Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. I practiced law for 10 years and now I help unhappy lawyers ditch their soul-sucking jobs. On this show, I share advice and strategies for aspiring former lawyers, and interviews with former lawyers who have left the law behind to find careers and lives that they love.

So let's talk about burnout. I know we've talked about this several times on the podcast recently, but I've just seen it coming up over and over and over with my clients, which happens and has happened over the years all the time. But given everything in 2025, it's coming up even more.

I want to talk today specifically about something that I hear from people a lot, which is people will say, especially if they're more junior in their career, or especially if they have made a recent move—like from one law firm to another or from a firm to in-house—they will say something to me like, “Well, I don't think I should be this burned out at this point. It hasn't been that long.” Again, either they haven't been practicing that long or they haven't been at the new job all that long. They have this sense that they shouldn't be that burned out, that there's something invalid about their burnout because it hasn't been very long.

One, I just want to say there’s no timeline in which burnout happens. Depending on the intensity and toxicity of the environment, you can become burned out very quickly. But the main thing that I want to talk to you about today is that if you are a high-achieving perfectionist, which is very likely if you're a lawyer, your burnout did not start the day that you graduated from law school or the day that you started at your law firm or whatever legal job you got after law school.

The reality is that for most people who are high-achieving perfectionists, you have been earning and banking this burnout probably for most of your life. So when you reach a point where you're, for example, leaving a law firm after a handful of years and you feel so incredibly burnt out and you're like, “Why? I don’t understand. I’ve only been here for four years. I’ve only been here for six years. I’ve only been here for eight years. I’ve only been here for a year,” often, when I talk with people, they are thinking about their burnout as though it is limited to the place in which it really exposed itself or where the symptoms really became severe, and that is their legal job, whatever practicing job they're in.

But for most people who are lawyers, they have been doing things that contribute to burnout for a very long time. A lot of people at a very young age learned that, for example, “I need to achieve. Achieving is good. Achieving earns me approval. Doing things with my brain makes people happy with me. I like when people are happy with me, so I’m going to keep doing that.” Frequently, that also involves them learning to ignore the feelings they have that might prevent them from achieving in the way that they think they should.

So tiredness or sadness or basic feelings that your nervous system generates to tell you, “Hey, something’s a little bit off here. Maybe you should do something else or take a break.” A lot of people who became lawyers, who are high-achieving perfectionists, don’t really think that it’s okay to take a break. They never really have. They probably grew up with some sense of “quitting is bad.” We’ve talked about that on the podcast before. Once you’ve decided to do something, you do it.

They often have the sense of, “Well, I just need to do my best. My best is like, I’m not doing my best unless I’m literally giving every single ounce of blood, sweat, and tears that I have.” So there are a lot of ways that people who become lawyers have operated in the world before practicing law, before law school, that already have set them up for burnout. But you were younger and sprier and spritelier and you often didn’t really realize that was happening, so you end up burnt out as a lawyer.

Yeah, for some people, maybe it just started when they started practicing. But for a lot of lawyers—anyone who says they’re high-achieving, anyone who says they’re a perfectionist, anyone who says, “Me? I’m not a perfectionist because if I was a perfectionist, I’d do things a lot more perfectly”—that made my therapist laugh, I will say, which was peak therapy. You win at therapy if you make your therapist laugh.

If you have spent your whole life thinking that you should be perfect, believing that that’s a reasonable goal, your burnout did not start the day that you started practicing law or the day you started in your particularly toxic legal workplace. That burnout has been cooking for a really long time. I wanted to talk about this because I think it is so easy for people to be like, “Well, I don’t understand why I’m so burnt out and it’s only been X amount of time.”

Often it’s actually been much, much longer than that. Your burnout has been developing for a much longer time, and you’ve only reached the point where the symptoms are so unavoidable that you have to face them, whereas before you were able to ignore them. Also, sometimes you just are in a place that is that toxic. A really toxic place can create a large amount of burnout in people very, very quickly.

Regardless of why you are burnt out, the reality is that there is no should or shouldn’t when it comes to burnout. It just is. I think the longer that we fight the reality of “I’m burnt out,” the longer it can take to get back to your baseline. I’m not saying this to be like, "Berate yourself for being burnt out to the extent you are because blah, blah, blah." No. What I’m saying is be kind to yourself because you’re a human being.

Burnout is just a symptom of being human and being asked to do too much, which many lawyers don’t believe is possible, they think they should just be able to do whatever is asked of them, that is just not the reality of being human. There’s something very freeing about accepting that you’re human and that you do not have unlimited capacity and that that’s okay.

I hope that this was helpful. I am sending lots of love to all of the lawyers out there who are experiencing burnout. I know that it’s really difficult, and I hope that you are able to get yourself the support that you deserve. Thanks so much for listening. I'll talk to you next week.

Thanks so much for listening. I absolutely love getting to share this podcast with you. If you haven't yet, I invite you to download my free guide: First Steps to Leaving the Law at formerlawyer.com/first. Until next time, have a great week.