Elimination of Bias: Reducing Stigma and Chronic Stress to Avoid Burnout

In serving clients, the profession, and the system of justice, lawyers bring intellect, passion, and skill to their work, carry significant workloads, and work long hours in close relationship with others solving difficult problems. Lawyers seek not only justice and successful resolution for clients and others, but also fairness, meaning, and intrinsic and external rewards for themselves. These aspects of a lawyers’ work can cause chronic stress, resulting in burnout, poor physical health, or other health challenges such as anxiety, depression, substance use, addiction, and mental illness.

Effectively managing workplace stress is critical to lawyer health, competence, and ethical responsibility. The stigma attached to burnout and other physical or mental health concerns as well as implicit and explicit bias can both drive burnout and make it difficult for lawyers to get help. This program explores what burnout is, how our work contributes to burnout, and how to head off burnout, break the stigma, and get help for burnout to regain our spark and enjoy our lives.

– Judith M. Rush; Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers