What the 2026 Krill Study Really Shows About Lawyer Burnout (And What the Headlines Missed)

It’s 3:30 in the morning. You’re awake again; your mind is racing, running through tomorrow’s deposition outline for the third time, and the part of your brain that’s supposed to let you sleep appears to have filed a motion to stay.

I know that hour all too well. Toward the end of my 17 years as a trial attorney, I woke up many nights at 3:30 AM like clockwork. From the outside, for some, it looked like success. I was winning trials and obtaining many favorable outcomes for my clients. Behind the scenes, however, I was exhausted, my marriage was headed toward divorce, and I was working longer and longer hours for diminishing returns.

I tell you this because a new study has just put hard numbers on that hour. And the numbers regarding attorney well-being remain sobering.

Most of the coverage I’ve read so far reports the headline numbers. This post is based on the study itself, including what a lot of the headlines missed.

I’ve traced research reports sounding the alarm about attorney mental health for at least 40 years. Notwithstanding those alarms, the profession as a whole pretty much ignored them until 2016, when Patrick Krill and his colleagues published the first national study of lawyer behavioral health. That study surveyed nearly 13,000 lawyers and documented substantial rates of problem drinking, depression, anxiety, and stress. According to the authors, it catalyzed a wave of jurisdiction-specific surveys and well-being initiatives across the profession (the National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being released its landmark report the following year).

Now, nearly a decade later, Krill is back with a new survey. In September 2026, he and Justin Anker of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences published “When Demands Equal Distress: An Updated Understanding of Lawyer Mental Health and Well-Being” in the Journal of Affective Disorders, a peer-reviewed psychiatric journal.

Let’s examine why this study is deserving of your attention.

Conducted in partnership with the American Bar Association Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs, the research drew on the rosters of 28 participating bar associations and regulatory bodies across North America. Lawyers were invited at random (roughly 498,000 invitations in all). 46,694 began the survey, and the primary analyses cover 36,925 employed, actively licensed lawyers, weighted to match the national lawyer population on age, gender, and race/ethnicity. Data were collected in July and August 2025.

It is the largest survey of actively licensed lawyers to date. Methodologically, it’s also a meaningful step up from 2016, which relied on a convenience sample recruited through bar association emails and website postings.

A note on how I’m reading this study: it is cross-sectional, meaning it captures a single moment in time. It can show which conditions travel together. What it can’t do is establish which conditions cause the others. So when I say below that a factor is “associated with” an outcome, that is precisely what I mean. Every number in this post traces to the published paper, and the full source list appears at the end.

A note on the numbers: if you’ve followed the coverage, you may have noticed slightly different figures, such as 47.4% burnout instead of 47.5%, or 21.7% depression instead of 21.6%. Most coverage drew on the ABA’s press release and summary materials. The figures here come from the peer-reviewed paper. The differences are small, and I mention them for one reason: not to be critical of others who are talking about the study; instead, I firmly believe that when a study matters this much, it’s worth carefully reading the study and citing it accurately.

What the Study Found: The Headline Numbers

Let’s start with burnout, because it’s the number that anchors everything else in this study.

The researchers measured it with the work subscale of the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory, a validated instrument that asks questions like “Do you feel worn out at the end of the working day?” Nearly half of all lawyers surveyed (47.5%) landed in the high or very high range. (One honest caveat, which the authors acknowledge: those ranges describe a position on a 0–100 scale. Thus, they are descriptive categories, and no clinical diagnosis attaches to them.)

Still, nearly half of all lawyers surveyed report high to very high levels of burnout.

The mental health numbers come from the DASS-21, a standard screening measure covering the prior week. Roughly one in five lawyers reported depression, anxiety, or stress at moderate or higher severity.

Indeed, the burden falls hardest on the youngest lawyers. Moderate-or-higher depression was 31.5% among lawyers aged 30 and under, compared with 9.7% among those 61 and older. For anxiety, the gap is even wider: 40.4% versus 6.2%. That means four in ten of the profession’s youngest lawyers are carrying anxiety at a level that warrants attention.

The authors offer possible explanations, clearly labeled as their informed speculation: the stress of being a novice in a demanding profession, thinner support networks, educational debt, the demands of starting a family, and the disruption of artificial intelligence’s growing role in legal work.

For firm leaders, here’s the reality: these are the lawyers your business model and succession plan depend on. If distress is concentrated in the first decade of practice, then client continuity and leadership development ten years from now are being shaped by what happens to these lawyers today.

