Career Change for Lawyers: Staying and Rebuilding When Burnout Strikes
When Do You Know It’s Time to Fold?
I recently started playing mahjong. I really like it. Particularly because, like poker, there comes a point during certain hands when your odds of winning go to zero and you know you can’t win.
So is it time to leave the table? Or just change things up?
In all cases, it’s your choice. And that’s what makes it so hard. As a lawyer facing burnout, you likely haven't been told it's okay to pivot or rebuild. Instead, the traditional advice is, “Grin and bear it,” or, “This is just how it is, so you better get used to it quickly.” And, many do. Miserably.
But instead of considering what you should do, what if you ask what you could do? Framing it that way, is leaving the only answer?
Four ideas changed how I think about this: when to fold, what to try, why we cling, and what actually sustains us.
Career change for lawyers doesn’t have to mean leaving law entirely.
Career change can mean, instead, shifting how, where, or if you practice law at all. If you’re facing lawyer burnout, you’ve been told two things: endure it or leave. But, rebuilding within - experimenting, oscillating, finding wholeheartedness - is a viable and can be the more grounded avenue forward.
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The Competency Trap: Success as a Cage
Oftentimes, the first real challenge when considering whether to change or leave practice is the thought that, “I’m good at this (and, they pay me pretty well to do it). Why change anything?”
This is what Herminia Ibarra in the excellent Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career, calls the “competency trap.” Proficiency triggers both an internal sense of mastery, external validation and rewards. The thing you’re best at also becomes the most limiting factor about your work life.
In law and the other professions, this trap cuts deep: you're earning well, you've built years of expertise, yet you feel trapped by burnout. This isn't normal stress - it's a signal that your skills and expertise have become a cage instead of a path to the freedom you thought they would lead you to.
But, is that enough to make a change?
Why Professionals Quit Too Late
In her book Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, Annie Duke (a former poker player) argues that most of us quit too late, not too early, because we overvalue grit, underestimate uncertainty, and ignore the hidden cost of sticking with the wrong things.
Herein lie two more traps.
The first: As long as there feels like a chance of things turning around, it will always feel too early to give up or make a change. When you are good at what you do, the “maybe it’ll improve” story is always kept alive.
The second: the sunk cost fallacy. This is the idea that, if I quit now, I’ll have wasted all that time/money/energy/etc. But is this actually true? How much of that will you waste going forward if you don’t quit/change paths? Imagining the future signals that would tell you it’s time to leave, and writing them down, increases the chances you’ll cut your losses when you should.
The real question isn’t whether a career change is inevitable - it’s when you’ll pursue one intentionally rather than in crisis.
You can hear more of Duke on her thinking here (courtesy of McKinsey & Co.):
How Career Transitions Actually Happen
But, even if you do decide it’s time to leave - or change it up - the question most folks get hung up on is, “To where do I go? What could I do as well as this, and how can I even figure that out?” Ibarra’s research on how legal career transitions actually happen challenges the all-or-nothing narrative.
Ibarra posits that it’s not about figuring out what you want and then jumping. In fact, it’s entirely the opposite. Try things - experiment constantly - until you have effectively invented your new future.
This makes sense. From a scientific perspective, knowing is the result of doing - not thinking - so, running small experiments rather than making one terrifying, all or nothing jump (which I know a thing or two about) can make the transition not only more easily attainable, but feel safer.
Which is important. The idea that this is an “all or nothing” thing can leave you entirely paralyzed. But, what if you were to look at change as a longer period of transition, rather than a simple on/off switch? To this point, Ibarra suggests a period of “oscillation” - holding on to past work while also letting go of it at the same time - and living with the contradictions that introduces (as hard as that might be), rather than simply jumping to a premature resolution (which, in all likelihood, will result in either returning to the old path or a prolonged state of panic).
