By Catherine Poole
VP, Client Advisory, BARBRI Professional Education
Every year, the first week of May is dedicated to well-being in the legal profession. It’s a moment that matters — because the research keeps telling us the same story, and it’s one we can’t afford to ignore.
Law is a demanding profession by design. The stakes are high, the hours are long, and the pressure to perform is constant. Most lawyers knew all of that going in. What’s less often discussed — and what the research has now made undeniably clear — is the cumulative toll that culture takes on the people who practice it.
BARBRI has long been the trusted partner that aspiring lawyers turn to when preparing for the bar in the U.S. or the Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE) in England and Wales. In recent years, we’ve expanded that commitment to support people across the legal profession throughout their careers — because we know the pressure doesn’t end once someone qualifies. If anything, it intensifies. Well-being sits at the center of what it means to support lawyers well, at every stage.
The Numbers Are Hard to Read. That’s Exactly Why We Need to Read Them.
Some of the most comprehensive research in this space comes from the United States. A landmark 2016 study conducted by the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in collaboration with the ABA Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs surveyed more than 12,800 practicing U.S. lawyers — the most comprehensive national study of its kind ever undertaken — finding levels of substance use and mental health distress that the lead researcher described as painting “a picture of an unsustainable professional culture that’s harming too many people.”1
Specifically, the study found that 21% of licensed, employed lawyers qualified as problem drinkers — and when measured by volume and frequency of consumption alone, that figure climbed to more than one in three.2 Critically, it wasn’t the most senior lawyers who were most at risk. It was the youngest. Those in their first ten years of practice had the highest rates of problematic alcohol use.3 The same study found 28% struggling with some level of depression and 19% experiencing symptoms of anxiety.4
The same study also found that 12.5% of lawyers self-reported having ADHD — substantially higher than commonly cited estimates for the general adult population. It received far less attention than the substance use and mental health data at the time — and remains underaddressed in most well-being conversations today.5
A 2023 peer-reviewed study published in Healthcare examined suicidal ideation in a random sample of nearly 2,000 practicing U.S. lawyers. It found that perceived stress was the single strongest predictor: lawyers experiencing high stress were 22 times more likely to report suicidal ideation than those with low stress. Loneliness and work overcommitment were also significant independent risk factors.6 These are not abstract statistics. They describe real people — colleagues, peers, and friends — across the legal profession.
That foundational U.S. research is now nearly a decade old. More recent data tells a similarly challenging story.
The 2025 ALM Mental Health Survey of more than 3,100 legal professionals at U.S. law firms found some cautiously encouraging signs: reported rates of depression fell to 33% — the lowest since 2019 — and the share of respondents who felt mental health and substance abuse were “at a crisis level” dropped six points to 43%.7 At the same time, one stressor is getting worse: 65.5% of respondents said billable hour pressures are negatively impacting their mental health — up nearly four points from 2024, and one of the few metrics to worsen year-over-year. Lawyers cited ever-increasing rate hikes as a key driver. These are meaningful improvements overall, but the underlying pressure points remain.
But even these “improved” numbers are still alarming. Roughly one in three respondents reported depression. Nearly 69% reported anxiety. And 73% — nearly three in four — said their work environment contributes to mental health issues.8
The progress is real. The problem is not solved.
A Global Challenge, Not Just an American One
It would be easy to read this as a uniquely American problem — driven by billable hour culture, a particularly adversarial legal system, or the specific pressures of U.S. law firm life. But the international research tells a different story.
The International Bar Association’s Presidential Task Force on Mental Wellbeing surveyed almost 3,500 legal professionals and more than 180 legal organizations across global regions. Its 2021 report, Mental Wellbeing in the Legal Profession: A Global Study, found that legal professionals’ wellbeing scores — measured using the WHO-5 wellbeing index — fell below the global average in every regional forum studied.9 One in three respondents said their work had a negative impact on their wellbeing, and 41% said they would not raise mental health concerns with their employer for fear of career consequences.10
In the UK and Ireland, the picture is similarly challenging. LawCare’s Life in the Law 2025 report — drawn from surveys of more than 1,500 legal professionals and 80 organizations, conducted in early 2025 — found that nearly 60% of respondents had poor mental wellbeing. Half reported experiencing anxiety frequently or constantly over the prior 12 months. And more than three in four were working beyond their contracted hours.11 LawCare also found that 56% could see themselves leaving their current workplace within five years, and nearly a third could imagine leaving the legal sector altogether.
The legal profession has a well-being problem. And it is a global one.
