The 2026 Well-Being and Performance Studies

By Dr. Stephen Rue, Attorney, Researcher, and Author

 An Important Moment for the Legal Profession

The legal profession has received an important new body of scientific evidence concerning lawyer mental health, work-related burnout, work-family conflict, alcohol-related risk, barriers to seeking help, and the occupational conditions under which lawyers practice.

In 2026, Patrick R. Krill and Justin J. Anker, Ph.D., published When Demands Equal Distress: An Updated Understanding of Lawyer Mental Health and Well-Being in the Journal of Affective Disorders. Conducted in partnership with the American Bar Association Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs, the research is the largest multi-jurisdictional survey of actively licensed lawyers to date.

Its findings deserve careful attention. The study offers a substantial contemporary picture of psychological distress, work-related burnout, alcohol-related risk, work-family conflict, and help-seeking barriers among lawyers. It also identifies meaningful associations between those outcomes and work hours, litigation involvement, and practice setting.

The study creates an important opportunity for the profession—not to diminish the rigor, responsibility, ambition, or service expected of lawyers, but to examine the conditions under which lawyers are expected to work, develop, lead, serve clients, recover, and sustain professional performance over time.

My doctoral research, completed in May 2026, approached related questions through a different methodology and a more focused organizational lens. The study explored how managerial behavior and supervisory relationships were perceived to influence subordinate lawyer well-being and job performance in large U.S. law firms.

The Krill–Anker research and my doctoral research are independent studies. They were designed to answer different questions, use different methods, and make different contributions. Neither study independently proves or validates the other. Considered together, however, they provide complementary perspectives for a broader professional inquiry: how can lawyers and legal organizations pursue excellent work while supporting and renewing the human capacities upon which sustained excellence depends?

That inquiry is central to The Happy High-Performing Lawyer: The Science and Practice of Well-Being and Sustainable High Performance.

Key Findings

The 2026 Krill–Anker research examined psychological distress, work-related burnout, alcohol-related risk, work-family conflict, barriers to seeking help, and selected occupational factors among actively licensed lawyers. It included 39,036 employed respondents recruited through 28 participating jurisdictions; 36,925 respondents were eligible for the primary survey-weighted analyses.

Measure

Survey-weighted finding

Moderate-or-higher depressive   symptoms

21.6%

Moderate-or-higher anxiety symptoms

20.4%

Moderate-or-higher stress symptoms

18.9%

High or very high work-related   burnout

47.5%

High or very high work-family   conflict

35.9%

Positive AUDIT-C screen at the   standard hazardous-drinking threshold

41.8%

Positive AUDIT-C screen at the   higher threshold

26.4%

The mental-health findings use the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales–21, known as the DASS-21. They report screening results for moderate-or-higher symptoms; they are not individual clinical diagnoses.

Likewise, the alcohol-related findings use the AUDIT-C consumption screening instrument. A positive AUDIT-C screen is not, by itself, a diagnosis of alcohol-use disorder. The work-related-burnout findings use the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory work subscale; its low, moderate, high, and very-high categories are descriptive positions on the research scale, not clinical diagnoses.

That methodological precision does not make the results less meaningful. It ensures the findings are interpreted as the authors intended.

Study Design and Scope

The Krill–Anker study used a large-scale, cross-sectional survey design. The authors collected data in July and August 2025 across 28 participating jurisdictions.

Within each participating jurisdiction, actively licensed lawyers were randomly selected from rosters using non-identifiable study identifiers. Each roster member had a known 70% probability of invitation. The participating jurisdictions represented all four United States Census regions and all nine Census divisions.

The participating jurisdictions themselves were not selected through a national probability procedure. Participation by invited lawyers was voluntary. The researchers used post-stratification raking to calibrate responses to 2024 American Bar Association demographic benchmarks for age, gender, and race/ethnicity.

The study therefore provides strong contemporary evidence about patterns, screening results, occupational strain, associations, and adjusted predicted prevalence within the surveyed and weighted lawyer population. Its cross-sectional design does not establish simple causal pathways. It cannot determine that a particular workplace condition caused a particular lawyer’s distress or burnout, and it does not diagnose individual lawyers.

The authors appropriately identify limitations associated with cross-sectional and self-report methods, potential nonresponse bias, residual confounding, common-method bias, and generalizability beyond the sampling frame and weighting targets. These limitations clarify the study’s scope; they do not diminish its value as a major contemporary contribution to lawyer well-being research.