Five Red Flags it’s Time for a Career Change
Chronic dread most workdays (not situational stress)
Constant comparison: "I should be happy / successful by any measure, yet I'm not"
Identity collapse: when work fails, you fail
Misalignment: your work conflicts with your core values
Exhaustion no amount of rest fixes
The Real Question: Wholeheartedness, Not Rest
So, let’s recap: just because you’re good at it, doesn’t mean it’s right or your future; know when to quit and have criteria for doing so or else it really can be too late to fold; run a lot of experiments and don’t be afraid to straddle two (or more) paths as long as necessary.
But, what about “passion”? Or energy? Or, simply ensuring that the next thing doesn’t lead to more burnout?
David Whyte, the author and poet, exhausted running a nonprofit and privately wrestling with whether to leave, asked his friend the Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast to “speak to me of exhaustion.”
The monk’s answer: the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest - it’s wholeheartedness. Whyte was tired because he couldn’t be wholehearted about the work he was doing. His whole heart was really in poetry.
So, what is it to be whole-hearted? Is your current work 25% of the way there? 50%? Something else?
To quote Whyte, “You are only half here, and half here will kill you after a while.”
Whyte writes that our sense of success in life can imprison us as much as our sense of failure. You can spend a lifetime defending a success rather than finding out who you actually are. For lawyers especially - a profession where identity fuses with work - burnout often signals not that a career change is inevitable, but that your relationship to law needs to shift.
The research bears this out. The ABA and Institute for Well-Being in Law reports that 36–44% of lawyers report depression, anxiety, or substance-use symptoms - often rooted in misalignment between their work and what they care about.
So, what can you be wholehearted about? Well, I think it’s less about what and more about when. We so often tell ourselves we’ll get to it when the kids are grown, when there’s enough money in the bank, when we’re retired…but, we need to ask what we are wholehearted about now.
That is the direction to which the change needs to pivot.
Identity Foreclosure: Why Professionals Burn Out
But, being “whole-hearted” is not enough on its own.
In Amy Wrzesniewski’s “Jobs, Careers, and Callings”, she found that people relate to work as a Job (financial necessity), a Career (advancement and prestige), or a Calling (fulfilling, socially useful work that’s an end in itself). Roughly a third fall into each.
She also noted that callings can turn sour - or, in other words - those most likely to burn out are those who narrate their calling as identity - “I am this thing” - so that when conditions make it impossible to live up to, the failure cuts at the self.
Take lawyers for example. For many (though not all) the profession is not just what you do, but what you are. When that kind of pressure falls on your work and career, and you aren’t doing it in a way that is wholehearted or in a way that meets your own self-expectation of joy, performance or satisfaction, that’s when things fall apart.
Psychologists call this identity foreclosure - a high commitment to a role reached through premature identification, without prior exploration or crisis. Hence, the need to experiment and try more things, along the lines of Ibarra’s thinking, while also, in Whyte’s thinking, pursuing those experiments that give to your heart the most - and allow your heart to express the most.
Is Burnout Different from Stress?
Is it burnout or just normal stress?
Burnout is chronic misalignment—if you dread most days, it's likely burnout.
Do I need a career change to fix burnout?
No. Many lawyers find relief by rebuilding *how* they practice: different areas, part-time roles, firm transitions, sabbaticals.
What is oscillation?
Keeping your law practice while experimenting with new ways of working - reduced pressure, zero all-or-nothing risk.
What about Mahjong?
Back to the table. In mahjong, the hardest hands aren’t the ones you clearly lose - they’re the ones you could still win, if the right tile falls, if you play it perfectly, if you’re willing to wait just one more round.
That’s the trap. Not the losing hand, but the winnable-looking one that ends up costing you the game.
Your career rarely hands you a clean signal to fold. What it offers instead is a question you can ask at any point, and the earlier the better: Am I still wholehearted here or just still good at it? You don’t have to answer by leaving. You answer by paying attention, by running the small experiment, by writing down the signals now so the sunk cost can’t talk you out of it later. The choice was always yours.
The only real mistake is waiting until it isn’t.
Jordan Nahmias is the founder of Unstuck Consulting, an executive coaching practice for lawyers and other professionals. A former entertainment law partner in Toronto, he helps high performers navigate burnout, career transition, and identity.
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