This Isn’t Just a Human Issue. It’s a Business Issue.
A 2024 survey by Unmind, drawing on responses from over 4,400 participants across nine U.S. and U.K. law firms, put a striking number on the cost of poor well-being: firms could be losing an estimated $33 million annually — or roughly 10% of staffing costs — to decreased productivity, absenteeism, and attrition tied to mental health challenges.12
The research also found that highly stressed employees are 3.7 times less likely to meet client demands.13 Think about that in the context of a profession where client service is everything.
Well-being and performance are not in competition. They are deeply, inextricably linked. When people are depleted, anxious, or struggling in silence, their ability to focus, problem-solve, and do their best work suffers. The reverse is equally true: when lawyers have the tools and support to manage their well-being, they are more engaged, more resilient, and more effective.
Firms that take this seriously — and invest in scalable, practical education for their people — are seeing measurable returns. We’ll come back to what that looks like in practice.
The Trait Lawyers Wear as a Badge of Honor May Be Making Things Worse
One of the most striking recent findings in this space comes from a 2024 study conducted by Krill Strategies, JC Coaching & Consulting, and Ambitionprofile in partnership with NALP. The “Perfectionist Paradox” report surveyed 764 private-practice lawyers on the relationship between perfectionism, mental health, and professional performance.14
The results are hard to ignore. Among lawyers with high perfectionist tendencies — those who equate mistakes with personal failure and are driven by fear and the need for approval — 62% reported elevated stress levels, compared to just 5% of their low-perfectionism peers. More than 50% of high-perfectionism lawyers reported elevated depression, versus just 7% of low-perfectionism lawyers.
Here’s the part that should give law firm leaders pause: perfectionism didn’t make those lawyers more productive. High-perfectionism lawyers reported greater difficulty prioritizing and managing their workloads, lower engagement, and less boldness in their careers. They also stayed at their firms for an average of 5.3 years — compared to 8.4 years for their low-perfectionism counterparts.15
The trait that law firm culture often rewards — the relentless pursuit of flawless work, the inability to accept anything less than perfect — may be quietly driving burnout, disengagement, and attrition. It’s a paradox worth taking seriously.
The Silence Problem
What makes this crisis particularly difficult to address is the stigma that surrounds it. The 2016 ABA/Hazelden study found significant reluctance among U.S. lawyers to seek help — driven largely by fear that doing so would be seen as weakness or would harm their careers. The IBA’s global research echoed this finding, with 41% of respondents worldwide citing the same fear. The result, in every jurisdiction studied: far too many legal professionals suffer in silence.
That culture of silence isn’t anyone’s fault in isolation. It’s baked into a profession that rewards strength, precision, and an unwavering ability to hold it together under pressure. But it is something firms can change. And more firms across jurisdictions are beginning to do exactly that.
Formal Commitments to Well-Being: A Growing Movement
In the U.S., the well-being movement gained formal momentum in 2017 when the ABA’s National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being published its landmark report, “The Path to Lawyer Well-Being: Practical Recommendations for Positive Change.” The following year, the ABA launched the Well-Being Pledge Campaign — a call for legal employers to formally commit to a seven-point framework for improving mental health and well-being in their organizations. It launched with 12 founding firms in 2018 and had grown to more than 227 signatories by 2023, representing law firms, law schools, corporate legal departments, and other legal employers.16
The pledge’s framework includes commitments to provide robust education on well-being, mental health, and substance use; to challenge the culture of drinking-based events; to develop visible partnerships with outside resources; and to actively demonstrate that help-seeking and self-care are core cultural values, not signs of weakness.
Parallel commitments are taking shape globally. The IBA’s 2021 global study issued ten wellbeing principles for legal workplaces and organizations worldwide. In the UK, LawCare has been a longstanding advocate for cultural change in the profession, and its 2025 research sets out a clear roadmap — from managing workloads and investing in people managers to embedding hybrid working and evaluating wellbeing programs — for building a more sustainable legal sector.
Well-Being Week in Law — held annually during the first week of May and supported by the ABA Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs — is one of the most visible expressions of this ongoing commitment in the U.S. This year’s programming includes free sessions during the week on perfectionism, psychological safety, belonging and inclusion, stress management, and the science of hope and resilience.17
And the U.S. research base is about to be dramatically expanded. In June 2025, the ABA and Krill Strategies announced a new nationwide study — a 10-year update to the landmark 2016 research. Data collection has now closed, with responses from more than 35,000 randomly selected lawyers — nearly three times the scale of the original study.18 In the coming months, researchers will publish their findings in a peer-reviewed journal. Given everything that has changed in the legal profession over the past decade — the pandemic, the pace of technological change, the rise of AI — the results will be essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of the profession.
