By Elizabeth M. Miller bio
I’ve been working with the legal profession for nearly 40 years and I can assure you it is one of the most stressful work environments ever.
The legal profession as a career choice is stressful because of stringent deadlines, including statutes of limitations, which if you miss one of those you have just sunk your own battleship. Other stressful factors include demanding and inflexible clients, who are stressed out because they are unfamiliar with the legal system. They pass their stress on to the lawyer and staff with their insecurities, continuous questions, and need for reassurance. Clients do not know legal procedures, they do not know how to manage stress, and often their expectations are sometimes unreasonable. These emotions are passed on to the law firm.
Lawyers also contribute to the stressful environment with the character traits perfectionism and pessimism. Perfectionism ensures that work is always accurate and detailed-oriented. Pessimism ensures that the lawyers are always on the look-out for what can go wrong. These two traits when taken to the extreme can obviously be a recipe for disaster. No work product will ever be good enough, even if it is perfect. Lawyers correct, re-write, and re-think the most basic letters and pleadings over and over. After pleadings or correspondence have been filed, submitted, and served, they pontificate about what the result will be, whether they could have done better thereby getting a better result, or if they did everything they could.
All of these emotions spill over to others in the law firm. It’s what I call “second-hand stress.” Here are a few ways you can reduce the level of second-hand stress that affects you and your staff:
- Identify any demands of work life which might be mistakenly perceived as unmanageable and change them. For example, if your lawyers are worried about missing deadlines, make sure you have a docketing system and a back-up. Are they worried about sending out perfect documents? Make sure that your forms are up to date, not saved over—and ready for use for each new case. This will keep your staff from making errors by including information from another case in a pleading.
- Make sure you actively practice work/life balance or work/life integration. Do not become a slave to your law firm, working unreasonable and unmanageable hours and do not allow your staff to do this either. While you might think that working overtime will ensure that everything at the firm is running smoothly, what it actually does is take a toll on your personal life and your staff. Work life and personal life are obviously interconnected. When you short-change your personal life, you will experience even more stress. The same is true for your employees. Everyone needs to shut down and disconnect.
- Relax and recharge—and leave the office at the office. Sounds pretty easy right? Not as easy as you might think. You have to train yourself to believe that since you have done everything you could during the day to avoid missing deadlines, talking to clients, and being prepared, that it is more than ok to turn off the office. And then do it!
- Make sure you have a social life—and not with people from the office or people who work in the legal profession. Getting together after-hours or on the weekend at a social function with other people who work in a law firm to commiserate and discuss work stressors is not going to help minimize your stress levels. In fact, it may make it worse because discussing it with colleagues may in fact reinforce your beliefs that second-hand stress is just a part of the business.
- Don’t internalize or take client problems personal. This is very difficult to do, especially because you are dealing with real life people in real life situations who may be suffering. You cannot personally take on their problems and as much as you might want to get personally involved, it is not good for you or the client.
Conclusion
It is not difficult to recognize how second-hand stress can caused by working in a law firm, but it can sometimes be difficult to acknowledge how it affects you. Be proactive in separating yourself personally from client problems. Remember that continued stress can adversely affect your health and that is not good for you, your practice, or your family. Trust me; I’ve been there.