Burnout and Demand

The study provides the first large, multi-jurisdictional estimate of work-related burnout among lawyers using the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory. Of the survey-weighted population, 31.7% fell in the high-burnout category and 15.8% fell in the very-high-burnout category, for a combined 47.5% at or above the study’s high-burnout threshold.

Work-family conflict was also substantial. Nineteen percent of respondents fell in the high category, and 16.9% fell in the very-high category, for a combined 35.9%. The measure assessed the degree to which work interfered with family or private life.

The authors found that work-related burnout was the more proximal correlate of psychological distress in their analyses. The predicted prevalence of moderate-or-higher depression, anxiety, and stress rose nonlinearly as burnout increased. Work-family conflict was also associated with greater distress, although the researchers did not find reliable evidence of a formal burnout-by-work-family-conflict interaction across the specifications tested.

The careful takeaway is not that burnout, work-family conflict, and distress are simple or wholly separate conditions. The authors note substantial overlap among these measures of occupational strain. Rather, the research supports sustained professional attention to the relationship among occupational exhaustion, work-life interference, recovery, and lawyer mental health.

Work Hours and Litigation

The Krill–Anker research found that distress and burnout outcomes varied with weekly work hours, litigation involvement, and practice setting.

In adjusted analyses, lawyers reporting 71 or more work hours per week had an adjusted predicted prevalence of moderate-or-higher stress of 42.2%, compared with 13.5% among those reporting 31–40 hours per week. The corresponding adjusted predicted prevalence of anxiety was 33.1% versus 16.5%, and the predicted prevalence of depression was 30.6% versus 18.6%.

High work-related burnout also rose across longer work weeks. In descriptive results, the prevalence of high burnout increased from 39.9% among lawyers working 31–40 hours per week to 69.5% among lawyers reporting 71 or more hours. In adjusted analyses, the predicted prevalence of high burnout was 65.9% among the 71-or-more-hours group, compared with 39.0% among the 31–40-hours reference group.

These findings are associations in cross-sectional data. They do not prove that long work hours cause a specific lawyer’s distress or burnout. Nevertheless, they offer a compelling reason to examine whether periods of extraordinary demand remain exceptional—or become the ordinary architecture of a lawyer’s professional life.

Litigation involvement was associated with modest but consistent elevations in distress, burnout, and alcohol-related-risk screening outcomes after adjustment for other variables. Practice setting was also associated with different outcome patterns. Some in-house and judicial-chambers settings showed lower adjusted distress and burnout prevalence than solo private practice, while private-firm settings showed higher adjusted hazardous-drinking screening prevalence.

These occupational associations should not be treated as judgments about particular lawyers, firms, practice areas, or career paths. They are reasons for continued research and for thoughtful examination of workload, staffing, supervision, recovery, practice systems, and professional culture.

Help-Seeking Barriers

The study’s findings on help-seeking reveal a serious implementation challenge. While 75.2% of respondents reported awareness of a Lawyer Assistance Program in their jurisdiction, awareness does not necessarily mean that support feels safe, accessible, or realistically available.

The most frequently reported barriers to seeking mental-health assistance were:

• Confidentiality concerns: 53.3%.
• Concern about professional reputation or career      opportunities: 49.2%.
• Lack of time: 34.5%.
• Preference to manage problems independently: 25.2%.

The research also found that 41.1% of respondents reported that time in the legal profession had been detrimental to their mental health. Twenty-seven percent reported considering leaving the profession due to mental-health concerns, burnout, or stress. Eighty-one point three percent rated it important or very important for the profession to devote greater effort to reducing mental-health and substance-use problems among lawyers.

Those findings reinforce an important principle: making a well-being resource available is not the same as creating a professional culture in which lawyers feel able to use it. Trust, credible privacy protections, leadership, communication, and realistic access all matter.

The Rue Lawyer Well-Being and Performance Study

A complementary qualitative study

The Krill–Anker study provides a broad quantitative perspective on lawyer mental health and occupational well-being. My doctoral research was designed to explore a different but related issue: how do managerial behaviors and supervisory relationships influence subordinate lawyer well-being and job performance in large U.S. law firms?

The formal title of the dissertation is:

Managerial Behaviors and Their Impact on Subordinate Lawyer Well-Being and Performance in Large U.S. Law Firms: A Qualitative Multiple Case Study.

The research was completed in May 2026 as part of the Doctor of Business Administration program at National University’s School of Business and Economics. For readability, this article and The Happy High-Performing Lawyerrefer to it as the Rue Lawyer Well-Being and Performance Study.

