. Taking that inventory is not easy. It requires noticing from moment to moment what thoughts and emotions you are experiencing in response to the things that happen to you in a work day. Mindfulness could be a topic for its own column – or heck even a book or two – but to put it briefly, mindfulness is the practice of experiencing the present moment without judgment. There is even an organization devoted to helping lawyers practice mindfulness which you may want to investigate to learn more.
Once you have completed your inventory of burnout triggers, brainstorm ways you could make them less exhausting for yourself. You need to make sure that you are developing solutions you could actually implement and stick to. A list of great solutions you can’t or won’t enact will do you no good. Don’t expect to develop the perfect set of adaptive steps right away either. Your plan to manage and prevent burnout will almost certainly be imperfect. We lawyers tend to be allergic to imperfection but making mistakes is a necessary part of developing and improving on your plan. This is an iterative strategy. You will hone it by trying things out, noticing how they work and don’t work, and making changes as needed. That’s another reason for having an ongoing relationship with a professional helper as you do this. Having a regular check-in with someone like a therapist can help you realize what’s working well and what’s not.
You should also include in your inventory a note about what you love about the work. Your plan should ideally allow you to minimize your experience of exhaustion while balancing that with those elements of the work that make you feel fulfilled and energized. The best plan is one you develop - with help - for you. Without trying to give you an exhaustive list, here are a few ideas that might fit into your own plan.
- Is the intake process the main source of distress for you? There are agencies in most locations that engage volunteer lawyers to provide legal help to people in need. One of the benefits of delegating the job of intake to an agency like that is that they are built for that purpose and have systems in place to make sure the right clients are coming to you for your expertise.
- If it’s client communication that is getting you down, notice the patterns of client inquiries. It is likely that most clients get anxious about what’s happening in their cases in much the same way and at much the same point in the process. If there is always a lag in the beginning of a case when you have to give the person on the other side of the dispute a chance to respond (such as filing a Statement of Defence for example) you can put an explanation of that right into a “Frequently Asked Questions” list or even a standard template e-mail you send the client. Often there are very positive reasons for those periods when you have nothing to report, and the client’s anxiety is reduced if you proactively tell the client that. The delay in waiting for a defence to a claim, for example, allows a defendant to consider whether it’s even worthwhile disputing the claim.
- The stress you experience in giving clients bad news can be mitigated by reminding yourself – and your client – that hard as it might be to hear it from you, that is far less painful than hearing an adverse decision by a judge or being surprised when an opposing lawyer asks sensitive questions, or similar things that make you dread doing your professional duty. You don’t control the outcomes. You are just an expert guide along the path that the client is treading, and the best guides can spot dangers and help avoid them. That means telling people that the dangers are there in the first place.
- Is the exhaustion you’re feeling emotionally paired with physical fatigue, hunger, thirst, or the irritation of being tied to your desk all day? Take a break, have lunch, drink some water, and/or go for a walk. That emotional exhaustion you’re feeling may well stem from what your body is going through and have very little to do with the work itself.
The national study mentioned above found that autonomy and consistency of work with your own values is a helpful counterweight to the effects of burnout. Think about what kind of cases you want to devote your time to. Importantly, also think about what kinds of cases you don’t want to work on. Consider how much control you have over what you take on and what you don’t and do what you can to maximize your own freedom to make that choice.
Don’t feel guilty for deciding not to help someone. By reserving your time and energy for cases where your unique qualities can have the greatest impact, you are helping the clients you do take on. For clients you don’t take on, keep on hand a list of other people they could go see for help, agencies that might be able to work on their cases for them, or even reliable self-help resources like court websites. By developing what you’ll tell someone in order to get the best help elsewhere before-hand, you save yourself from figuring out ad lib a viable way of saying no to these people without feeling like you’ve let them down. Remember that if you refer a client to someone who is even better than you are at helping with their particular legal issue, you are helping clients get to the best person or people possible. That’s far from letting them down. When you go to the hospital to have your appendix removed, your surgeon doesn’t feel guilty for not having taken out your wisdom teeth while you were under anesthesia. Medical professionals recognize the value of patients’ being helped by the best person for a particular need. Having a pre-set script for how to refer someone to another source of legal assistance is an effective tool in boundary-setting when you’re the kind of person who wants to help everyone.
There’s another benefit of putting together a list of other helpful people and resources: It forces you to go out to your legal community and find out what and who is out there. You can make connections with other people who share your passion for helping others and who bring their own unique skillsets to the table. Connecting with, and regularly checking in with a circle of like-minded peers in your profession also helps you put the things that cause you distress into some perspective. When you find you’re beating yourself up over the fact that you can’t solve all the world’s problems, being able to talk it over with a colleague who has some understanding of what you’re going through really helps.
Be well,
Advy