This week I shared the findings of our State of In-house 2025 report on LinkedIn, based on interviews with 160 in-house lawyers and legal ops professionals. Section 1, ‘Under pressure: stress, burnout & resourcing’ revealed some concerning stats:
That’s 38% of in-house lawyers confronting burnout recently in one way or another.
As I’ve mentioned before, in-house legal has had a rough time - war, inflation, political turbulence, enormous disruption from AI. For UK startups, one of our banks even collapsed.
Companies grew really fast; then a lot of the same companies shrank really fast.
Reductions in force are a fact of life in venture-backed startups. But that doesn’t mean they’re easy - far from it. They’re orders of magnitude worse for those affected by them. That goes without saying.
But the mental toll on legal teams of backstopping that process is real, and shouldn’t be dismissed. It takes its toll on lawyer mental health.
Last year at Scaleup GC, Annmarie Carvalho explored the ways in which lawyers are susceptible to stress and burnout. Commenting on our data, she said:
For people with insecurities and who tend towards having an external locus of evaluation, like many lawyers, being the in-house lawyer in a climate of redundancies and layoffs is extremely tough.
That’s why we were proud to support lawyers’ mental health by donating to LawCare for every survey submission we received.
The context behind all of this is that legal teams aren’t growing. 69% of them are either staying flat or shrinking. So with less resource, a series of unprecedented challenges, and increasing workload, stress and burnout are inevitable.
But wait: wasn’t automation supposed to solve all this? Automate the low-risk tasks, focus on the value-add work, get your life back?
There are only really two options. Either everyone selling and buying tech was wrong; or automation can help … we just didn’t do enough of it.
We know that CLM has an adoption problem. At Juro we take great pride in having the highest adoption rate in our category, according to independent G2 reviews. But there are solutions who I won’t name and shame - ones you’d have heard of - whose adoption rate is half of Juro’s.
Vendors need to think hard about why that is. And about whether the influx of generative AI use cases gives us another chance to direct technological progress at solving the problems that still leave lawyers way too stressed.
Next week we’ll share and analyse our survey data on AI adoption. Some of it is surprising. Some of it really isn’t. But whatever your opinions are on legal technology, the end result we’re working towards must include a better work-life balance for lawyers.
Because in-house doesn’t have to be this way.
Richard Mabey is the CEO and co-founder of Juro, the intelligent contract automation platform. Under his leadership, Juro has scaled rapidly, backed by $38 million in venture funding from prominent investors including Eight Roads, USV, Point Nine Capital and Seedcamp, and the founders of companies like Indeed, Gumtree and Wise.
Richard trained and qualified at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, working as an M&A associate in London and New York. He gained an MBA from INSEAD, and then spent time at LegalZoom, learning to build legal tech products.
Frustrated by the manual legal processes that slow down businesses, Richard co-founded Juro in 2016, with a mission to help the world agree contracts faster. Beyond Juro, he hosts the "Brief Encounters" podcast, makes angel investments, and supports other ambitious ventures from the boardroom. Richard is a Fellow of the RSA, an adviser to The Entrepreneurs Network and sits as a Non-executive Director of Bright Blue.
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