The state of burnout in the legal profession

Burnout in legal isn't a new conversation. What's new is the scale of it.

According to Juro's State of In-house 2026 report, which surveyed more than 130 in-house lawyers across sixteen countries, more than half of in-house lawyers (52%) have seriously considered leaving their role due to stress or burnout. That's more than double the figure from the previous year's survey, when almost a quarter of respondents reported experiencing burnout.

AI was supposed to change this. Faster contract review, automated first drafts, and fewer hours lost to repetitive work were meant to hand time back to lawyers. Instead, the data suggests something more complicated: burnout is rising at the same time as AI adoption, not falling because of it.

This article breaks down what's actually driving burnout in legal teams right now, what the most recent data shows, and some actionable steps you can take to protect your wellbeing as an in-house lawyer.

Key findings on legal burnout today

• 77% of in-house lawyers regularly work beyond their contracted hours
• 18% do this every day or almost every day, not just during crunch periods
• 95.5% continue handling legal tasks while on leave
• 36% do this during most or all of their leave periods
• 52% have seriously considered leaving their role due to stress or burnout
• Despite this, 66% describe team morale as positive or very positive
• 90% still find their work meaningful
• 68% would choose an in-house legal career again

Three years of Juro data show the same story getting worse

Burnout in legal isn't a one-off finding. Juro has been tracking it across three consecutive years of research, and the trend line only moves in one direction:

• May 2024: a Juro survey of 100+ in-house lawyers found that over 50% had experienced burnout at some point in their career.
• State of In-house 2025: almost a quarter of respondents reported experiencing burnout in the previous 12 months alone.
• State of In-house 2026: 52% have seriously considered leaving their role due to stress or burnout.

Read together, these numbers describe a profession where the boundary between work and rest has effectively disappeared, but where lawyers still feel their work matters. That combination is exactly what makes burnout in legal so hard to spot and so hard to fix. High morale can mask real strain, right up until someone reaches a breaking point.

Why is burnout intensifying in legal?

Having spoken to lawyers firsthand, we floated (and tested) some theories on what's driving an increasing rate of burnout for legal professionals. Here's what they hypothesized:

1. AI is adding short-term workload before it removes any

It's tempting to assume that AI adoption and burnout move in opposite directions. The 2026 data suggests the relationship is more complicated, at least for now.

As Stephanie Dominy, General Counsel and Head of Operations at Tessl, put it:

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In her view, legal teams are often waiting to see whether AI can unlock more capacity before they commit to hiring, which increases workload in the short term. Learning a new tool, redesigning a workflow, or reviewing AI-drafted output all take time before they save any. Teams are investing effort now for a payoff that hasn't landed yet, and this is felt across businesses.

2. Low decision latitude, at volume

A recurring theme in burnout research, echoed by burnout specialist Sally Clarke in Juro's earlier legal wellbeing panel, is "decision latitude": how much control someone has over their own work.

In-house lawyers are frequently buried in repetitive, low-value tasks (NDA reviews, routine approvals, first-pass contract markup) where they have little discretion over what lands on their desk or when. Combined with long hours, that lack of control is one of the clearest predictors of burnout.

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3. The "anxious overachiever" pattern

Michael Haynes, General Counsel at Juro, offers another explanation in the 2026 report: many in-house lawyers are high performers who get real satisfaction from delivering more, faster. AI feeds that pattern. It lets you do more in the same amount of time, and that feels good, right up until achievement becomes the only source of validation and switching off becomes harder, not easier.

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4. Time off isn't actually time off for legal

The single most telling statistic in the report may be this one: 95.5% of in-house lawyers continue doing legal work while on leave, and over a third do this during most or all of their time off. Annual leave, in practice, has become a lower-intensity version of the working week rather than a genuine break from it. Recovery time that never actually recovers anything compounds burnout risk over the course of a year, not just a busy quarter.

Why morale hasn't collapsed despite burnout

Given those numbers, you'd expect morale to be in freefall. It isn't. 66% of respondents describe team morale as positive or very positive, and 90% say they find their work meaningful.

This isn't a contradiction so much as a warning sign. As Nicolette Nowak, General Counsel at Beamery, notes, lawyers didn't choose the profession expecting to coast: the work is intellectually engaging even when it's exhausting, and that sense of purpose can sustain morale for a long time.

But purpose doesn't substitute for rest, and it doesn't show up in the 52% who've seriously considered leaving. High morale and high burnout risk can, and currently do, coexist in the same team.

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Is technology helping with legal burnout?