The study used a qualitative multiple-case design guided by self-determination theory. It included semi-structured interviews with 32 participants: 14 supervising attorneys or managing partners and 18 subordinate lawyers from large U.S. law firms. Through thematic analysis, the study explored how participating lawyers described management behavior, supervisory relationships, professional development, psychological well-being, and job performance.

The Rue study was not designed to estimate national rates of distress, burnout, work-family conflict, or alcohol-related risk. It does not provide national prevalence estimates, establish general causal effects, or replicate the Krill–Anker methodology. Its contribution is qualitative and contextual: it examines how participating attorneys and law-firm leaders described workplace relationships and organizational conditions relevant to lawyer well-being and perceived performance.

Self-determination theory

Self-determination theory, developed by Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, was the conceptual framework for the Rue study. The theory identifies three basic psychological needs relevant to human motivation and well-being:

• Autonomy:     Experiencing volition, appropriate professional discretion, and meaningful      ownership of one’s work.
• Competence:     Experiencing effectiveness, feedback, development, mastery, and the      ability to meet professional challenges.
• Relatedness:     Experiencing connection, belonging, respect, constructive relationships,      and care from others.

Within a law-firm environment, these needs may be affected by how work is assigned, how expectations are communicated, how feedback is delivered, how mistakes and uncertainty are handled, how mentorship occurs, and how professional development and increasing autonomy are supported.

Management, well-being, and perceived performance

The Rue study identified recurring patterns in how participating attorneys described managerial behavior and its relationship to psychological need satisfaction, work engagement, well-being, and perceived job performance.

Five clusters of managerial behavior were associated with more favorable experiences:

• Structured mentorship.
• Autonomy-supportive supervision.
• Intentional skill development and meaningful feedback.
• Consistent supervisory accessibility.
• Relational investment in subordinate lawyers.

Participants also described controlling supervision, chronic supervisory unavailability, billing-driven appropriation of subordinate work, and emotionally volatile or unpredictable managerial behavior in connection with psychological distress, professional isolation, diminished confidence, and other adverse workplace experiences.

The study also identified structural practices, including workload allocation and billing-related expectations, that may affect subordinate lawyers’ experiences independently of the conduct of any individual supervising attorney.

These qualitative findings should not be read as proof that a particular managerial practice causes a specific mental-health or performance outcome. They identify patterns in the perceptions and experiences of participating lawyers and leaders. As such, they offer useful questions for law firms, supervisors, researchers, and professional institutions to examine.

Resigned resilience

A meaningful finding from the Rue study involved lawyers who continued meeting professional expectations despite diminished well-being. The dissertation described this pattern as resigned resilience.

Participating lawyers described meeting deadlines, serving clients, recording billable hours, and fulfilling professional responsibilities while also experiencing adverse workplace conditions, exhaustion, diminished confidence, strained relationships, or inadequate opportunities for recovery.

The point is not that every productive lawyer is distressed or that excellent work necessarily comes at a personal cost. The more careful proposition is that visible output alone may not fully reveal the conditions under which performance is maintained.

A lawyer may perform effectively in the short term while capacities needed for future performance—attention, judgment, emotional regulation, health, relationships, development, motivation, and recovery—are being depleted. That distinction is central to the idea of sustainable lawyer performance.

How the Studies Relate

The Krill–Anker study and the Rue Lawyer Well-Being and Performance Study are independent research projects. They use different designs, answer different questions, and make different contributions. Discussing them together does not imply research collaboration, institutional endorsement, a common data source, or that either study independently validates the other.

They are nevertheless complementary in the broader professional conversation about lawyer well-being, professional conditions, leadership, development, and sustained performance.

Shared relevance

Occupational conditions associated   with lawyer well-being

Managerial and organizational conditions relevant to lawyer well-being and sustainable performance

The Krill–Anker research helps the profession understand the scope and occupational context of distress, burnout, work-family conflict, alcohol-related risk, and help-seeking barriers. The Rue study adds qualitative insight into how participating attorneys experienced management, supervision, professional development, autonomy, competence, relatedness, and perceived professional performance.

The intersection is conceptual and practical—not a claim of empirical confirmation. Together with the broader literature on lawyer well-being, motivation, leadership, organizational behavior, and professional functioning, the studies support further inquiry into how legal careers can be more sustainable without sacrificing rigor, responsibility, ambition, client service, ethics, or excellence.

