Young lawyers are speaking out, but is anyone listening?

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Brett, keep coming up with your ideas. Just keep them to yourself.”

The senior partner said it, closed the door, and left. Brett Colvin was five years into private practice in Calgary. People at his firm had taken to calling him “Mr. Ideas,” but they didn’t mean it as a compliment.

For a while, he listened. He kept his ideas to himself. Until he didn’t. In 2019, he walked. He now runs Goodlawyer, a national platform with hundreds of Canadian lawyers building careers on terms the traditional model would not give them: their own.

Colvin isn’t unusual, however. He’s just visible.

It turns out a meaningful share of the profession is rejecting the model it has run on for decades. The reasons vary — compensation, geography, the pull of in-house work — but the data tracks a pattern that firm leaders see in their own hallways. According to a recent report on attrition from the NALP Foundation for Law Career Research and Education, which drew on data from 141 firms in Canada and the United States, more than 80 per cent of departing associates left their firm within five years of hire — an all-time high, up from 80 per cent in 2024. A growing number leave the law altogether. Those who stay are reading the studies their seniors commissioned, looking at the partners those studies describe, and deciding the bargain is one they will not take. They are not arguing the point at conferences. They are answering with their calendars: taking the vacation, going home at five, and leaving the Sunday email unanswered.

The profession has responded with wilful blindness, and wellness coordinators doubling as human resources.

I have spent years writing and speaking about lawyer wellness across North America. That’s unfortunately led me to conclude that the profession’s collective wellness response has become cover. Mental health and wellness weeks, resilience modules, mindfulness apps, and peer-support lines form a parallel architecture that lets the profession appear responsive while the model that causes the harm keeps running.

That’s evident in the lawyers who are leaving. They’re not asking for more programming. They are voting on whether the model is sustainable, and the vote is no.

The data paints a grim picture

Phase I of the Cadieux study on the psychological health determinants of legal professionals in Canada drew on data from 7,305 legal professionals across all Canadian jurisdictions. More than half reported psychological distress and burnout, depression, and suicidal ideation. Among lawyers aged 26 to 35, psychological distress climbed past 70 per cent.

Phase II, released in October 2024, drew the line tighter: the culture of legal practice is itself misaligned with well-being, and work–life conflict tracks directly with intention to leave. Billable hours were singled out as having a “highly negative impact on mental health,” with 1,800 hours flagged as the threshold past which risk rises sharply. That was my target on Bay Street, 25 years ago.

The research did more than just measure the harm; it identified the protective factors. “The key skills to build resilience and shield legal professionals from stressors,” the researchers wrote, “are psychological detachment from work and the ability to set limits.”

That sentence has likely been quoted at many wellness conferences since, but it hasn’t been acted on. The profession treats psychological detachment as a personal skill, not a firm obligation or a workplace condition. When it's part of the culture, a partner does not email at 9 p.m., the 1,800-hour target is not silently raised to 2,200 to make partner, and vacation is actually taken.

Lawyer burnout should, of course, be recognized for what it is: a management problem.

This is not just a Canadian problem. LawCare’s Life in the Law 2025 report found that UK lawyers aged 26 to 35 have the lowest rates of mental well-being and the highest rates of burnout, with 78.7 per cent routinely working beyond contract.

In a single year, the share of UK junior lawyers willing to work more than 50 hours weekly fell from 18 per cent to nine per cent. Young lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic are the first to enter the profession knowing what the work it has long demanded does to people.

Reading the room

When I was called in 2000, I turned out the lights at my Bay Street firm every night. I never said no — not when I was exhausted, not when the work had stopped being productive. There was no language for refusal. The vocabulary was endurance.

A retired partner at a large Toronto firm told me he pulled all-nighters as a young lawyer so documents would be ready by morning. He didn’t call it a sacrifice. He called it the standard. It never occurred to him that the expectation itself was the problem.

Slowly, change is starting to happen. Senior lawyers have read the studies and watched talented associates leave for in-house roles, government, and any practice that allows for detachment and rest. At a Law Society of England and Wales roundtable in 2024, one firm leader put it plainly: “It’s only the oldies left in the office at 7:30 pm. We either have to challenge that or cope with that.”

While there is dignity in what was endured, it cannot become insulation. For many, it may have been a failure of design, kept in place by prestige, habit and economics. The generation now leaving is the first that hasn’t mistaken the fee for the value.

The conversation that stays with me

A senior partner I have known for years recently described the morning his top third-year associate resigned. She came in, closed the door, and told him she was leaving for a mid-size company’s legal department. She didn’t negotiate or ask for a raise, title, or sabbatical. Her decision was made before she walked in.

He told me what stayed with him. After she left, he tried to remember the last weekend he had spent without opening his laptop. He couldn’t. A partner for 22 years, he realized in real time that his best associate had read his life and judged it.

That is the conversation the profession is having with itself, in offices across the country, one resignation at a time.

What would listening cost?

North American attrition data shows that 83 per cent of departing associates leave within five years of being hired, which is an all-time high. Vendor research puts the cost of losing a third-year associate above $1 million dollars and the number leaving the profession altogether up from nine per cent in 2024 to more than 16 per cent in 2025.

Firms can keep calling retention a people issue, but it’s now also a balance-sheet issue.

The evidence points to four critical shifts that are needed.

First, decouple early career development from billable expectations. Eliminate billable-hour targets in the first two years of practice and identify 1,800 hours as a ceiling, not a floor. That signals to young lawyers that firms are training them, rather than extracting from them.

Second, treat psychological detachment as a workplace norm. Associates will not believe they can set limits if every senior lawyer they answer to performs limitlessly. Ontario already requires employers with 25 or more employees to maintain a written disconnect-from-work policy. The federal Canada Labour Code now also imposes a parallel obligation, with regulations expected in 2026, but firms need not wait.

Third, widen the imagination of what serious legal work looks like. Canadian alternatives exist, and they are products of the wellness conversation, rather than refugees from it. Procido LLP in Saskatoon mandates vacation rather than encouraging it. Stringam Law in Western Canada has tied culture commitments to partner compensation. Froese Law in Toronto was built around its founder’s mantra: “Bay Street calibre, without the Bay Street bull.” While not every attempt takes, the point is that structural change is possible and people are choosing it.

Fourth, shift compensation toward outcomes, capability, and client trust rather than time. Clio reports that firms are billing 34 per cent more cases on flat-fee terms than in 2016, and that a majority now offer flat fees alongside or instead of hourly billing. Reward efficiency, not overextension.

The signal

The Cadieux study was commissioned by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada and the Canadian Bar Association. It named the harm, the protective factors, and the culture and economics of practice as the cause. None of it was whispered.

If firms want to know why their best associates are leaving for government, in-house, or smaller centres, they should read those moves as market information. Exit is the evidence young lawyers have been left to use. The profession has not learned to read what they are saying.

A firm that builds wellness on top of an unchanged model cannot claim it did not know. The studies are in the file, and the resignations are in the hallway, on their way out the door.