A reader writes:
I am a junior partner at a law firm. I earned my promotion by taking on an unsustainable workload — working early mornings, late nights, weekends, and during annual leave — while helping to manage firm-wide HR, recruitment, and business development with very little administrative support.
My direct supervisor (who works even harder and longer than I do) is incredibly supportive and has repeatedly warned me about burn-out. However, because overworking is my default and I associate stepping back with laziness, I ignored the signs. Recently, the pressure caught up with me, and I suffered a severe, two-hour panic attack in my office that was witnessed by several colleagues. I was hyperventilating and crying alone in my office, until a colleague of mine was kind enough to talk me through it. I have never experienced anything like this before.
About three weeks before this incident, I had agreed with my supervisor that I would step back from the firm-wide responsibilities and focus on the casework, which I have been doing. Before I had agreed to step back from those responsibilities, I was still doing those and doing enough casework to bill significantly in excess of my billing targets.
I am struggling deeply with the aftermath of the panic attack and would love your perspective on a few things:
Although my colleagues were sympathetic, I am terrified I have permanently damaged my professional authority. How do I maintain my standing as a partner without oversharing or appearing defensive?
My supervisor is currently on a rare, overdue holiday but still continuing to regularly work remotely. I feel immense guilt that I’ve let her down and that she will now view me as unreliable, impacting her own heavy workload. I also worry she might blame herself. When she returns, how do I discuss this with her without just apologizing for “not being strong enough”? She is the closest thing I have had to a mentor in my career, and I feel worried that, if I try to do less work to cope with my situation, I will ultimately be letting her down.
This crisis has made me question my entire career. If I cannot handle this level of stress, should I even be a lawyer? Is it possible to find long-term happiness and sustainability in senior legal roles, or do I need to pivot out of private practice entirely?
I don’t mean to downplay what happened at all, but I think you might be surprised by how many people’s coworkers have found them crying at work — it’s not everyone, but it’s more than you’d think. That’s especially true in stressful fields. And it might help to keep in mind that your colleagues who saw you don’t know what was going on or that it was connected to work at all; for all they know, you’d just had terrible personal news. In other words, they’re probably not viewing what happened as, “Oh, wow, Jane can’t cut it.” They just know that you’re human and you were having a hard time — as they themselves and people close to them have all experienced at some point.
You’re questioning whether this means that you shouldn’t be a lawyer at all — but you also clearly wrote that you’ve taken on an unsustainable workload with little support. The issue is the workload, not the work.
It is worth asking whether working at this particular firm (or in this particular area of law) requires that unsustainable workload. Is everyone around you working the same unsustainable hours with the same unsustainable amount of pressure, or has anyone successfully forged another path there? If this is just How It Is And Will Always Be there, then yes, that’s a sign that it’s not a good place to build a life. But that’s not a sign that you shouldn’t be a lawyer at all; there are many, many different ways to practice law, some notoriously much more stressful than others.
I do think the timing is interesting, that the breakdown happened just a few weeks after you agreed with your manager that you’d step back from all the additional firm-wide responsibilities to focus on casework — and I don’t think that timing is a coincidence. Sometimes it’s only when we finally get some room to breathe again that we’re able to react to what we’ve been putting ourselves through (similar to how some people always get sick on the first day of vacation). You finally had room to have a natural response to it, and so you did.
As for letting down your manager — this is the same person who has been repeatedly warning you about burn-out, so I highly doubt she’s going to view you as unreliable. She’s been warning you this could happen if you didn’t pull back — i.e., she’s aware you’re human. She is not going to be let down by getting confirmation that you are, in fact, human. You asked how to discuss this with her, and one way is to lead with, “You saw this coming and I understand now you were right.”
The bigger issue is that you noted that you associate pulling back from a workload you acknowledge was unsustainable with laziness. That’s potentially therapy fodder, if you want to go that route. Not because there’s anything wrong with you for not being able to hack it, but because you don’t believe that. Not all ways of practicing law require this level of sacrifice, and finding one that doesn’t isn’t giving up — it’s making a sustainable career possible.