Why Well-Being Belongs in Performance

The Krill–Anker study is fundamentally a mental-health and occupational-well-being study. It does not purport to be a comprehensive study of lawyer job performance. The Rue study examined the perceived relationship between lawyer well-being and job performance more directly, particularly through supervisory relationships and large-law-firm organizational environments.

Neither study supports the simplistic conclusion that happier lawyers always perform better. Well-being does not guarantee exceptional performance. Lawyers experiencing distress may continue performing at a high level, especially in the short term. Legal performance also depends on knowledge, preparation, technical skill, judgment, ethics, client circumstances, experience, teamwork, systems, and organizational resources.

The more useful question is whether the conditions through which lawyers achieve performance can be maintained over time.

Sustained legal excellence depends on human capacities: clear thinking, judgment, attention, learning, communication, emotional regulation, ethical perspective, collaboration, leadership, motivation, health, relationships, and recovery. These capacities do not replace legal competence or professional discipline. They help make continued competence and disciplined performance possible.

This is the core idea of sustainable lawyer performance: producing excellent legal work while maintaining, developing, and renewing the human capabilities upon which continued excellence depends.

How the Book Helps

The Happy High-Performing Lawyer: The Science and Practice of Well-Being and Sustainable High Performance brings this broader research conversation into practical professional life.

The book integrates contemporary lawyer well-being research—including the work of Krill, Anker, the ABA Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs, and other researchers—with original qualitative doctoral scholarship, self-determination theory, positive psychology, leadership and organizational research, professional-performance research, and decades of legal-practice experience.

It does not treat well-being as the opposite of ambition. It does not argue that law should become less rigorous, disciplined, demanding, or accountable. Nor does it suggest that individual self-care alone can solve organizational, managerial, or structural challenges within legal practice.

Instead, it asks:

What does it take for a lawyer to perform effectively not simply through one demanding week, trial, transaction, or billing cycle, but across years and decades of professional life?

A broader framework for lawyer performance

Traditional measures of lawyer performance frequently focus on billable hours, revenue, client acquisition, case outcomes, professional advancement, and public recognition. These measures may reflect genuine achievement, meaningful service, and extraordinary dedication. They do not necessarily provide a complete account of the lawyer producing the work or of the long-term sustainability of the conditions under which that achievement occurs.

The book offers an original, multidimensional framework for considering lawyer performance:

Dimension

What it considers:

Task performance

Legal research, analysis, writing,   advocacy, negotiation, preparation, and matter management

Client-service   performance

Understanding client objectives,   communicating effectively, exercising responsiveness with judgment, and   delivering meaningful legal value

Contextual performance

Collaboration, reliability,   civility, mentoring, knowledge sharing, and contributions to the professional   environment

Adaptive performance

Learning, professional development,   responsible use of new tools, and responding effectively to changing   circumstances

Ethical performance

Integrity, independence,   confidentiality, sound judgment, and adherence to professional   responsibilities

Leadership performance

Developing others, communicating   expectations, providing feedback, creating accountability, and supporting   effective teamwork

Sustainable performance

Maintaining the capacities necessary   to continue producing excellent legal work over time

This framework is an original synthesis developed for the legal profession. It is not a validated psychometric instrument and should not be treated as a formula for calculating the performance of an individual lawyer. Its purpose is to encourage a more complete examination of professional excellence—one that considers what lawyers produce, how they serve, how they develop, and whether their working conditions support their capacity to continue performing effectively.

 From Research to Practice

The legal profession has made meaningful progress in recognizing the importance of lawyer mental health and well-being. The 2016 ABA–Hazelden research helped change the national conversation. The 2026 Krill–Anker study adds major contemporary evidence concerning lawyer distress, burnout, work-family conflict, alcohol-related risk, help-seeking barriers, and occupational conditions.

The Rue study adds a complementary qualitative perspective on how participating attorneys experienced management behavior, supervision, psychological need satisfaction, well-being, and perceived job performance. The Happy High-Performing Lawyer brings these perspectives together with broader research and practical legal experience.

The next challenge is implementation.

Individual lawyers

Individual lawyers can examine health, recovery, professional identity, values, relationships, work habits, boundaries, career alignment, meaningful work, and their willingness to seek appropriate help when 

it is needed. Individual agency matters, but it exists within professional environments that may make healthy choices easier or more difficult to sustain.

Supervising lawyers

Supervising attorneys influence important features of another lawyer’s daily professional experience. They can examine how they communicate expectations, allocate work, provide feedback, respond to questions and uncertainty, recognize contributions, support development, create appropriate autonomy, and mentor rising lawyers.

