Posted by Pemi Quadri, a litigation assistant at Legal Futures Associate Express Solicitors
Quadri: I want to be hardworking but not consumed
“Thank God my identity isn’t tied to just a job.”
To many of my peers, that sentence feels healthy. To many lawyers from previous generations, it sounds almost offensive. And that says a lot about the modern legal profession.
This conversation began with my training principal, who admitted something many senior lawyers quietly feel: “I struggle to understand what motivates Gen Z lawyers.”
She described the scene in many offices. It’s 5.30pm, official closing time and suddenly it feels like the last bell at school. Laptops shut. Coats on. People disappearing into the car park before the clock hits 5.31pm.
To senior lawyers who built careers on endurance and sacrifice, this behaviour feels baffling. For many of them, work was never just work. It was worth, identity and ultimately security.
To understand the difference between generations in law firms today, we need to understand the environments that shaped them.
The generation of endurance
Imagine it’s the late 1990s, early 2000s. You’ve just finished university after years of pressure and competition. Training contracts are scarce (as they still are now). Getting a role at a firm, whether a magic circle skyscraper or a busy high street practice feels like winning the lottery.
You are simply grateful to be in the room. You tolerate things that today’s trainees never would.
You pick up your supervisor’s dry cleaning. You make tea for six partners. You print endless bundles. You stay long after your work is finished because leaving before your supervisor feels career ending.
One senior lawyer told me that an older male manager once asked her to remove her shoes and stand on the pavement for a photograph because she was taller than him. Today that is not flying but she did what many ambitious young professionals did – endured it in pursuit of the goal.
Without a doubt, that mentality worked and created resilient lawyers that we look up to for mentorship today.
Particularly for women, ethnic minorities and working-class professionals, succeeding in law often required an extraordinary level of psychological endurance. For many, overworking was not simply ambition, it was protection against failure.
This explains why, when senior lawyers look at Gen Z logging off on time and fiercely protecting personal boundaries, some genuinely struggle to understand it. From their perspective, sacrifice is what got them here.
Gen Z. My generation
My generation grew up watching what that sacrifice sometimes produced. Burnout, stress being normalised and people reaching the top of the ladder only to realise they had nothing meaningful waiting for them outside the office.
And then came Covid – the pandemic fundamentally changed how young professionals view work. We were confronted with a question: what matters to me outside my job?
For me I have a long list: my family, friends, hobbies, creative outlets like writing, drawing, graphic design, my church community, charity volunteer work, travelling and seeing the world, going to restaurants that caught my eye on my TikTok ‘for you’ page. Oh, and sleep.
Should I continue?
That is why many young lawyers refuse to build their entire identity around work. It is not always laziness; sometimes it is self-preservation.
Why Gen Z approaches work differently
Work is no longer our sole identity
Previous generations were often taught that career success was your personal worth. However, a lawyer today can also be a content creator, entrepreneur, athlete and a musician. Success is becoming more multidimensional.
This leads beautifully into the conversation of having multiple streams of income.
Careers are no longer linear
We are growing up in an era where people monetise skills online, build businesses from bedrooms and change industries multiple times before the age of 35. The idea that one employer deserves unquestioned loyalty feels outdated to many young professionals.
Information
Law firms used to operate with strong hierarchies partly because knowledge itself was hierarchical. Now we can Google anything, ask ChatGPT for a starting point and access all things legal instantly (we still must be careful of AI hallucinations, of course).
The one all-knowing gatekeeper of knowledge model is slowly dying out. That changes how younger lawyers interact with authority. Respect is still important but increasingly it must be earned and not demanded.
We are less willing to romanticise suffering
Many Gen Z professionals question why unnecessary hardship is treated as a rite of passage. If a workplace is toxic, many will leave and if boundaries are crossed, many aren’t sticking around to explain.
Some may see this as fragility. Some see it as protecting the most important thing: your sanity.
Cost of living
The cost of living continues to rise but entry level salaries often fail to keep up. Rent, transport, food, bills, everything stretches pay thinner than it did for previous generations.
The expectation to give more time and more of yourself to a job feels harder to justify when the financial return does not provide the same sense of security it once did.
Both generations are right
The older generation teaches resilience, discipline and perseverance. Many of today’s opportunities exist because they endured systems that were often deeply unfair.
Gen Z brings healthier conversations around boundaries, wellbeing and identity outside work. One generation knows how to survive, my generation is asking whether survival is all there is to life.
I want to be a lawyer who is hardworking but not consumed. Committed to excellence without my title being the only marker of success in my life.
Work matters but it is not my entire identity. Or should it be?
Leave a Comment