Debridement: the legal profession has dead tissue under the dressing and it is time to take another look

Before you start: this briefing talks about burnout, intrusive thoughts and the way the legal profession treats people who are unwell. If you are not in a place to read that today, close the tab, because it will keep. If you need somebody right now, Lifeline is on 13 11 14, and there are further support options listed at the end. Nuance and critical thinking cap on please. You have been warned, with love.

The presenting complaint

Last week I remembered a thought I used to have at work.

I wished I would sprain my wrist in an accident. Nothing dramatic, nothing that would show up on a scan and frighten anybody, just enough damage that I did not have to type for a little while. Just enough damage that somebody else would decide I was not working that day.

I remember shrugging at the time and getting on with it, which is the part that stays with me now, the shrug rather than the thought.

I put this little memory on my Instagram stories the way I put most things on my Instagram stories, which is to say without much of a plan. What came back was the largest response I think I have had in six years of doing this work. Dozens of messages, then dozens more. I stopped sharing them once the point had been made, partly because it had stopped being useful for anyone to watch the pile grow, and more honestly because I could not take any more of it. It broke my heart.

I should not have been surprised, given what we already know. I have written about this myself and the profession has been writing and writing and writing about it for as long as I can remember. What I had not appreciated was how far down the rot still goes, how quiet everybody has been about it, and how many people opened their message with some version of the same sentence.

"I thought it was just me."

I should say now that I think this time is different from the last several times the profession had this conversation, for a reason that has nothing at all to do with awareness. I will get to it.

Triaging the evidence

The messages fell into three piles.

Pile one: what people thought. My wrist thought, mirrored back in a hundred small variations that arrived all week. A car on the way to court, a fall on the stairs, a short hospital stay somewhere with a bed and no wifi. Different scenarios, same wish sitting underneath all of them, which was for somebody other than themselves to decide they were not working that day.

The people writing to me were careful to be clear about something that I want to be equally clear about here, because it is the most important sentence in this piece. Almost every single one of them volunteered, unprompted, that they did not actually want to be incapacitated from work forever. What they wanted was to rest, could not see a legitimate way to stop, and so their minds had gone looking for an illegitimate one instead.

One person had worked the logic all the way through. Resigning does not help, she wrote, because you still have to serve out the notice period, whereas a small non-life-altering accident requiring short-term treatment would do the trick immediately.

That is not a person in the grip of something irrational. That is a person reasoning correctly about the options available inside a system where the only reliable off switch is physical injury. The thought is not the disease. The thought is a symptom, an entirely sane response to an unsustainable situation.

Pile two: what employers did. This is the pile the profession cannot explain away.

• Files delivered to a hospital room after heart surgery, with a note attached saying it was something to keep her busy while she recovered

• A woman on crutches with a torn ligament, sent down the road to fetch her boss a coffee, managing the crutches, the umbrella and the coffee while the boss expressed irritation that she was not better yet

• Someone in acute care reviewing tribunal submissions from the bed, still expected to appear five business days later, without knowing when the surgery was or when she would be discharged

• A lawyer admitted overnight for emergency surgery, told to go home from the hospital first and collect her laptop so she could be useful while she waited

• A message to a supervisor about heading off for a chest X-ray, answered with a request for a call about an unrelated matter

• More than one version of the same story, which is giving birth and being asked to join a call hours later

Pile one is what people thought. Pile two is what their employers did. Only one of those can be written off as an individual having a hard time.

Pile three: I thought it was just me. The biggest pile by a distance, and the one that made this briefing necessary. Not one or two people writing to say they had assumed they were the only one, but most of them.

That is not a coincidence. A profession that treats distress as a personal failing produces a workforce where everybody is privately certain they are the only one failing.

Why we have to look at this again

You cannot dress a wound you have not looked at. You cannot know whether the tissue underneath is healing or dying without lifting the dressing, and lifting it hurts, and everybody in the room would rather you did not. You do it anyway.

That is where the legal profession has been for eighteen years by my count, at minimum. The dressing is quite beautiful now, and in most workplaces it even has a lovely awareness ribbon on it.

I want to be honest about my own reaction to what came out from under it, because I have written a lot of measured pieces about this and this is not going to be one of them. Even I did not fully realise the extent of it. Reading those messages scared the absolute sh*t out of me. I have been in this profession for fifteen years, I talk to lawyers daily for a living, and I thought I had a reasonably clear-eyed view of how bad things were out there. I was wrong by a wide margin.

The aetiology

None of this is mysterious. We know what causes it, in the way we know what causes any chronic condition with two interacting factors, which are who gets selected for exposure and then what they are exposed to.

Who the profession selects for. In Why Lawyers Are Unhappy, published in the Cardozo Law Review in 2001 and republished for an Australian audience in the Deakin Law Review in 2005, Seligman, Verkuil and Kang argued that law selects for pessimism, or as the profession prefers to call it, prudence. The reflexive scan for what could go wrong, otherwise known as Lawyer Brain, is the same explanatory style that is strongly associated with depression when it leaks into the rest of your life. Their law school data is American and the authors were careful to note it predicted success in law school rather than in practice, so hold it lightly. Hold it, though.

It sits alongside a familiar cluster:

• Perfectionism, in a job where a small error can have real consequences

• Conscientiousness taken past the point of usefulness, so that rest starts to feel like a form of negligence

• Insecure overachievement, where the achievement never quite resolves the insecurity, and yes, guilty

• Identity fusion, where lawyer stops being what you do and becomes who you are

• Prudent pessimism, brilliant in a due diligence report and corrosive in a life

The profession then recruits hard for exactly these people, calls them the best and brightest, and works them accordingly.

What they are exposed to. I have set this out at length before, in For the Ones in the Trenches, so this is the short version:

• The billable hour, which commodifies your time, rewards presence over output and makes working through illness the rational choice

• Low decision latitude, particularly early on, which the same 2001 paper identified as one half of the combination that reliably produces poor health and poor morale

• Unpredictable and excessive hours, where sleep, relationships and everything non-work absorb the difference

• Zero-error tolerance, sustained indefinitely, with feedback and recognition that only arrive when something has gone wrong

• Hierarchy dressed as mentorship, an earn-your-stripes model built for a workforce and a time that no longer exists

Stack the selection on top of the exposure and you do not have a wellbeing problem. You have an architecture.

The warning label has been on the tin for most of my career and most likely yours as well. Richard Beasley published Hell Has Harbour Views in 2001 and the profession received it as comedy rather than as a warning, which tells you something on its own. Lisa Pryor published The Pinstriped Prison in 2008. Tristan Jepson, a law graduate, died in 2004, and the foundation his parents built in his name, now Minds Count, has been doing this work since 2008.

Eighteen years of pain relief

Since then we have had wellbeing weeks, R U OK Days, resilience CPD, employee assistance programs, mindfulness sessions catered with sandwiches, some yoga and a great deal of signage.

Every single one of those is analgesia. They manage the presentation of a condition without touching the thing causing it, which is why the awareness industry inside law is enormous and the needle has still not really moved.

You can hand out a great deal of pain relief to somebody with an untreated infection. They will still be infected, they will simply complain about it less, and the institution will read that as an improvement.

Wound or rot?

This is where I got stuck writing this briefing.

I have just finished Sarah Wilson's I Eat the Stars, which is about how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world. It is a book about civilisational and climate collapse rather than about law, so I am borrowing the frame rather than the subject, but it gave me language I did not have around complex systems and what happens to them under sustained stress. Complex systems do not usually get repaired, Wilson argues. They reorganise, or they come apart so that something else can grow in the gap. Her move, and the reason the book is not a despair text, is to treat collapse as an invitation rather than an ending.

So which is the current state of the Australian legal profession. A wound that you clean, dress and watch, or a rot that you cut out.

I spent a while assuming those were the only two options, amputate or persevere. The answer sitting between them is the one surgeons actually use.

Debridement.

I have a dear friend with severe scar tissue from a burns accident many years ago, and she once explained the process to me in a way I have never forgotten. You cut away the dead tissue so that the living tissue underneath has a chance. It is painful, it looks worse before it looks better, and the people who love the patient find it distressing to watch. Skipping it is how you get sepsis.

What will not work is treating this as a culture problem you can fix with a poster and a morning tea, because underneath the culture sits a very serious business model. Charlie Munger said it best, which is show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.

• The billable hour incentivises presence over output, which rewards illness worked through

• Growth targets require more revenue this year than last, every year, forever, from a workforce of finite humans

• Partnership incentivises the people who survived the system to defend it, because their equity is priced on the assumption that the next cohort pays the same entry fee

That is the dead tissue, and that is why most people are not going to like where my thinking has landed.

I am not calling for the end of capitalism. I like supply and demand and market forces dictating trade and competition, and I run a business myself. What I am asking for is narrower than that, and I think it is fair. I want to know at what point enough becomes enough, and what this profession would look like if the incentives rewarded something other than simply more.

The thing that changed the prognosis

Something happened while the profession was busy running wellbeing weeks, and it is the reason I think this moment is finally different from 2008.

The law changed.

Since 1 December 2025, every Australian state and territory has enforceable obligations requiring employers to identify, assess and control psychosocial hazards at work. Not respond to them afterwards, prevent them. Excessive job demands, low job control, poor support, bullying and unreasonable workload pressure now sit in the same legal category as an unguarded machine in a factory. The eight harmonised jurisdictions run it through their WHS Regulations with Safe Work Australia's model Code of Practice behind it, while Victoria has its own Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025, which commenced on that date and completed the national picture. Penalties are real, officers carry personal due diligence duties, and regulators have started prosecuting.

