Other people’s worst days: secondary trauma in legal practice

By Sonja Cilliers and Maryke Swarts, PMRI · 12 September 2026

The criminal practitioner who has read the post-mortem report three times, once for the facts, once for the cross-examination and once because the mind went back to it on its own. The personal injury attorney who knows the details of the accident better than the family does, down to the angle of the road. The labour practitioner who has sat through a hundred disciplinary hearings in which someone’s livelihood ended, and who can still picture the faces of a few of them. The family practitioner and the children’s affidavits. The head of legal at a mining house who reads every fatality report before it goes to the board. This is ordinary legal work, and it is done by people who are expected, by their clients, their colleagues and themselves, to be unaffected by it.

The clinicians who work with paramedics, police officers and social workers have a name for what happens to a person who is repeatedly exposed to other people’s trauma: secondary traumatic stress, sometimes called vicarious trauma. Those professions have known about it for decades and have built debriefing, rotation and supervision around it. The legal profession has largely not adopted the term, which means the practitioners who experience it have no word for it and usually assume that something is wrong with them personally.

What it looks like

The signs are recognisable once they have been named. Details of a matter intrude when you are doing something else: in the car, at dinner, at three in the morning, with a vividness that seems out of proportion to how long ago you read the file. Sleep changes, either into too little of it or into a heavy sleep that does not refresh. A growing avoidance of certain kinds of matter, or certain kinds of client, without a reason you could state if asked. Irritability that arrives faster than it used to, and with the people who deserve it least. A flattening, where things that used to register no longer do, which is the nervous system protecting itself by turning the volume down on everything at once, the good along with the bad. And a change in how the world looks: a practitioner who has done ten years of matrimonial work can find it hard to believe that any marriage survives, because the ones that survive never came through the door.

None of these signs means the practitioner is unsuited to the work. They mean the work is doing what it does to a human nervous system, and that nothing has been put in place to counter it. That is the point at which the profession’s silence does its damage. A candidate attorney who cannot stop seeing the photographs from a first murder trial concludes that she is too soft for criminal work. A partner of twenty years who notices the flattening concludes that he has simply stopped caring, and feels ashamed of it. Both are reading a predictable physiological response as a character flaw, and both will keep it to themselves.

Why the brain does this

The brain does not distinguish cleanly between a threat experienced and a threat vividly described. When a client recounts an assault in detail, the listener’s threat system activates, at a lower level than the client’s but along the same pathways: the amygdala flags danger, stress hormones rise, and attention narrows. The images are stored with the emotional charge attached, which is why they can return uninvited months later, and why a smell or a stretch of road can bring a matter back in full. Repeated over years without adequate recovery, the system settles into a higher resting state of alarm, and the signs above follow in a fairly predictable order.

The scale of what this does across the profession is now documented. Krill, Johnson and Albert’s 2016 study of several thousand practising attorneys found substantial rates of anxiety, depression and problematic drinking, with the youngest practitioners and those in their first ten years of practice the most affected. The study did not measure secondary traumatic stress by name, but the pattern it describes, of a profession carrying more than it acknowledges, is the same one that high-exposure practice areas produce most sharply.

This is a physiological process, and it responds to physiological measures. Deciding to be tougher does not resolve it. That is the profession’s usual prescription, and it is the one that produces the flattening, because the only way a nervous system can be made to feel less is to feel less of everything.

What helps

The single most protective thing is recovery between exposures, and the profession is structured to prevent it. A practitioner who moves from one harrowing consultation to the next with no interval is doing to the nervous system what a runner would be doing by never stopping, and the body responds in the same way, with a slow accumulation of strain that eventually presents as injury. Short intervals count. A few minutes after a difficult consultation before the next task, used deliberately rather than spent checking email, lets the arousal come down. A proper break at lunch, away from the desk and the file, does more than it looks like it should. An evening that is not spent with the matter closes the day for the nervous system as well as for the diary.

Naming it counts. Practitioners who know what secondary traumatic stress is, and who understand that it is a predictable consequence of the work rather than a personal weakness, report the intrusions less and recover from them faster. The knowledge itself changes the meaning of the symptom, and the meaning is much of the load. In firms and legal departments where the senior people speak about it plainly, juniors ask for help earlier, and earlier is where the difference is made. A head of litigation who says at the start of a heavy matter that the evidence in this one is going to be hard to read, and that the team should expect to feel it, has done something the firm’s policies cannot.

Talking counts, and so does the choice of listener. A colleague who does the same work and can hear the detail without being harmed by it is worth more than a well-meaning friend who has to be protected from it, because the practitioner ends up editing the account for the friend’s sake and carrying the unspoken parts home again. Some firms in high-exposure areas of practice arrange a regular debrief for exactly this reason, and the practitioners in those departments tend to stay longer.

And where the signs have been present for months, a professional conversation helps, in the same way that a physiotherapist helps a runner who has ignored a strain for too long. That is maintenance of the instrument the practice depends on rather than an admission of anything.

For the people who run the department

A managing partner or general counsel cannot remove the exposure. The post-mortem reports and the affidavits will keep coming. What leaders can do is stop treating recovery as a private matter and start treating it as part of how the work is organised: intervals between heavy consultations built into the diary rather than squeezed out of it, a rotation that does not leave one junior with every assault matter for a year, and a culture in which saying “that file was hard” is met with recognition rather than a raised eyebrow.

PMRI runs time at the firm, shaped as a morning, a full day or two days, on stress physiology and recovery in high-exposure practice areas, and the same material for corporate legal teams whose work brings them into contact with fatalities, harassment complaints and fraud. The programmes are developed jointly by a behavioural specialist and an advocate with 27 years in practice, which means they are built around how a legal week actually runs. For an individual practitioner, the Burnout Prevention Framework for Legal Professionals is a recorded webinar, with workbook, that sets out the progression from strain to exhaustion and shows how to place yourself on it honestly. If you would like to talk about what this could look like in your firm or department, start a conversation with us. There is no charge for the first conversation.