The fear underneath the silence runs deeper than burnout: perhaps I have already lost the thing that made me useful. A narrowed mind is a loaded mind, and load can be taken off. The second of two articles, on how the legal mind returns and the week that makes the good day more likely.
The profession has a rich vocabulary for hours, targets and burnout, and almost none for the three loads that do the real damage: a thinning instrument, a weight that cannot be put down, and a self that disappears into the role. Why they stay unspoken, how they feed one another, and what protects the legal mind.
You sat with a client’s worst year this morning and drafted a contract this afternoon. What that switching does to the brain, and how to stay steady without going cold.
The client is shouting, or crying, or blaming you for the law. You have to stay steady enough to advise. Here is what is happening in you, and how to hold it.
The profession has no word for what happens to a practitioner who listens to the worst of other people’s lives for a living. The clinicians do.
You have read the letter twice and drafted a reply in your head that would end your career. This is the threat system at work, and there is a better way to answer.
Twenty years in, and the night before a hearing is still a bad night. It is not a failure of experience. It is anticipation, and it can be managed.
You were courteous to a rude opponent, patient with an anxious client and measured with a difficult partner. Then you got home and snapped at a child over a schoolbag.
It starts at about five on a Sunday afternoon, and it starts quietly. From the candidate attorney to the senior partner, most practitioners know the feeling and almost none of them talk about it. What it is, how to read it, and what to do about it.
The legal function is on every invitation list for the leadership programme. Ask how often it turns up and you get a small smile. The reason is not arrogance.