A Careful Word About the 2016 Comparison

At the moderate-or-higher threshold, anxiety came in at 20.4% compared with 10.7% in the 2016 study (roughly double). Depression and stress were also higher.

With that in mind, it would be easy to write the headline “Lawyer Anxiety Has Doubled.” Yet, the authors explicitly caution against it. Because the 2016 study used a convenience sample and the 2025 survey used a random, weighted sample, they present the two figures as separate benchmarks and decline to treat the difference as a measured change over time. I’ll hold to that standard here, and so should anyone else citing this study.

What we can say with confidence is this: today, about one in five lawyers is living with anxiety at a level that warrants attention.

The same caution applies to burnout. You may have seen headlines describing lawyer burnout as “escalating.” This study is the first national measurement of lawyer burnout, so it sets the benchmark. Future studies will tell us which direction it moves.

What the Skeptics Say

Honestly, the research on lawyer mental health is somewhat contested, and you deserve to know that.

In the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, law professors Benjamin Pyle and Clifford Rosky compared lawyers in two nationally representative federal health surveys. Both surveys found lawyers reporting elevated alcohol misuse compared with the general public and with similarly educated peers. On psychological distress, the two surveys split. One found lawyers reporting distress at rates lower than the general public and similar to, or moderately higher than, similarly educated professionals. The other found more than 40% of lawyers reporting moderate or serious psychological distress in the past year, significantly higher than both comparison groups.

Krill and Anker cite this work themselves and acknowledge that estimates can shift with sampling methods and screening instruments. Researchers disagree here, and here’s why: different surveys ask different questions of different samples, and they land in different places.

Here’s what I take from it. How lawyers compare with other professions remains an open question. What the Krill and Anker study adds sits somewhere else entirely: it shows how distress varies within the profession, by burnout level, hours, practice setting, and litigation exposure. Those patterns hold regardless of where the profession ranks against dentists or accountants. And on alcohol, every dataset points in the same direction.

The Finding That Matters Most: The Curve Bends

Here’s the thing: the most important finding in this study is a shape.

The researchers modeled how the likelihood of moderate-or-higher distress changes as burnout rises, adjusting for age, gender, hours, practice setting, litigation, and other factors. Burnout emerged as the dominant correlate of psychological distress. In the authors’ words, burnout is “the proximal factor,” the one sitting closest to the symptoms.

But here’s where the rub comes in. The relationship bends.

At the lower end of the burnout scale, distress rises gradually. At the upper end, it turns sharply upward. A lawyer at the median level of burnout has a predicted likelihood of moderate-or-higher depression somewhere around 12 to 15 percent. At the 90th percentile of burnout, that figure climbs to roughly 59 to 64 percent.

Distress climbs slowly as burnout builds. Then, at the high end, the curve turns sharply upward.

Having this in mind, consider what that gradual early slope means for a lawyer. Lawyers are trained to endure. We were taught, from the first semester of law school, that pushing through is what professionals do. The early stretch of that curve is exactly where pushing through feels possible, and it sits right before the curve turns. (That’s my interpretation of the shape. Cross-sectional data can’t show how any one lawyer moves along the curve over time.)

Work–family conflict matters here too, though its contribution is smaller and, according to the authors, best modeled as additive. At low burnout, the difference in predicted stress between lawyers with higher and lower work–family conflict is about 2 percentage points. At the 90th percentile of burnout, it widens to about 15.5 points. The authors suggest that, where resources are limited, directing support to lawyers with high burnout and high work–family conflict at the same time may yield the greatest return.

You may have read that work–family conflict “intensifies” stress risk for highly burned-out lawyers. The paper itself is a bit more careful. The authors formally tested whether the two factors interact and found no reliable evidence that they do; a widening gap is what you’d expect mathematically as baseline risk rises. The practical point stands either way: the lawyers carrying both are carrying the most.

One more caveat, because opposing counsel would find it if I didn’t mention it. Burnout, stress, and work–family conflict overlap substantially in this data (burnout correlated with stress at r = 0.70 and with work–family conflict at r = 0.72). Part of the burnout–stress association therefore reflects that overlap. The overlap with depression (r = 0.61) and anxiety (r = 0.56) is smaller, and the same steep pattern holds for both.

Taken together, the message for the individual lawyer is clear: burnout deserves attention well before it feels like a crisis. The message for firm leaders is equally clear: the lawyers at the top of the burnout distribution are carrying a disproportionate share of the profession’s distress, and they may be the least likely to say so.