The SkillBurst Well-Being Series: Built for Law Firms, Now Part of BARBRI
So what does meaningful action actually look like in practice?
The Well-Being Series was developed by SkillBurst Interactive, a professional eLearning company that built its entire catalog specifically for law firms. SkillBurst was founded on a simple but important conviction: that lawyers and legal professionals deserve learning experiences designed for their world, not adapted from generic corporate training. The Well-Being Series was a direct response to what law firm clients said they needed — practical, accessible, law-firm-specific content that gives people real tools they can actually use.
When BARBRI acquired SkillBurst, that mission came with it. Today, the Well-Being Series is part of BARBRI’s broader commitment to supporting legal professionals beyond bar and qualifying exam preparation — extending the relationship that begins at the start of a legal career into every stage that follows. We offer it as SkillBurst by BARBRI, and the series continues to reflect the deep law firm expertise that SkillBurst built.
The series was designed to directly support firms that have made a formal commitment to well-being — whether through the ABA’s Well-Being Pledge, the IBA’s wellbeing principles, or a firm’s own internal initiative — fulfilling the kind of robust educational commitment those frameworks call for. And it’s equally relevant whether or not a firm has signed any formal pledge, because the underlying need is universal: people across the firm need practical tools to build and sustain their well-being, and firms need a way to deliver that education at scale.
What makes the nine-module series distinctive is that it meets people where they are — across roles and career stages. And critically, it’s designed not as a Well-Being Week event but as a year-round resource — content that firms can deploy when and how it makes sense, building a culture of well-being steadily over time rather than in a single annual push.
For brand-new associates, the series speaks directly to the reality they’re stepping into. Thriving in the Legal Profession: Maximizing Well-Being; Optimizing Performance addresses something many new lawyers quietly wonder but rarely ask aloud: why do lawyers tend to have higher rates of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse than those in other professions — and what can I do about it? Rather than leaving new associates to absorb the culture passively, this module equips them from day one with five evidence-based habits they can put into practice immediately: reframing how they think about stress, finding meaning and engagement in their work, seeking appropriate control over their environment, managing their energy intentionally, and building social support. It’s a module about agency — about how to set yourself up to thrive, not just survive.
For managers and firm leaders, the series offers something equally important. Fostering a Psychologically Healthy Workplace: The Important Role Managers Play addresses a truth the research keeps affirming: the single biggest factor in whether someone feels safe enough to speak up, ask for help, or acknowledge they’re struggling is their immediate supervisor. Psychological safety — the sense that it’s safe to take risks, voice concerns, and be human at work — doesn’t emerge from a poster on the wall or an annual survey. It’s built day by day, interaction by interaction, by the people who manage others. This module helps managers understand that role and act on it.
The remaining modules cover the full landscape of well-being for everyone in the firm — lawyers and professional staff alike: what a firm’s commitment to well-being looks like in practice (in both Lawyer and Staff editions); proven five-minute practices for reducing stress and renewing energy; an introduction to mindfulness and how to apply it in a demanding workday; building resilience in the face of inevitable setbacks (also in Lawyer and Staff editions); and raising awareness of substance use challenges and how to respond with care.
Each module runs approximately 6 to 15 minutes, can be branded to the firm, and is customizable to reflect your specific culture, environment, and priorities. The Well-Being Series is available as part of SkillBurst’s Professional Essentials library — a subscription through which firms can access 150+ modules across a wide range of professional skills topics, selecting the content that best fits their needs.
Well-Being Is a Skill. We Can All Get Better at It.
Neuroscientist Richard Davidson offered a framing I return to often: “Well-being is a skill. Well-being is fundamentally no different than learning to play the cello. If one practices the skills of well-being, one will get better at it.”
That’s the premise behind everything in this series. Not that lawyers are broken, or that firms have failed their people. But that well-being — like legal research, like client communication, like any other professional skill — can be learned, practiced, and improved. And that firms have both the opportunity and the responsibility to make that possible.
Well-Being Week is a meaningful annual reminder. But the real goal is a culture where this work happens not just one week a year — but as an ongoing, visible part of how your firm takes care of its people.
The question is no longer whether well-being matters in the legal profession. The question is whether we are willing to act on what we already know.
Interested in learning more about the SkillBurst Well-Being Series or our free CLE programming during Well-Being Week? Reach out — we’d love to connect.
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