How to Guarantee Burnout in Your In-House Legal Team
Please note: This is a satirical take on what NOT to do to your legal team. If you're looking for genuine advice on preventing burnout, click here.
If you're a business leader who wants to ensure your legal team burns out spectacularly, follow this foolproof guide.
For anyone else (especially if you’re currently working in-house), consider this your checklist of warning signs to watch out for and actively prevent.
Give Them Manual Work Only
Keep giving your legal team tasks that are boring and a waste of their time and talent, and therefore make them feel terrible about themselves. The lower their professional self-worth, the better.
Why invest in legal technology or process improvements when you can have highly qualified lawyers manually copying and pasting company details into NDAs for the hundredth time this month? Make sure they spend their days on repetitive, mind-numbing tasks that a paralegal or automated system could handle. Nothing says "we value your legal expertise" like having someone with a law degree manually updating signature blocks.
Isolate Them
Ideally, you should have just one in-house lawyer regardless of overall headcount. Be sure to tell that lawyer they'll be by themselves indefinitely, doing all that manual work.
Create a legal team of one and make it clear that hiring additional legal support is never going to happen. Let them know they're expected to handle everything from complex M&A transactions to basic employment questions, all while maintaining the same response times as a fully staffed legal department. Bonus points if you regularly remind them how expensive lawyers are and how lucky they should feel to have a job.
Encourage Negative Biases
Allow folks to have a negative perception of your legal team and throw lazy generalisations their way based on what they've seen in legal dramas. Let them think of legal as the "department of no," risk-obsessed, a cash drain on the business, fee-extracting vultures, and so on.
Never challenge these stereotypes or educate your team about what legal actually does. When someone makes a joke about lawyers being the "fun police," just laugh along. Don't bother explaining how legal enables deals or protects the company from significant risks. Let the negative perception fester and watch as your legal team becomes increasingly defensive and isolated.
Take Them for Granted
No need to ever check in to see if your legal team is okay - they're robots with no feelings, not fellow human beings.
Assume that because lawyers are trained to be resilient and handle pressure, they don't need the same support, recognition, or mental health considerations as other employees. Never ask how they're coping with the workload or if they need additional resources. After all, they're paid to handle stress, right?
Keep Their Value Secret
Why let your legal team use technology, AI and automation to track their performance and show you how aligned they are with company goals when you can force them to do this in clunky spreadsheets instead? Or just stay in the dark about their performance - everyone needs an enemy at work, right?
Make sure legal never gets the tools they need to demonstrate their value to the business. Don't invest in legal operations or analytics that could show how quickly they turn around contracts or how much risk they've helped the company avoid. Keep their contributions invisible so other departments can continue to see them as a cost centre rather than a strategic asset.
No Downtime
The intense, reactive mode your legal team activates to support revenue generation in the weeks leading up to end-of-quarter is a breeze - why give them extra time off immediately afterwards when they can be back at their desk at 9 AM on day one of the next quarter?
Ignore the fact that end-of-quarter periods involve 12-hour days, weekend work, and constant high-pressure negotiations. As soon as the quarter closes, expect them to be fresh and ready for the next wave of urgent requests. Recovery time is for the weak.
Ignore Their Processes
Hey, you know that manual process your legal team set up because you won't give them budget for proper technology? Well, don't worry - go right ahead and ignore it and continue to ping them incessantly on Slack 24/7, or whatever platform you happen to be on.
When legal creates intake processes or communication protocols, feel free to bypass them entirely. Why use the proper channels when you can send urgent contract requests via text message at 11 PM? Make sure different team members contact legal through different platforms so they have to monitor email, Slack, Teams, and their personal phones simultaneously.
Micromanagement is Key
CFOs, VPs of Sales, COOs - please continue to tell your legal team how to do their jobs better even though you're not legally qualified and don't have a clue what you're talking about.
Second-guess every legal decision and offer helpful suggestions like "can't we just delete that liability clause?" or "why don't we just accept their terms - what's the worst that could happen?" Make sure to question their judgment publicly in meetings and suggest that legal requirements are just suggestions that can be ignored when convenient.
The Reality Behind the Sarcasm
If you've recognised your organisation in any of these points, it's time for some serious reflection. These behaviours don't just cause burnout - they drive talented legal professionals out of the industry entirely and expose your company to significant risks.
Creating a sustainable environment for your legal team requires:
Adequate resources and staffing for the workload you're expecting
Investment in legal technology to eliminate manual, repetitive tasks
Recognition and respect for legal expertise and professional judgment
Clear communication channels and respect for established processes
Regular check-ins on workload and wellbeing
Recovery time after high-pressure periods
Visibility into legal's contributions to business success
Your legal team wants to be strategic business partners who help drive company success. Give them the tools, respect, and support they need to do exactly that.
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