Hours, Litigation, and the Law of Diminishing Returns

Distress rose with hours worked, and the gradient steepened most sharply beyond 50 hours per week. Relative to lawyers working 31–40 hours, those working 71 hours or more were roughly three times as likely to report moderate-or-higher stress and about twice as likely to report moderate-or-higher anxiety.

The authors put it in terms any managing partner will recognize: lawyers working very long hours may experience a law of diminishing returns, because distress and high burnout are known precursors to turnover and error.

I lived that sentence. Working longer hours, pushing harder, and getting less for it. At the time, I thought the answer was more discipline. It took me years to understand that the way I was doing things was impacting my brain and body’s biology in ways that didn’t support sustainable peak performance. Instead, it made it nearly impossible.

For firm leaders, those two words, turnover and error, carry a price tag. Replacing a single departing attorney is estimated to cost $200,000 to $500,000 (ABA Journal / Embroker, 2024 Legal Risk Index). Error carries its own exposure in malpractice risk and client trust. The hours that look like productivity on a billing report may be generating costs that show up somewhere else on the balance sheet.

The Litigation Effect

As a former trial attorney, this finding landed close to home. Lawyers whose work involves litigation reported modestly but consistently higher distress, burnout, and hazardous drinking, even after accounting for hours and practice setting. The authors point to adversarial exposure as a possible source of incremental strain worth further study. (Anyone who has prepared for trial knows the feeling: your body treats the courtroom as an adversarial arena to prepare for long before you walk into it.)

Practice Setting Matters

Where lawyers work was also associated with meaningful differences. Compared with solo practitioners (51.0% high burnout, adjusted), burnout was lower among lawyers in judicial chambers (35.5%) and in-house corporate roles (41.4%). The authors note that solo practitioners, given their comparatively limited infrastructure and benefits, may need different resources than lawyers in larger organizations, which strengthens the case for bar associations to step in.

The Silence Problem: Why Lawyers Don’t Ask for Help

The most cited barriers to seeking help were confidentiality concerns (53.3%), fear of harm to professional reputation or career opportunities (49.2%), lack of time (34.5%), and a preference to handle problems independently (25.2%).

These are the same barriers the 2016 study documented. They have outlasted a decade of awareness campaigns, and the authors conclude they are “core features of legal culture.”

Look, I understand these fears from the inside. We are a profession that rewards the appearance of unshakable competence and confidence. Asking for help can feel like handing opposing counsel, and sometimes even your colleagues, an exhibit they can and may indeed use against you.

What the Drinking Data Shows

Hazardous drinking was screened with the AUDIT-C, a brief measure of alcohol consumption. At the standard threshold, 41.8% screened positive; at the stricter threshold, 26.4%. Rates were highest among lawyers 30 and under (51.6% at the standard threshold) and higher in private firms than in solo practice (45.8% versus 35.7%).

One finding that really stands out about drinking: 41.0% of lawyers screened positive for hazardous drinking while reporting no alcohol use disorder diagnosis. (A positive screen measures consumption and is distinct from a diagnosis. The gap still tells us something about how much risk goes unacknowledged.)

There is also an encouraging data point here. Using the same threshold, 26.4% screened positive in the current survey compared with 36.4% in 2016. The same benchmark caveat applies, so I’ll treat it as a hopeful signal and leave the trend question to future research.

I don’t write about drinking in the abstract. I watched colleagues numb themselves with alcohol. I watched others grind through, and some quietly left the profession. Two of my colleagues died by suicide. I carry them with me into every piece of this work.

If you are struggling with alcohol, other substances, or thoughts of suicide, confidential help exists. Every state has a Lawyer Assistance Program, and the ABA maintains a directory of them at americanbar.org/groups/lawyer_assistance/resources/lap_programs_by_state/. If you are in crisis in the U.S., you can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. (Addiction treatment and clinical mental health care sit outside my lane. My work sits upstream, with chronic stress and performance, and I’ll always point you to the right specialist.)

What Lawyers See Around Them

57.6% of respondents reported observing mental health or substance use problems among colleagues occasionally or regularly. 30.8% encountered a legal professional in the past year whose well-being raised concerns about their fitness to practice.

Lawyers are ready for change. Only 39.1% believe their employer is doing enough to support well-being, and only 25.3% believe the profession is. Meanwhile, 81.3% said it is important or very important for the profession to do more. The authors describe that consensus as striking. I couldn’t agree more.

