Lawyers Are Burning Out, Can AI Help?

A major survey by the American Bar Association has found that ‘nearly half of all lawyers (47.4%) screened positive for high burnout, including 15.6% meeting the threshold for severe burnout’. Can AI help?

The survey of 37,000 lawyers across the US, performed in conjunction with Krill Strategies, also found the following data, (rounded up to whole numbers) –  

• 36% of lawyers report high or very high conflict between their professional and personal lives.
• 42% of lawyers screened positive for risky drinking under standard clinical thresholds.
• Plus, when asked what they believed to be the situation with colleagues, ‘57% reported observing mental health or substance use problems among colleagues occasionally or regularly’.
• 31% reported encountering a legal professional in the past 12 months whose well-being raised concerns about fitness to practice.
• 41% of lawyers reported that time in the legal profession has been detrimental to their mental health.
• 27% reported considering leaving the profession due to mental health, burnout or stress.

Meanwhile, only 39% felt that their employers were ‘doing enough’ to support them, and only 25% believed the legal profession as a whole was ‘doing enough’ – although it’s perhaps hard to define what this would look like, (see below).

Now, some might say that the legal profession has long had these characteristics, just as ER doctors and the police have difficult working lives (e.g. long hours, an ‘always on’ culture, constant demands for high level attention, severe professional risks related to errors), but that isn’t necessarily a good reason for it to stay that way.

This site, and no doubt many others in this sector, would ask: can AI help here? If AI eats up a lot of the more process level work, does it free up time, reduce stress, and generally help to make things better for lawyers?

The jury is still out on this, and the often-quoted response, at least for law firms, is: ‘Just because you finish a piece of work more quickly with AI doesn’t mean you’re going home that evening. There’s just more work to be done.’

Plus, AL has got to say, at no point in the last few years has anyone working as a lawyer told this site that AI helped them to relax, that it reduced stress, or that it allowed them go home at a decent hour on a Friday. Maybe there are plenty for whom AI has helped in this way, but AL has not chatted to them.

It’s also interesting that Patrick R. Krill, who works at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Minnesota Medical School – and who was part of the survey team, noted: ‘…as the profession navigates the significant uncertainties and changes brought by the proliferation of AI, it is more important than ever for the well-being of lawyers to be a truly central priority.’

I.e. from Krill’s perspective, AI may be adding to the profession’s anxieties. Perhaps this is because AI threatens jobs (although we have seen no real evidence of this for lawyers yet), or maybe it’s because lawyers feel compelled to use AI while not being fully certain of its outputs? Or maybe it’s just another area of change to contend with, as change can trigger stress in people used to a certain way of working?

But, could AI be a helper, rather than another ingredient in the stress cocktail of legal work?

The short answer is: yes.

However, if AI absorbs more process-heavy work, its benefits are only going to be felt if the person who has been relieved of that burden by technology can fill that time with something better – and it should be said something they enjoy more.

E.g. an inhouse lawyer uses AI to stay on top of a mass of contracts. This saves them loads of time. But does the inhouse team now allow for them to do more interesting work? Or does this efficiency gain just lead to more manual process work landing on their desk?

Meanwhile, if they can now do higher value work, which is more strategic and thus riskier in terms of getting things right or wrong, will they like that challenge? AL has never forgotten the time an inhouse lawyer came up to this site’s founder after a speech and said: ‘But I don’t want to do more complex work, I like doing what I do.’

That said, for many lawyers exchanging ‘boring’ work for more strategic work could be a huge positive and lead to a reduction in stress and higher overall happiness. It will depend on the person.

And then law firms – will you go home on a Friday evening if you are an M&A lawyer at a global giant because AI absorbed 50% of the doc review task you were doing? Maybe, but it would depend on the partners at the firm allowing that, rather than expecting you to immediately move onto another task – in part to keep you occupied and billing at full tilt.

But, perhaps at a NewMod firm, where lawyers are not on the hour, AI works as a positive part of their approach to the job. Perhaps they would have set hours and could keep to them, as going over that time isn’t necessary within the design of the business model?

Therefore, the long answer is that AI could help, but it’s the current human systems and working patterns that need to change with it if there is to be meaningful growth and improvement in many lawyers’ professional environments. AI alone can’t fix humanity’s working cultures. But, it could perhaps be a beneficial ingredient in the mix, and perhaps even act as a catalyst for positive change.

More about the survey here.

Plus, if you are in the UK and are affected by any of the above issues, the organisation Law Care –  see here – may be helpful.

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Legal Innovators UK – London, Nov 4 and 5