Wellbeing Considerations: Preparing New Lawyers for the Transition from Law School to Practice

By Filippa Marullo Anzalone and Beth D. Cohen

Transitional times in life are challenging. The evolution from law student to lawyer is no exception. This article offers suggestions for how law school faculty and law practice mentors can help ease this identity shift.

The Challenges

New lawyers often encounter significant difficulties because of the rigors of law practice and complications in life beyond work. Some of the familiar issues that beleaguer contemporary attorneys include grinding hours, unreasonable skill and knowledge expectations, office politics, tracking time and billable hours, unfamiliar practice areas, people, and venues, being held accountable for work product, and imposter syndrome.

In addition to these common practice stressors, the rise of AI, ubiquitous technology, social media doomscrolling, and other distractions test practitioners’ focus. Add in the highly-polarized political environment and growing uncertainties in the legal system, and we have an especially anxious time for both inexperienced and seasoned attorneys.

New lawyers often shoulder basic life worries, too, including crushing student debt and the changing landscape of loan forgiveness programs. Many are also impacted by family demands, loneliness, and mental health conditions like anxiety and depression.

Strategies

Starting any new job is overwhelming, but faculty, law school administrators, and law office mentors can help. They can better prepare lawyers to navigate their entry into practice by cultivating a basic awareness of the challenges and by introducing students to resources and practices to ease this important life transition.

Prioritizing both self-care and compassion is paramount. Law schools and employers need to message the importance of rest and breaks from the daily grind for nascent attorneys. Stillness and pausing are essential for resilience and nervous system regulation. Modeling and encouraging the cultivation of self-awareness by encouraging new lawyers to name their strengths, weaknesses, habits of mind, inclinations, and needs with candor, precision, and humility is indispensable. To become more self-aware, lawyers might incorporate meditation and mindfulness practices, regular writing or journaling, and other effective tools to attain clarity and self-understanding.

Mindfulness—a type of awareness that emerges from intentionally and non-judgmentally paying attention in the present moment—is especially important for lawyers because the practice of law can be fast and adversarial, reactive and defensive. Developing a mindfulness practice can help lawyers become less reflexive and more reflective to better manage obstacles.

Legal practitioners spend huge amounts of time taking in information and synthesizing and analyzing it and applying the law to facts. Consequently, they tend to live in their heads, often ignoring their emotions and bodily sensations. This phenomenon can cause people to anticipate or imagine scenarios that may or may not be happening. We curate our experiences and, because humans have a negative bias, we catastrophize what is happening with thoughts that can alter reality. We spend time traveling back into the past and galloping ahead into the future, whereas mindfulness brings us squarely into the present—into life as it is.

Lawyers are also trained to be strong, zealous advocates for others, but when lawyers need help, they may feel subpar. They are reluctant to reach out for assistance or take a break. Being overwhelmed or less able to function is viewed as weakness. Stigma is attached to not being perfect or not being able to deal with time pressures and mountains of work. Although law students are similarly busy and stressed in law school, the stakes are raised in law practice where there are paying clients with big problems and demanding supervisors. This can lead newer attorneys to attempt to distract themselves from overwhelming situations and stress with unhealthy habits and coping mechanisms rather than strengthening their resilience.

Mindfulness can help sever the dysfunctional stress/reactor loop of the burdened lawyer and regular mindfulness practices positively influence the structure of the brain and help practitioners cultivate healthy mental habits. Mindfulness training, such as breathwork, meditation, and gentle movement practices like yoga or tai chi, can help bolster cognitive and emotional intelligence and wellbeing, including increased focus, resilience, and compassion. Breathwork is especially effective for emotional regulation. Simple breathing exercises, such as “box-breathing,” can help call up the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) in lieu of the sympathetic nervous system (fight, flight, or freeze).

Teaching and modeling self-awareness requires convincing students and lawyers to stop living from the neck up in autopilot. Contemplative practices provide law students with the tools that they can use to maneuver the stresses of law school study, to withstand the rigors of bar preparation, and to have a smoother transition to law practice when confronting inevitable hurdles. Mindfulness can provide a steadfast core that enables practitioners to see, adapt, and accept whatever arises, not engaging in catastrophizing and hyper-control.

Mindfulness may not work for everyone, but there are other helpful tools that can be used to strengthen confidence, steady minds, and maintain equanimity in the face of difficulty. For example, highlighting the benefits of physical wellbeing, including movement breaks, instead of reaching for ultra-processed snacks, alcohol, or drugs, is also important. We are preparing law students for a lifelong marathon, not a 5K. It is important for law students to learn that eating well, regular exercise, and adequate rest will enhance their job performance.

The legal profession has wrestled with lawyer wellbeing for a long time. Countless reports and studies describe crisis levels of chronic stress, depression, anxiety, and self-medication through substance abuse. The mental, emotional, and physical health of lawyers is inextricably linked with professional responsibility, competence, and even profitability in the profession.

Additionally, it is helpful to highlight the benefits of teamwork over competition for lawyers. Law is by nature combative, but legal work can also be collaborative. Most law schools promote competition as we prepare students for the adversarial win/lose dynamic of law practice, yet fostering a culture of sharing resources instead of information hoarding and prioritizing teamwork over heroic individualism, would benefit everyone. Collaboration also permits lawyers to resist the demands of the ego to improve relationships and foster a mindset of kindness and compassion for oneself and others.

Additionally, a collaborative mindset naturally fosters inclusivity and a more complete work product. We must model and teach curiosity, openness to other points of view, and a widening of the lens beyond personal experiences to optimize the inclusion of differences in gender, race, age, background, personality types, experience, and work styles. More voices can create better decisions and outcomes.

Moreover, helping new lawyers develop a strong network of peer support and mentors, with opportunities for regular check-ins, would help new lawyers counter their fears, isolation, and loneliness.

Finally, all lawyers should question whether we are comfortable seeking help ourselves and recognizing when others need help. We are a self-regulating profession that should have a culture of care for ourselves and other lawyers. We must strive to normalize concern and interest in the whole person and celebrate the meaningful work done by each of us.

Maybe the elusive common goal of “work-life balance” could be replaced with “work-life kindness” by practicing self-awareness and asking these vital questions: How can we develop excellent, zealous, compassionate advocates who are dedicated to helping clients while taking care of themselves and others? How can we embrace “doing the best we can” and “learning from our mistakes” instead of workaholism and perfectionism? It is important to evaluate our support for new lawyers as they transition from the world of law school to law practice. We each have a role in creating the culture we want in legal education and the profession—one lawyer at a time.

Filippa Marullo Anzalone is Associate Dean for Library & Technology Services and Professor of Law at Boston College Law School.

Beth D. Cohen is Professor of Law and Director of the Legal Research and Writing Program at Western New England University School of Law. 

Filippa and Beth serve as co-chairs of the Supreme Judicial Court’s Standing Committee on Lawyer Wellbeing’s Legal Education Subcommittee.