For firm leaders, the authors are specific about what builds trust: confidential access points that are independent of disciplinary bodies, and employer support that offers a safe harbor from reputational harm and career repercussions.

What Comes Next: Structure, Biology, and Sustainable Peak Performance

Taken together, this study tells a coherent story. Burnout is common. It sits closest to psychological distress. It rises with hours, litigation, and work–family conflict. And the lawyers carrying the most of it face real barriers to asking for help.

Everyone wants, and indeed expects, lawyers to perform at their highest levels of cognitive abilities. This includes clients, court systems, other lawyers, disciplinary boards, and society as a whole. Yet that becomes far harder when they are suffering from burnout and other mental health issues.

The authors’ recommendations focus on how legal work is structured: staffing and workflow improvements, monitoring of consistently excessive workloads, greater schedule predictability and flexibility, regular check-ins with lawyers working very long hours, and added support for litigators (caseload management, supervision, peer consultation). They close by calling on mental health professionals to move beyond generic stress-management techniques and address the high-stakes stressors unique to legal practice.

Once again, I couldn’t agree more.

Now I’ll step beyond what this study measured, and I’ll tell you exactly when I’m doing it and why.

The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory measures prolonged physical and psychological exhaustion attributed to work. In performance terms, that is depleted capacity. And the science of why capacity depletes is well developed.

We know the human stress response is built for activation followed by recovery. When activation becomes chronic and recovery doesn’t arrive, the physiological wear accumulates (Bruce McEwen’s research on allostatic load, 1998, is the foundational work here).

Strong evidence also suggests that stress exposure impairs the prefrontal cortex, the brain region that supports working memory, judgment, and flexible reasoning (Amy Arnsten, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2009). Those are precisely the capacities lawyers rely on to produce positive outcomes for their clients.

Lawyers are reporting exactly that erosion. In Bloomberg Law’s 2026 Well-Being Survey, which was also released in September 2026 (1,143 attorneys and legal professionals, most of them in law firms, and a different sample and method from the Krill and Anker study), respondents attributed the following to work-related issues: disrupted sleep (68%), anxiety (65%), worsened mood (55%), and less ability to concentrate (52%). Among those whose well-being had significantly worsened, 80% reported less ability to concentrate. High-quality sleep and sharp focus. These are the raw materials of sound legal judgment.

Meanwhile, research on recovery consistently shows that psychological detachment from work during off-hours is associated with lower exhaustion (Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz, 2007).

Here is my hypothesis, and I want to be clear that the Krill and Anker study did not test it: the steep section of that curve is where demand has outpaced the nervous system’s capacity to recover. If that’s right, it points to two levels of response.

At the firm level, the structural changes the authors recommend give lawyers room to recover. At the individual level, training in nervous system regulation and recovery gives lawyers the capacity to use that room. Structure without capacity leaves lawyers white-knuckling through a better schedule. Capacity without structure asks lawyers to regulate their way through an unsustainable workload. The profession needs both.

The same Bloomberg Law survey found that half of respondents hadn’t used any of the well-being services their organizations offer. Among those who had worked with a professional or executive coach, 73% would recommend it to colleagues, and 53% saw improvement in their personal performance. (Those figures are self-reported by lawyers who chose coaching, so treat them as a signal of fit. Measuring the effect would take a controlled study.)

The destination is what I call Sustainable Peak Performance: the ability to consistently access one’s highest levels of cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and professional performance over the course of an entire career while protecting health, relationships, integrity, and overall well-being.

The bottom line is this: too many lawyers are needlessly suffering. Needlessly suffering at 3:30 in the morning. Needlessly suffering in silence because asking for help feels like a career risk. And needlessly suffering because the profession has treated exhaustion as the price of excellence. This study gives us the clearest data we’ve ever had. What we do with it is up to us.

If you recognize yourself in these statistics (worn out at the end of the working day, routinely working past 50 hours a week, or lying awake before dawn running tomorrow’s argument), you’re not alone. I invite you to book a Performance Gap Analysis call. You’ll leave understanding what’s happening in your nervous system that’s driving your performance gap, and what it would take to change it. Whether or not we work together.

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For firm leaders: if the hours, litigation, and help-seeking findings describe your firm, I invite you to explore our Law Firm Wellness Workshops, including the 90-day Firm Partnership with pre- and post-measurement.

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Because success that requires destroying the person achieving it is not success.