Guest post by Andrew Holgate, chief operating officer at Manchester firm HD Law [1]
Holgate: Lawyers need time to develop judgement
LawCare’s Life in the Law 2025 [2] study found that 59% of people working in the legal sector reported poor mental wellbeing, 78% worked longer than their contracted hours and 45% worried about meeting their chargeable hours or billing targets.
Those numbers are often quoted, usually as evidence that the profession has a problem. What is said less often, however, is that burnout is not simply an unavoidable cost of being a lawyer.
Law firms cannot talk seriously about burnout without talking about how they design the work.
We are building a firm around that belief, and I think seven things will make the biggest difference: supervision, caseload, technology, client contact, thinking time, what we choose to measure, and a visible route forward.
None of it is complicated but all of it takes deliberate effort to get right.
1. Make supervision something people actually use
Supervision on paper and supervision in practice are two different things. A junior needs somewhere to take a genuinely difficult question, not the name of someone on an organisation chart they rarely see.
This means senior lawyers setting aside time for supervision rather than treating it as whatever time they have left once their own work is done.
It also means explaining why a decision was made, rather than simply telling someone what the answer is. And it means junior solicitors feeling able to admit when they are out of their depth without it counting against them.
People will occasionally get things wrong, and they have to be allowed to. If every difficult decision gets pushed upwards because a junior lawyer is frightened of a mistake, judgement never develops further down the firm.
2. Set a real ceiling on caseload
A junior lawyer with too many files does not do worse work across the board. They do worse work on the cases that need judgement rather than process, and those are usually the ones where a client needs the most from their counsel.
An aspirational ceiling on caseload is one that quietly gets exceeded whenever volume rises, which is why the ceiling has to be a real one. There is a balance between quantity and quality, and quality has to carry the greater weight.
3. Be deliberate about what technology takes away
AI has enormous potential in legal services – and enormous risk. Used properly, it removes repetitive processing, speeds up research and document review, and gives lawyers more time for the work that actually requires judgement.
That should mean junior lawyers getting closer to clients and to substantive legal issues far earlier in their careers, rather than spending years on administrative work simply because that is how lawyers have traditionally been trained.
However, some of that mundane work is the way people learn how legal work is put together. You cannot critically assess an AI-generated answer if you do not yet know what a good answer looks like, and any output still has to be checked by someone capable of spotting when it is wrong.
So the answer is not to keep junior lawyers doing inefficient work for the sake of tradition, and it is not to automate everything we possibly can either. The challenge is deciding which work develops judgement and which work is simply process.
Technology should make good lawyers more effective. It should not replace the process by which people become good lawyers in the first place.
4. Keep junior lawyers close to their clients
Lawyers in their early careers who are kept away from clients for years, doing only the background work while someone senior handles every conversation that matters, can find their development hindered.
Many of those who join a firm like ours do so because they want to represent people who are up against institutions with far more resources than they have, and that only stays real if they are actually talking to those people, hearing what the case means to them, and carrying that responsibility themselves.
Many of our clients have never dealt with a solicitor before. Understanding complex law is one skill. Explaining it clearly to a client, without hiding behind legal language, is another, and it is not one you develop at a distance.
5. Protect thinking time, not just working time
A junior who is never given time to sit with a hard question, uninterrupted, learns to reach for the fastest answer rather than the right one. That habit is hard to unlearn later and it is usually the first thing lost when a firm is under pressure.
Legal work requires judgement, and judgement takes time. Protecting thinking time is therefore not a luxury, it is part of producing good legal work.
6. Measure what actually matters, not just hours
What a firm measures tells people what it values. If the clearest measure of contribution is how many hours someone records, people will naturally focus on recording more hours. That can create a culture where being busy becomes more important than being effective.
We want people to be recognised for the quality of their work, the service they give clients, the judgement they show and the contribution they make to the team.
Good judgement is not always the same as winning, either. Sometimes the best advice a lawyer can give is to walk away. Change what gets recognised, and you change what people optimise.
7. Show people the path, not just a promise
Ambitious people, and that means most lawyers, do not need a promise that hard work will eventually be noticed. They want to know what the next opportunity is, what is expected of them and what they need to demonstrate to get there.
Vague reassurance is not the same as a plan, and the absence of a plan is one of the more common reasons a good junior lawyer starts looking elsewhere.
Promotion should not simply be a reward for time served either. If somebody shows they are capable of taking on greater responsibility earlier, there should be a route for them to do it.
It is also worth remembering that being an excellent solicitor does not automatically make someone an excellent manager, and firms sometimes do people a disservice by promoting them and then assuming they will work the management part out for themselves.
The people you promote eventually determine the culture of the firm. Those decisions matter more than almost anything else on this list.
Getting the design right
None of this will take the pressure out of legal work entirely, and some weeks will always be harder than others. But there is a difference between work that is demanding and work that is designed in a way that wears people down.
Many of the pressures behind the LawCare figures come down to choices firms make, and those choices can be made differently.