A Big Life Change and a New Chapter for Justice with Humanity
Dear Justice with Humanity Community,
I have some big news to share: I recently moved to France.
Paris is now home, both personally and professionally. With the move, I'm expanding Justice with Humanity's work into Europe and the United Kingdom through Justice avec Humanité, while continuing our work in the United States. I'll still teach, train, speak, consult, and work with U.S. lawyers and organizations.
This move is an opportunity to learn from other legal systems and bring those perspectives into the conversations we're already having about trauma, well-being, and sustainability in the legal profession.
Almost immediately after arriving, I wondered whether this work would resonate here in the same way, and what lawyer well-being and burnout look like within European legal systems.
I'll admit that I came to Europe with a very American assumption: Europeans have figured out work-life balance.
Spend August in France, and it's easy to see where that perception comes from. Businesses close, cities empty, and people disappear for weeks at a time. Paris in August felt like a different city, its usual energy reduced to a quiet hum. Coming from a professional culture where even using the vacation time you're given can sometimes carry an undercurrent of guilt, it felt strikingly different.
The data suggest that some of this difference is real. According to the OECD, in 2025 employees in the United States worked an average of approximately 1,800 hours. In France, the figure was 1,498; in the United Kingdom, 1,533; and in Spain, 1,633.
That is not a trivial difference. An American employee averaged more than 300 additional working hours compared with a French employee—roughly 7.5 additional 40-hour workweeks over the course of a year.
And it's worth noting that these are averages across all workers—not lawyers specifically. Given what we know about the legal profession's work expectations, many lawyers likely work considerably more.
So I wondered: Does working less translate into less lawyer burnout and better mental health?
For lawyers, at least, the relationship between working hours, lawyer well-being, and burnout seems far more complicated.
Lawyer Burnout and Mental Health: Fewer Hours, Familiar Problems
Earlier this year, France's Conseil National des Barreaux released sobering findings about the mental health of French lawyers. Although work-life balance was their top professional priority, cited by 62% of respondents, only 52% were satisfied with their own work-life balance—down eight percentage points from 2024.
The mental health findings were even more concerning. One-quarter rated their current mental health between just one and four on a ten-point scale, and 60% reported experiencing at least once during the previous twelve months burnout, a depressive state, or suicidal thoughts related to their work as a lawyer.
The pressures behind these numbers were also clear: 58% identified pressure related to results or profitability as negatively affecting their well-being and mental health, while 55% identified an excessive workload.
When asked what was undermining their mental health, French lawyers identified workload and pressure for profitability as leading factors.
The picture in the UK is similarly concerning. LawCare's 2025 Life in the Law study found that 59% of respondents reported poor mental well-being and 50% had experienced anxiety often, very often, or all of the time during the previous year. Nearly 79% regularly worked beyond their contracted hours, and 8.5% estimated that they worked more than 21 additional hours each week.
In Spain, a survey of more than 1,000 Madrid lawyers found that 66% had experienced anxiety during the previous year, while nearly half reported fatigue, negative or depressive thoughts, and emotional disturbances. The factors lawyers identified are particularly interesting: difficulty resting and disconnecting from work ranked first, followed by pressure to work long hours. Other concerns included difficulty balancing work with the rest of life, performance targets, and unclear job expectations.
These aren't perfectly comparable studies. They measure different populations, use different instruments, and ask different questions, so we shouldn't line the percentages up as though they represent an international ranking of lawyer mental health.
But collectively, they challenge a tempting assumption: fewer annual working hours and more generous norms around time off do not automatically produce a profession free from burnout, anxiety, or poor mental health.
One reason may be that the demands of legal practice are surprisingly consistent across borders. The legal systems, employment structures, and cultural norms differ, but lawyers in very different countries described familiar pressures: heavy workloads, demanding clients, immutable deadlines, performance expectations, responsibility for consequential outcomes, and a professional culture that often treats constant availability and overextension as normal.
In that sense, the problem may not simply be how many hours lawyers work. The expectations placed on lawyers can be unreasonable, and the intensity and pressure of the work remain even when total hours are lower.
Conversations about lawyer well-being and burnout often focus heavily on time. Work fewer hours. Take your vacation. Set better boundaries. Get more rest. Those things matter, and I teach some of them myself. But they may be only part of the equation.
What Working-Hours Data Miss About Lawyer Well-Being
The more I looked at the data, the more interested I became in what it couldn't tell me. An annual-hours statistic can tell us how long someone worked, but not what those hours felt like. It doesn't tell us whether the workload was manageable, whether the person had control over their schedule, whether they could stop thinking about work when the day ended, or whether taking vacation meant returning to an impossible backlog.
It also doesn't tell us much about the emotional content of the work. For lawyers working with people experiencing violence, injury, abuse, exploitation, loss, or other forms of trauma, the question isn't simply how long they work. It is also what they are exposed to while they're working and what support exists to help them process that exposure.
And averages can obscure enormous differences between workplaces. Two lawyers in the same city, practicing under the same laws and national labor protections, may experience completely different professional cultures.
Conveniently, just as these questions were beginning to take shape for me, I found myself in Rome at the annual conference of the Pan-European Organisation of Personal Injury Lawyers (“PEOPIL”).
Over several days, I talked with lawyers from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United States, and elsewhere. I started asking about working hours, vacation, burnout, workplace culture, and whether people actually disconnect when they're away.
Those conversations weren't scientific evidence, but they offered something quantitative data couldn't: context. What I heard made me think the more useful question may not be whether lawyers in Europe work less. It may be what makes legal work sustainable in the first place, and what lawyer well-being requires beyond fewer working hours.
I'll share more about those conversations in my next email.
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