Leveraging Technology as a Tool to Fight Lawyer Burnout

This post is the third in a four-part series on lawyer burnout written in collaboration with Mark Yacano of Major, Lindsay, and Africa. Read the first article to learn about our proposed enterprise-based solution to lawyer burnout and the second post about the connection between lawyer burnout and workload allocation.

Employees suffer from burnout when the organization cannot provide the culture, processes, or tools to create an environment where its team members can thrive. When a critical mass of team members reach their physical and emotional points of failure, burnout becomes an organizational problem.

Hence the imperative for law firms and legal departments to address employee burnout at an enterprise level.

We introduced the concept of an enterprise approach to preventing burnout in our first installment.

Then, in the second installment, we focused on the need to create a fair and intentional approach to assigning work. Workload allocation is necessary to prevent people from being overworked or underworked because both situations are likely to cause employee burnout.

This third installment explores how technology can be a component of that enterprise approach.

Lawyer burnout can be prevented with the right technology.

Discussions about how lawyers can leverage technology are challenging because so much has been written already.?

Yet, it is impossible to talk about burnout without bringing technology into the conversation.?Employees and organizations do not thrive when they always manage from “behind the curve” in an environment of unnecessary chaos.

The calibrated use of technology can help prevent that, and frankly, law firms and legal departments of any size can find technology solutions that meet their needs and budgets.

We do not represent this installment as a comprehensive overview of the broad spectrum of legal technology on the market. The systems and tools referenced below illustrate the potential for technology to help shape work environments with less friction when legal professionals handle projects and matters, and deliver substantive legal work.

Technology does not replace legal professionals.

Rather, it creates opportunities to optimize their performance efficiently and effectively.

Project management tools can combat lawyer burnout.

Almost every company with a legal department has business units relying on project management tools to manage critical initiatives. Similarly, most law firms with administrative and technology teams do the same.

To project stakeholders, project management software is integral to tracking the progress of big projects, setting deadlines, breaking down tasks into workstreams, and providing visibility to the project team, among many other things.

Legal work can (and arguably should) be managed the same way:

• tracking the components of a significant transaction,
• breaking down the work necessary to handle a complex litigation matter, or
• ensuring that initiatives like updating contract playbooks don’t stall and lose momentum.

Good project management is a guardrail against chaos-driven project activity and the lawyer burnout it creates.

Team members are prone to burnout when constantly working under austere and seemingly arbitrary deadlines that could have been planned for.

Further, a failure to break down more significant parts of a matter into smaller components and track who is responsible increases employee stress as well as the likelihood that some important tasks are overlooked.

When implemented effectively, project management tools can prevent burnout by allowing all team members to see who is responsible for each component task, when various deadlines fall, and where potential bottlenecks occur.

There are many project management software options to fit almost any budget (i.e., ClickUp, Asana, Airtable, Trello).?When paired with an orderly process for assigning workloads, the combination can significantly improve the environment where great legal work is delivered.

Use content automation tools to prevent lawyer burnout.

Software that allows for the templatization of frequently used documents can deliver some great benefits.?

It reduces the time spent drafting documents from scratch, standardizes things that should be standardized, and creates opportunities to use professionals or business stakeholders other than lawyers to create baseline documents.

Many user-friendly legal-specific software options can enable service providers to quickly create documents such as NDAs, standard MSAs, and Terms and Conditions without a significant investment in time.

When the legal team is mired in repetitive work and constantly playing catch-up on more critical work, morale suffers, and burnout becomes a real risk.

Reducing the cycle time to complete routine drafting gives all legal professionals more time to do more challenging and rewarding work.

Contract management systems reduce lawyer burnout.

People often conflate contract management and document management systems. They are, however, different.

Contract management software enables legal departments to manage better to draft, review, negotiate, store, and track contracts.

Almost all systems come with the ability to configure the workflow to track requests for the review and editing of contracts from the time the initial request is made until they are signed and stored. These systems also allow for the creation of templates, and many leverage AI to help review third-party contracts.?

A prime stressor on in-house legal teams is keeping up with the flow of inbound contracts and managing the obligations related to executed agreements.?A “fit for purpose” contract management system can significantly reduce that stress if wisely chosen and well-implemented.

Document management systems reduce inefficiencies and lawyer burnout.

Document management systems enable firms and legal departments to readily access their substantive work product by creating uniform naming conventions, proper filing structures, and the ability to search for documents in the system.

Too much time spent searching for content, including initial briefs, forms, research memos, and transaction documents usually wastes a lot of institutional knowledge, creates a lot of reinvention of work-product that exists already, and frustrates lawyers in their day-to-day practice.?

Document management systems should be a staple of any law firm with multiple lawyers to avoid these inefficiencies and the lawyer burnout that follows.

Technology shouldn’t add to lawyer burnout.

Above, we discussed some tools that, when properly deployed, create better environments for legal professionals to do their work, feel like a valued team member, and find a sense of balance in their lives.??

Far too often, though, the efficiencies of technology and their ability to create a better way of working create even more stress when organizations view the efficiencies created as an opportunity to overload team members with other work in addition to the work they already have.?

The goal is not to develop efficiencies only to find ways to create additional inefficiencies or responsibilities.

Legal professionals, like athletes, can only function at peak performance levels when they both work hard and then find ways to rest and recover properly. Properly calibrated, technology can help with that.

This article was first published at https://www.thejdnation.com/blog/lawyer-burnout-solution.

If you suspect that you or someone you work with may be suffering from burnout, download the free guide Break Free From Lawyer Burnout. You’ll learn more about what burnout is along with meaningful solutions that go beyond individual self-care measures.