What lawyers across Europe told me about time off, workload, and workplace culture.
Dear Justice with Humanity Community,
In my last Field Note, I explored an apparent contradiction: people in many European countries work fewer hours than Americans, yet research on lawyer burnout and mental health still shows significant levels of anxiety, poor mental well-being, and distress across the legal profession.
The numbers left me wondering what else might be shaping lawyers’ experiences. So at the recent Pan-European Organisation of Personal Injury Lawyers (“PEOPIL”) Annual Conference in Rome, I started asking lawyers myself.
These were informal conversations, not research, and I want to be careful not to generalize individual experiences to entire countries. But after conversations with lawyers from across Europe and the UK, several patterns emerged.
The most striking was the consistent pressures of legal practice across borders. Different systems may regulate work differently, but deadlines, client demands, financial pressure, high-stakes decision-making, emotional responsibility, and expectations of responsiveness travel remarkably well. Fewer hours can reduce exposure to work, but they do not necessarily change what the profession expects from lawyers during those hours—or how much work follows them home.
Vacation, Psychological Detachment, and Recovery From Legal Work
I was especially curious about August. In France and many other European countries, taking substantial time away during the summer is culturally normalized. From an American perspective, a month-long vacation can sound like the antidote to burnout.
So I asked people who had taken that time: Were you actually off?
The answers complicated the picture. Some people were checking email because they feared what they would return to if they didn't. Others were handling emergencies or responding to issues that couldn't wait. One person explained that although he wasn't actively working, work remained present in his head. He had physically left work without psychologically leaving it.
Research on recovery from work has long distinguished between simply being away from work and psychologically detaching from it; studies have linked poorer psychological detachment during non-work time with greater emotional exhaustion and need for recovery.
Another wrinkle I hadn't considered was what happens afterward. Several people described September as “madness.” When much of a workplace—or an entire professional ecosystem—slows down during August, the work often isn't eliminated. It is deferred. People return to a backlog of emails, deadlines, client needs, and a month of work demanding attention at once.
That raises a different question about vacation policy. It isn't only whether people are permitted to leave. What happens to their work while they're gone?
If an organization provides generous leave but has no meaningful mechanism to redistribute or reduce workload, it may be providing time away without creating the conditions for sustained recovery.
One lawyer I spoke with offered a different example. He had taken six weeks away, spending part of the time working remotely and then traveling with his family, where he completely disconnected. When I asked what that extended period away had done for him, he told me he could finally spend quality time with his children.
We often justify well-being in professional terms: rest makes us more productive and vacation prevents burnout. That may be true, but it can also reinforce the idea that our well-being matters primarily because of what it enables us to produce. Sometimes the value of not working is that we get to inhabit the rest of our lives.
Law Firm Culture May Matter as Much as Country
Another assumption began to fall apart as I talked with people: that national culture would dominate explanations for differences in lawyer well-being.
People certainly described meaningful differences between countries and legal systems. But they also described enormous differences between workplaces within the same country. Several people told versions of the same story: they had worked somewhere with unhealthy expectations around hours, workload, or availability, then moved to another organization in the same country and had a very different experience.
That suggests that comparing “European” and “American” lawyers can only take us so far. The structure of legal practice matters too. Barristers practicing independently face different conditions from lawyers employed within large firms. Independent lawyers have different sources of autonomy and pressure than employees. Even the relationship between a lawyer and a firm varies considerably among European legal systems.
What began as a question about geography increasingly looked like a question about work design and lawyer well-being: workload, autonomy, leadership, incentives, psychological safety, professional structure, and the expectations communicated by the people around us.
That interpretation aligns with the recommendations in LawCare's 2025 Life in the Law Report. Rather than placing responsibility for well-being solely on individual legal professionals, LawCare calls on legal workplaces to address the conditions in which people work: actively managing workloads, rethinking targets and incentives, challenging cultures of long hours, investing in effective people management, supporting flexible and hybrid working, and evaluating whether mental health and well-being initiatives are actually working. The recommendations also extend upstream, calling for legal education and training to better prepare people for sustainable careers in the profession.
Why Wellness Training Alone Cannot Fix Lawyer Burnout
One conversation captured this particularly well. A lawyer at a large law firm told me that her workplace offers training on burnout and well-being, but schedules it during lunch. The sessions aren't mandatory, and lunch may be the only genuine break people have during the workday.
There is an almost absurd contradiction in asking people to sacrifice their opportunity for rest in order to learn how to take better care of themselves. But I don't think this is really a story about one firm's scheduling decision. It reflects a broader challenge in how our profession has approached well-being.
Education matters. People benefit from understanding burnout, trauma, nervous system regulation, boundaries, and strategies for working sustainably. Those are skills I teach and believe in deeply.
But we cannot educate individuals out of organizational problems.
A lawyer can learn to recognize the signs of depletion, but that knowledge has limited protective value if the workload remains chronically unmanageable. We can teach boundaries in an organization where the unwritten rules punish people for asserting them. We can encourage people to take vacation without changing what happens to their workload while they're gone.
Individual skills and organizational conditions aren't competing approaches. We need both. That is increasingly where I think the conversation about lawyer well-being, burnout prevention, and sustainable legal practice needs to go.
Lawyer Well-Being and a Profession in Transition
One final theme gave me reason for optimism. Across several conversations, people described younger lawyers as less willing to accept working cultures that older generations often treated as inevitable. Expectations around availability, sacrifice, working hours, and the place of work within a person's life appear to be increasingly open for negotiation.
Whether that produces lasting structural change remains to be seen. But questioning inherited norms is an important beginning.
I went to Rome wondering whether the issues I've spent years thinking about in the United States would translate to a European context. I came home struck by how familiar the challenges sounded across borders.
The laws are different. Professional structures are different. Cultural attitudes toward work and vacation are different. Yet the profession's demands are surprisingly consistent across borders. Lawyers described different versions of many of the same pressures.
That left me wondering whether some burnout and distress stems from the profession's demands and expectations. The work remains demanding and consequential whether it occupies 35 hours a week or 55. And if one source of stress is the feeling that the work is never finished, simply working fewer hours will not solve the problem.
Underneath the differences are remarkably familiar questions: How much can we sustainably ask of people? What does meaningful recovery require? What happens when the emotional demands of the work follow us home? What responsibility belongs to individuals, and what responsibility belongs to the organizations and systems in which they work?
Those are questions I want to keep exploring. Different legal systems and cultures may require different approaches, but the need to make legal work more sustainable crosses borders. And there is an opportunity to learn from one another as we figure out what actually helps lawyers do this work well—and remain well while doing it.
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