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Early in my career, I was a junior associate in the Chicago office of a New York Big Law firm. I didn’t think much about billable hours. I had so much work that the hours took care of themselves. Sixty-plus billable weeks were routine.
I was in my mid-twenties. I thought of myself as hard-charging and disciplined, and I believed the solution to most problems was to toil harder and longer. That belief wasn’t entirely wrong, but it wasn’t the whole story.
The exhaustion crept in gradually. I’d come home and collapse on the couch, too depleted and distracted to be present with my wife. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, my mind immediately racing through open loops, and reach for the BlackBerry on the nightstand. That blinking red notification light was dominating more of my life than I cared to admit.
I still thought I was fine, that this was what the job required (more pain, more gain). And I was performing well. From the outside, nothing looked wrong. But with the benefit of hindsight, it was clear that there was smoke—I was in the early stages of burning out.
Eventually, I did something that didn’t come naturally to me: I asked for help.
I went to a mentor, a senior lawyer I trusted, and told her what was going on. For someone who had long equated asking for help with exposing weakness, this wasn’t easy. My mentor almost immediately put me at ease. She redistributed some of my work and told me to check in with her more often with questions, rather than grinding through everything alone.
I felt a lot of the weight come off my shoulders.
Better yet, my work got better. I had been trying to figure everything out on my own when some of those issues needed the perspective of a more experienced lawyer. There is value in wrestling with hard problems on your own; that is part of how young lawyers grow. But there is also a point at which persistence stops being discipline and becomes inefficiency. A good mentor helps you recognize the difference. Over the next few months, I gradually found a rhythm that wasn’t fueled by adrenaline and stubbornness.
What I learned wasn’t that hard work is bad. It’s that there is a difference between hard work—which is good and necessary—and unsustainable work, and the two can look and feel similar for long periods of time.
The Value of Inversion
Charlie Munger was once asked for advice on how to succeed in life. He answered by inverting. Instead of offering a list of things to do, he said: Figure out what ruins people, and avoid those things.
That’s s a useful frame for thinking about legal careers.
Advice for lawyers often centers on acceleration: more hours, more clients, faster advancement. Some of that advice is sound. But it tends to assume the greatest risk is not doing enough. In my experience, the more serious danger is usually the opposite: doing too much of the wrong things for too long without recognizing what they are costing you.
That is part of what makes burnout in law so dangerous. It rarely looks like a collapse. More often, it looks like a lawyer who is still functioning at a high level but has begun to lose the qualities that made him good in the first place. Curiosity gives way to cynicism. The temptation to cut corners grows. Judgment gets clouded. The willingness to go one level deeper fades. In this sense, burnout creates an obvious risk: depletion.
But it creates a subtler one, too. When the pace of work stays relentless for long enough, it becomes harder to see anything beyond it. The sprint does not just wear lawyers down. It can also narrow their vision.
Some years ago, I had lunch with a prominent lawyer in my hometown near the end of a long and distinguished career. I asked what he was looking forward to in retirement. He paused, then said he wasn’t sure. He told me he didn’t really have any hobbies. His hobby, he said, had been practicing law.
By any external measure, he had built an amazing. But there was something in his answer that nagged at me—still does, even though I’m no longer practicing law.
These two risks—on the one hand, early burnout, and on the other hand, a singular focus on work for decades—can seem like opposites. One is about pushing too hard, too fast. The other is about spending a full career climbing and, at the end, finding that the work had become the whole of it. But they share a common root. Both happen when a lawyer lets the profession’s metrics—hours billed, clients won, deals closed, partnerships made—become the entire scoreboard. That is a fragile way to build a long career.
So what’s the alternative?
One thing I’ve observed is that lawyers who seem most satisfied in their fifties and sixties, who are still sharp, engaged, and genuinely interested in their clients and their work, usually have something important in common: They built a life outside the office and protected it along the way.
This is not just an argument for “balance,” at least not in the soft and vague way that word is often used. It is a practical argument. To be clear, there are stages of a legal career—especially early on—when control over your time is limited. Some periods are simply demanding, and no one should expect perfect equilibrium. But the larger point still holds. Lawyers with real outside interests, things they genuinely care about and look forward to, have reasons to be efficient with their time in the office. They are less likely to stay late out of habit, inertia, or the belief that work should consume everything available. They work with more intention because they have somewhere else to be—somewhere they want to be. That constraint often sharpens focus and performance, because work expands to fill the time available for it. Over time, lawyers who perform well and build trust often gain more autonomy over how they work. The goal is not perfection. It is to move steadily in that direction, and to build a career that leaves room for a life.
There is also a second benefit, and it’s just as important.
Lawyers do not advise clients in a vacuum. They advise human beings to manage risk, navigate uncertainty, and make difficult decisions under pressure. Legal skill matters, of course. But great lawyers bring more to the table than legal acumen.
They bring perspective, and perspective comes from having a life.
It comes from reading things unrelated to law, spending time with people outside your professional circle, and having experiences that do not appear in your firm biography.
A lawyer who is active in the outside world brings something into client relationships that cannot be developed by merely billing more hours. Well-rounded lawyers bring more perspective, more proportion, and more of the calm that good advising requires. Their identities do not live entirely in work, and that can make them more resilient, more empathetic, and better able to meet clients as people rather than just problems.
The opposite is true, too. If work is your only source of meaning, every setback feels existential. A bad year is no longer just a bad year. It starts to feel like a verdict on your worth. That is a fragile way to build something meant to last thirty-plus years.
A Career Built to Last
Legal careers are long. The things most worth building and having, including judgment and expertise, trusted relationships, and a durable reputation, do not arrive in any single year. They compound slowly. And compounding requires one thing above all else: staying in the game with your judgment intact and your enthusiasm still alive. The first rule of compounding, Charlie Munger once observed, is not to interrupt it.
The conventional metrics—billable hours, originations, speed of advancement—are not meaningless. Obviously, they matter, especially early in a career. But they are a map, not the territory. And like any map, they leave important things out.
Lawyers who are still thriving at sixty are not necessarily those who simply billed the most in their twenties. In my experience, they are the ones who found a sustainable pace, built a life beyond work worth returning to, and protected their capacity to do good work throughout a career.
The sprint feels like the path to success. For many lawyers, it becomes the thing that makes lasting success harder to reach.
The blinking red light is always there in one form or another. Learning not to be wholly consumed by it is not a small thing. It turns out to be one of the more important professional decisions you make.
Jay Harrington is president of our agency, a published author, and nationally-recognized expert in thought-leadership marketing.
From strategic planning to writing, podcasting, video marketing, and design, Jay and his team help lawyers and law firms turn expertise into thought leadership, and thought leadership into new business. Get in touch to learn more about the consulting and coaching services we provide. You can reach Jay at jay@hcommunications.biz.