Entry Details

About the Entry

Category: 
All Content > Original Research Article > Northeast

Title of entry: 
The American Lawyer's 5th Annual Mental Health Survey

Issue or Publication date:
5/17

Publication name: 
The American Lawyer

View Website home page:
https://www.law.com/americanlawyer

Links to entry URLs

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Entry URL(s), if applicable:
Please enter a URL that will direct judges to the entry: 
https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/2024/05/17/old-school-expectations-plague-young-lawyer-mental-health-but-not-all-predecessors-are-sympathetic/

Entry Essay: 
The American Lawyer serves an audience of movers and shakers across the legal industry. Our readership ranges from law firm leaders and partners to staffers and paralegals, extending beyond the law firm world to recruiters, consultants and others who serve the industry, valued at nearly $400 billion in 2024.

Since 2019, we’ve been surveying law firm lawyers and staffers on an annual basis about their mental health—a consequential interval for workforce trends that extends across the COVID-19 pandemic, the bumpy effort to return workers back to the office, and the “great resignation.” This year’s survey garnered responses from 2,000 law firm attorneys and over 400 legal staffers.

American Lawyer reporter Dan Roe dug into this year’s data and found that while complaints about the persistence of the billable hour, an “always on call” mentality and a prevailing culture of perfectionism were shared across generations, younger professionals were struggling more than their senior colleagues. Specifically, lawyers aged 34 and under reported higher rates of depression, anxiety and other mental health issues than more experienced peers, as well as more persistent feelings of self-doubt, hopelessness, lost motivation and work-related dread.

Dan drew connections between these survey findings and a broader body of research that shows mental health outcomes have been declining for young people across the globe for years. And he skillfully built a narrative around open-ended comments from survey respondents that personalizes the stress and disenchantment captured by the aggregate data.

Those open-ended comments also reveal certain tensions that are ever present in the workplace, with several experienced attorneys using the format to denigrate what they deemed an undue focus on mental health in the workplace and to rail against a sense of entitlement among younger colleagues.

But Dan also used additional interviews with outside experts on mental health to make a case for the business benefits of taking mental health seriously, ensuring that the story offered more than just an airing of grievances from different factions in the workplace.

Dan’s analysis was accompanied by an adjoining infographic (accessible at https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/2024/05/17/mental-health-by-the-numbers-the-2024-survey-infographic/ ) from ALM graphic designed Rashmita Choudhury, which elegantly lays out takeaways from this year’s survey results and delivers comparisons across the past four years of data.

The American Lawyer and the broader ALM newsroom has been particularly committed to exploring the question of mental health in the legal profession since a year-long special project in 2019, and the care put into this year’s package aims to send a signal to the broader legal industry that the issue remains critical as ever.