At the Canadian Legal Summit, panellists spoke about defining burnout, confronting the data, and firm-level action
When a law firm loses capacity – through burnout, illness, or exits driven by overwork – the damage is usually invisible before it becomes irreversible. Client relationships erode quietly. Revenue follows. And by the time the numbers reflect the problem, the conditions that caused it are already entrenched.
These were the central claims of a panel at the Canadian Legal Summit held in October, featuring general counsel Carole Dagher, retired trial lawyer Jason Ward, and Leanne Goldstein, founder and senior lawyer at Leanne Goldstein Law, and moderated by Steven Benmor of Benmore Family Law Group.
Getting the language right
The session opened with an act of disclosure. Moderating the panel, Benmor noted that he has managed generalized anxiety disorder for 15 years – “I’ve made GAD my superpower,” he said – before handing the floor to his panellists.
The panellist began by distinguishing burnout from mental illness. “Burnout is not a medical condition,” Ward said. “You’re not going to find it in any North American diagnostic manual. The World Health Organization defines burnout as chronic workplace stress that’s unmanaged.” Using it as shorthand for depression, anxiety, or addiction is dangerous, he argued – it allows organizations to sidestep the clinical realities actually driving the problem.
Dagher, who says she has lived with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder, and trauma disorder for 15 years, and who maintained a senior legal career at CIBC, Scotiabank, and Loblaws throughout, agreed that precision carries real weight. “The reason why terminology matters,” she said, “is because when you understand what it is that you have, whether it’s burnout or a mental illness, then you can get the proper medical attention, you can get the proper work accommodation.”
Goldstein mapped three overlapping but distinct conditions. Burnout, she said, is “related to organizational or environmental factors.” Vicarious trauma is distinct: it arises when lawyers are “exposed to the trauma of their clients, whether it’s conversations about distressing events or viewing material that can cause trauma.” Compassion fatigue describes the depletion that comes from being a repeated emotional sounding board. And burnout, she said, “is not necessarily a mental illness, but it is something that could potentially lead to a mental illness if organizational factors are not taken into consideration appropriately. It is the body’s way of decompensating when it is facing chronic stress and resilience is depleted.”
The evidence of burnout and mental illness in the legal profession is documented. The National Study on the Psychological Health Determinants of Legal Professionals in Canada – led by Dr. Nathalie Cadieux at Université de Sherbrooke, commissioned by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada and the Canadian Bar Association, with 7,305 respondents – found that 59.4 percent of legal professionals experience psychological distress; burnout reaches 71.1 percent among those aged 26 to 35; and 24.4 percent of lawyers report suicidal ideation since beginning their careers. The Phase I report, collected in autumn 2021, remains the first comprehensive national study of its kind on the wellness of the Canadian legal profession. Ward has also written about the study’s implications for regulatory reform in Canadian Lawyer.
“The chances are that one of the lawyers at your table is suffering from some type of substance use disorder,” Ward said to the attendees. The profession has made real progress on awareness and stigma over the past decade, he argued, but “now we have to take the next step... we have to look at structural change.” In his view, legal practice is “the world’s most dangerous profession, mentally speaking” – one that asks people to “exist and function in a culture of conflict” for the full length of a career.
Beyond storytelling
Dagher was blunt about the limits of what the profession has done so far. “Quite frankly, I’ve been using my voice for 5 years,” she said. “My voice hurts, and I don’t see enough change. All I see are companies and firms asking me and Jason and Leanne to go and talk... but what is actually happening behind the scenes? Nothing. Nothing. Associates are still getting burnt out. Lawyers are still overworked.” The profession must move from storytelling to structural action – and she named what makes action feel risky: disclosure.
Accommodation, she argued, must be individualized. “You can’t have a policy that says everyone who comes and talks about being burnt out, we take some of their work off their plate, or we tell them to take a leave,” Dagher said. “The outcome is to have a conversation with the individual to say, ‘What do you need to be supported?’” The form of support will vary. The conversation is not optional.
Goldstein addressed the structural habits that accelerate the problem. First: avoid punishing the competent. “The individuals who are often the ones who take on extra work, who do a great job in the firm, are often the ones that other individuals in the firm tend to lean on disproportionately,” she said. “And that is a negative thing for that individual, but also for the firm itself, because what you’re dealing with is a scenario where one person becomes burnt out much more quickly. But you are also depriving other individuals [in] the firm of development opportunities.”
Goldstein identified modelling as the next priority. In litigation especially, leaders should visibly demonstrate how to manage adversarial pressure and ensure that affected team members feel supported rather than sidelined. Mental health, she said, should be treated as an essential component of professional competence.
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