Law firms and legal employers

Law firms and legal employers can examine what they measure, reward, model, and tolerate. They can consider workload practices, staffing, predictability, leadership development, supervisory systems, performance evaluation, advancement, organizational culture, psychological safety, and the credibility and accessibility of well-being resources.

Professional institutions

Bar associations, law schools, lawyer-assistance programs, regulators, courts, researchers, and other professional institutions can continue their work on stigma reduction, confidential assistance, leadership development, mental-health education, professional identity, evidence-informed organizational practices, and research that improves the profession’s understanding of legal work.

No single intervention can address every source of occupational distress or guarantee improved well-being and performance. The opportunity is to move beyond awareness alone and apply the profession’s growing knowledge with rigor, humility, compassion, and sustained attention.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the 2026 ABA–Krill–Anker lawyer well-being study?

The 2026 ABA–Krill–Anker lawyer well-being study refers to When Demands Equal Distress: An Updated Understanding of Lawyer Mental Health and Well-Being, a peer-reviewed article by Patrick R. Krill and Justin J. Anker, Ph.D. The research was published in the Journal of Affective Disorders and conducted in partnership with the American Bar Association Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs. It examines mental-health symptoms, work-related burnout, alcohol-related risk, work-family conflict, help-seeking barriers, and associations with occupational conditions among practicing lawyers.

What percentage of lawyers reported high or very high work-related burnout?

The study reported that 47.5% of the survey-weighted lawyer population fell within high or very high work-related-burnout categories on the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory work subscale. Those categories represent positions on a research scale and are not clinical diagnoses.

Does the study prove that long work hours cause lawyer burnout or mental-health problems?

No. The study is cross-sectional, so it identifies associations at a point in time rather than proving causation. It found that adjusted predicted prevalence of distress and burnout was higher among lawyers reporting longer work weeks, especially at the upper end of the work-hours distribution. That supports further attention to workload, recovery, and work design; it does not establish that work hours caused a specific outcome for an individual lawyer.

Does the research prove that happier lawyers perform better?

No. The Krill–Anker study was not designed to measure lawyer job performance or to determine whether well-being causes performance outcomes. The Rue study qualitatively explored how participating lawyers and law-firm leaders described the relationship among managerial behavior, well-being, and perceived performance. Neither study supports a simple causal rule that happier lawyers always perform better.

The broader proposition developed in The Happy High-Performing Lawyer is more careful: sustained professional excellence depends in part on human capacities—such as judgment, focus, learning, emotional regulation, relationships, ethics, and recovery—that deserve attention alongside traditional measures of output.

What is the relationship between the Krill–Anker study and the Rue study?

They are independent and complementary research projects. The Krill–Anker study uses large-scale quantitative, cross-sectional survey methods to examine lawyer mental health and occupational well-being outcomes. The Rue study uses qualitative multiple-case research to explore how participating supervising and subordinate lawyers described management behavior, psychological needs, well-being, and perceived job performance in large U.S. law firms.

The studies should not be treated as a single project, and neither independently validates the other. Together, they inform a broader discussion of lawyer well-being, occupational conditions, leadership, development, and sustainable professional performance.

Research References

Krill, P. R., & Anker, J. J. (2026). When demands equal distress: An updated understanding of lawyer mental health and well-being. Journal of Affective Disorders, 415, Article 122479. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2026.122479

Rue, S. R. (2026). Managerial behaviors and their impact on subordinate lawyer well-being and performance in large U.S. law firms: A qualitative multiple case study. University, School of Business and Economics.

About Dr. Stephen Rue

Dr. Stephen Rue is an attorney, researcher, author, and longtime legal practitioner. His work examines lawyer well-being, professional identity, motivation, leadership, performance, and the conditions that support sustainable legal careers.

His forthcoming book, The Happy High-Performing Lawyer: The Science and Practice of Well-Being and Sustainable High Performance, will be released January 12, 2027.

Greater Well-Being. Higher Performance. A Brighter Tomorrow.

Research and educational notice: This page is intended for educational and professional discussion. It does not constitute individualized medical, mental-health, substance-use, or legal advice and is not a substitute for appropriate professional evaluation or care. The Krill–Anker study and the Rue Lawyer Well-Being and Performance Study are independent research projects. Discussing them together does not imply research collaboration, institutional endorsement, or that either study independently validates the findings of the other