The detail that should make every managing partner in the country sit up is the hierarchy of controls. You are required to reach for the higher-order controls first, which means redesigning the work itself, before you fall back on the lower-order ones. Victoria puts it about as plainly as a regulation can, which is that information, instruction or training cannot be the exclusive or predominant control unless the other measures are not reasonably practicable.

Read that with the profession's entire wellbeing response in mind. The resilience CPD, the wellbeing week, the EAP number on the intranet. Almost everything law firms have offered for eighteen years sits at the bottom of a legally structured hierarchy, while the thing sitting at the top, which is treat the cause, is the thing very few have yet touched.

Law firms advise clients on this legislation. They run WHS practices, they write the client alerts, and as far as I can tell they are close to the last workplace in Australia to apply any of it to themselves.

That is not a vibe or a values conversation you can absorb and move on from. That is a compliance gap in an industry that sells compliance, enforceable by somebody other than the person suffering.

The prescription

Firms and in-house teams.

• Run a genuine psychosocial risk assessment, then act on the higher-order controls rather than reporting on the lower ones

• Look at workload allocation, after-hours expectations, resourcing on deals, and what actually happens to a file when somebody is unwell

• Read your exit interview data as hazard data, because that is now what it is

• Stop counting the EAP as a sufficient control, because it sits at the bottom of the hierarchy and you know it

Law societies.

• Less awareness, more teeth

• Publish sector guidance on what compliance actually looks like inside a law firm, then model it in your own practising certificate requirements

• Awareness was the 2008 answer and it did not work, so the 2026 answer needs to be a different one

Law schools.

• Tell students the truth about the conditions before they sign up to four or five years and a significant debt

• I wrote So Your Teenager Wants to Study Law for the parents, and somebody should be writing the honest version for the students

• We still need lawyers, of course we do. We need them well.

And you, sitting there reading this at 9pm after another day of intrusive thoughts.

I want to say this carefully, because I am not interested in blaming anybody for the conditions of a system they did not build. You did not cause this and you cannot fix it on your own.

You are also not in prison, my learned friend.

If this is your life right now, you have more agency than the profession has led you to believe. You can leave, go sideways, take less money for a while, sell things, move home, restructure the debt, take the ego hit of a title that sounds less impressive to a certain type of person at a certain type of party. Those are real costs and I am not going to pretend otherwise, though they are almost certainly smaller than the cost you are paying now, which you have stopped noticing because you have been paying it in instalments. The frog in the boiling water and all that.

If you have landed with a poorly trained manager, the odds are it will not be your last one, so learn to read the signs early, document what happens, and get out sooner than feels reasonable. I wrote about that pattern in The Dickhead Dominated Industry.

If nothing changes, nothing changes.

A note on my own diagnosis

I feel called to name the possibility that I am wrong about the scale of this.

I am a person who talks publicly on the internet about leaving corporate law, so it would be strange if the people who follow me were a representative sample of the profession. It is entirely possible there is a quiet majority out there doing good work, sleeping properly, seeing their families, enjoying their hobbies and finding the whole thing fine. Thriving, even.

I have gone looking for those people. I tried very hard and for a very long time to be one of them, I managed it for some years, and mostly I did not. The more Australian lawyers I talk to, the less that seems to be the shape of it. Like all things it is a spectrum, with plenty of people somewhere in the middle rather than at the bad end, though sitting in the middle is not the same thing as fine.

I would genuinely like to be wrong. Write to me if I am, and tell me what helps you.

Where this leaves me

I opened by asking whether this is a wound to be cleaned or a rot to be cut out, and having sat with it for a fortnight I do not think it is either. It is a burn with dead tissue over the top of living tissue, which is why the answer is debridement rather than a dressing or an amputation. There is a great deal worth saving here. There is also tissue that has been dead for years, and everybody has agreed to keep the dressing over it because looking underneath is unpleasant and expensive.

What I know is that the profession has been treating the symptom for eighteen years while the cause sat untouched, that people across this profession are quietly imagining injuries so they can rest, and that it now carries a compliance gap in the exact area it bills clients to advise on.

The work matters. We need good lawyers and good law, arguably more now than we have for a long time. What I am calling for is the end of the assumption that the only variable available for adjustment is the individual human being.

A profession where rest is legitimate and strategic is not a softer profession. It is a functional one.

This is so much bigger than the individual.

You are most certainly not alone.

Mel

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(and breathe)

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If any of this landed too close to home today, please talk to somebody. If you are in it right now, start with your GP, because mental health is health. It is trite because it is true, and your brain is an organ like every other organ in your body.

Lifeline is on 13 11 14. In Queensland, QLS members can access LawCare on a 24 hour basis and I hear very good things about it. In New South Wales, the Law Society funds a confidential counselling service for solicitors. Other states and territories run equivalent schemes through their law societies and bars, and the Law Council of Australia maintains a mental health and wellbeing portal for the profession.

Mel Storey is the founder of Counsel Media and the voice behind Career Big Sis. She spent fifteen years in corporate and in-house legal roles before leaving in July 2025 to go all in on creating, content and community.