Elizabeth Rimmer, Chief Executive of LawCare (the mental health charity for the legal community in the UK, Republic of Ireland, Channel Islands and Isle of Man), made a related point in conversation with Juro CEO Richard Mabey on the Brief Encounters podcast: technology can hand lawyers back time, but it doesn't automatically hand back wellbeing.

Whether that reclaimed time is reinvested in rest or simply absorbed by more work is a cultural and organisational choice, not something AI adoption resolves on its own. That's precisely the pattern the 2026 data confirms: AI is freeing up capacity, but nearly two-thirds of teams expect that freed-up capacity to be reabsorbed into more in-house work rather than converted into recovery time.

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The consistent message across all three years of research, the webinar panel, and the podcast conversation is the same: burnout in legal is a systemic and organisational issue, not an individual resilience problem, and it needs to be addressed at the level of workload design, not with wellness perks layered on top of an unsustainable structure.

8 tangible steps to reduce burnout in legal teams

Awareness of the problem isn't the bottleneck anymore. Most legal leaders already know their teams are stretched. The gap is between knowing that and actually building the systems that change it. Based on what's actually working for the legal leaders interviewed in the 2026 report, here's where to start.

1. Audit where time is actually going, not where you assume it's going

‍Before automating anything, track a typical two-week period across the team: how much time goes to genuinely judgement-heavy work versus repetitive, rules-based tasks like standard NDAs, routine order forms, or first-pass reviews. Most teams underestimate how much of their week is repeatable.

2. Take low-risk, high-volume contracts off lawyers' desks entirely

In the 2026 survey, 54% of respondents said routine contracts could realistically be handled without day-to-day legal involvement, and 13% said their team is already doing this. Self-serve templates and approval workflows with clear guardrails let the business move without a lawyer touching every document, which is exactly the "capacity" category of work Michael Haynes describes as ripe for automation.

3. Set explicit, tool-agnostic boundaries around leave

‍Rebecca McKenzie, Chief Legal & Business Officer at Codat, admitted to working through every holiday for her first two to three years in the role. The fix she describes isn't a wellness policy; it's operational: build enough self-serve capacity and delegated sign-off that the business genuinely doesn't need to reach the lawyer on leave. Boundaries only hold if the workload behind them is redesigned, not just declared.

4. Redefine what "value" looks like for a lawyer's time

‍If success is still measured by how many contracts someone personally reviewed, AI adoption will just raise the bar rather than lower the workload. Shift performance conversations toward judgement, risk calls, and business partnership, the things AI genuinely can't do, rather than throughput.

5. Invest deliberately in workflow design, not just tool access

‍Michael Haynes' point in the report is worth repeating: many teams are chasing AI's efficiency gains without prioritising the time to actually engage with the technology and redesign processes around it. Buying a tool doesn't save time on its own. Someone has to own the rollout, define the playbooks, and set the guardrails, and that needs to be resourced as real work, not squeezed in around everything else.

6. Track burnout indicators the same way you'd track any other legal risk

‍Working hours, leave usage, and after-hours activity are measurable. If 18% of a team is working beyond contracted hours almost daily, that's a leading indicator worth surfacing to leadership before it becomes a retention problem, not after.

7. Make the "why" explicit, regularly

‍90% of lawyers in the survey still find their work meaningful, and that sense of purpose is genuinely protective, but only if it's reinforced. Rebecca McKenzie points to camaraderie and proximity to the business as part of what sustains her team through pressure. That doesn't happen by accident; it comes from leaders actively connecting day-to-day legal work back to outcomes the team can see.

8. Access help

Ending on the single most important piece of advice we have: get the help you need.

No one should have to navigate this alone. If you’re feeling overwhelmed - or want to support someone who is -  these resources can help:

• LawCare: confidential mental health support for legal professionals
  
• Juro Community: a space for in-house legal to connect, share and support each other

One of the most powerful ways to shift the culture around mental health in law is simply to hear from the people driving change. If you’re looking for voices who speak openly, bravely, and practically about the emotional reality of legal work, start here:These aren’t just inspiring people - they’re shaping the future of the legal profession. Listening to them is a great place to start. Acting on what they say is even better.

• Justin Farrance – founder of Legally Proud and a prominent advocate for mental health, inclusion and belonging in law
  
• Henry Nelson-Case – lawyer, mental health campaigner and regular voice on wellbeing in legal
  
• Jodi Hill – employment lawyer and mental health activist, writing candidly about stress, burnout and recovery
  
• Annmarie Carvalho – former family lawyer turned therapist, now helping legal professionals manage their mental health

You don’t have to be a mental health expert to make a difference. You just have to care - and be willing to talk.

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