After more than 30 years of practicing law, I have come to understand something that many lawyers, law students, and law firm staff eventually learn the hard way: Stress often hides behind competence, skill and care.
Lawyers are smart. They are well-educated. They are highly trained. They are tenacious. They strive to know more and be better. They manage complexity. They absorb conflict. They make decisions under pressure. They carry the fears, anger, urgency, and expectations of their clients. They respond to opposing counsel, courts, deadlines, staff, spouses, families and financial pressures – all at the same time. And much of the time, they ‘appear’ to be functioning perfectly well.
The work gets done. The decisions get made. The clients are served. The emails are answered. The dockets add up. The calendar keeps moving.
But beneath that apparent steadiness, stress quietly accumulates. One of the most difficult things about professional stress is that it rarely arrives with a clear starting point. There is often no obvious moment when a lawyer can say, “This is when burnout began.” More often, the changes are subtle.
Decision-making starts to take more energy. Patience becomes shorter. Tolerance narrows. Recovery after a difficult day, hearing, negotiation, or client crisis becomes less complete. The mind remains capable, but less flexible. The lawyer is still performing, but at a greater internal cost.
What changes first is often not the quality of the work, but the efficiency with which the work is done. Tasks that once felt routine require more conscious effort. Moving from one responsibility to another becomes harder. The mental “switching cost” increases. The lawyer remains effective, but less adaptive. There is still output, but less ease. Still judgment, but less spaciousness. Still professionalism, but less recovery. And because lawyers are so accustomed to pressure, they often normalize these warning signs.
But after three decades in this profession, I no longer believe that chronic stress should simply be treated as the cost of admission to a meaningful legal career. Yes, law is demanding. It requires discipline, judgment, stamina, and emotional restraint. But it also requires self-awareness. It requires recovery. It requires boundaries. It requires the humility to recognize that even highly capable professionals are still human beings with nervous systems, families, limits, and needs.
The answer is not to become less committed to excellence. The answer is to become more deliberate about sustainability.
That means paying attention to the early signals: reduced patience, mental fatigue, rigidity, irritability, loss of curiosity, difficulty recovering, or the feeling that every task now carries more weight than it should. It means building systems that protect judgment rather than glorify exhaustion. It means creating space between demands. Seeking trusted colleagues. Delegating where possible. Saying no when necessary. Moving the body. Sleeping properly. Taking real breaks. Processing difficult cases instead of simply carrying them. And recognizing that emotional intelligence is not only something we owe our clients, colleagues, and families – it is something we owe ourselves.
For lawyers especially, well-being cannot be reduced to slogans about balance. It must be individualized, practical, and integrated into the way we actually work. A lawyer can be successful and strained at the same time. A lawyer can be high-functioning and depleted at the same time. A lawyer can look composed on the outside while becoming increasingly rigid on the inside. The absence of visible disruption does not mean the absence of risk.
After 30+ years in law, I have learned that resilience is not the ability to absorb endless pressure without consequence. Real resilience is the ability to notice the consequence early enough to respond wisely.
The goal is not merely to keep functioning. The goal is to remain thoughtful, flexible, healthy, humane, and whole while doing work that matters.
Lawyers who take care of themselves, take better care of their clients and practices.
Steve Benmor, B.Sc., LL.B., LL.M. (Family Law), C.S., Cert.F.Med., C.Arb., FDRP PC, Acc.D.C., is a full-time Divorce Mediator/Arbitrator and principal lawyer of Benmor Family Law Group, a boutique matrimonial law firm in downtown Toronto. He is a Certified Specialist in Family Law, a Certified Specialist in Parenting Coordination and was admitted as a Fellow to the prestigious International Academy of Family Lawyers. Steve is regularly retained as a Divorce Mediator/Arbitrator and Parenting Coordinator. Steve uses his 30 years of in-depth knowledge of family law, court-room experience and expert problem-solving skills in Divorce Mediation/Arbitration to help spouses reach fair, fast and cooperative divorce settlements without the financial losses, emotional costs and lengthy delays from divorce court.
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