Stress Less: Mindfulness Techniques for In-House Legal Teams

News flash: being a lawyer is stressful.

Okay, that’s not so much a news flash as a massive duh.

But it’s perhaps less obvious that corporations should care about — and feel empowered to do something about — the stress levels that their in-house legal teams experience.

In this blog, we’ll explain how corporations can help by actively encouraging in-house legal teams to use mindfulness techniques to manage stress and strategically adopting legal technology to reduce avoidable sources of lawyer stress.

First, though, let’s look at why lawyers’ stress levels are important for organizations.

Why organizations should care about lawyer stress

Again, it’s no secret that lawyers are stressed out. Lawyers have long reported higher levels of anxiety and depression compared with other professions. Over time, stress and its effects compound. Anxious and depressed lawyers may have difficulty focusing, leading to oversights, careless errors, and missed deadlines.

That, of course, adds more stress, kicking off a vicious cycle that may lead to insomnia, substance abuse, and complete burnout.

When lawyers burn out on their high-stress, high-pressure careers, they start looking for new opportunities, taking all of their skills and institutional knowledge with them.

And that’s a loss — financially, operationally, and in overall morale — for the organization.

We’re not being dramatic; these issues are so pervasive that the American Bar Association created a National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being that recommends, in part, reframing well-being as “an indispensable part of a lawyer’s duty of competence.”

So, how can lawyers improve their overall well-being? Through mindfulness.

How lawyers can use mindfulness techniques to manage stress

What is mindfulness? In a nutshell, it’s the practice of simply being present in the moment. Mindfulness is the opposite of multitasking or working on autopilot; rather, it’s being purposefully aware of what you’re doing, where you are, and what’s happening around and within you.

What difference does mindfulness make? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Mindfulness has been shown to help people accomplish important goals, including these:

• Managing stress
• Regulating their emotions
• Focusing on tasks
• Communicating more clearly
• Maintaining mental balance and calm

A recent study showed that when law students were taught how to practice mindfulness, their levels of stress, anxiety, and depression all decreased. Notably, the control group of students saw all three measures rise — which makes sense, given that the “before” assessment was performed in January 2020 and the “after” was conducted remotely in April 2020.

What does it mean to “practice” mindfulness?

The cornerstone of mindfulness is usually meditation, but mindfulness can be practiced anytime and anywhere. Here are a few ways to get started.

• Learn the basics of mindfulness meditation with the help of a meditation app.
• Identify a time-wasting habit that you don’t enjoy — mindlessly scrolling the news or social media, perhaps — and replace it with a brief daily meditation.
• Designate at least part of every workday to intentional monotasking, turning off notifications for that period, and pay attention to how you feel during and after.
• Choose an environmental cue — like an occasional notification sound or, if you’re brave, the ringing of a phone — and train yourself to take a deep breath every time you notice that cue.
• Listen to a podcast episode about how to practice mindfulness and/or meditation.
• Explore a mindful movement practice like yoga.
• Pick a short, non-stressful daily task, like doing the dishes or brushing your teeth, and commit to being mindfully present during that activity for the next week.

Experiment with different approaches until you find something that works for you, and encourage all the members of your legal team to do the same.

To learn more about how organizations can encourage lawyer well-being, check out our webinar on Finding Balance and Success In-House.

But the burden shouldn’t fall exclusively on the legal team to do a better job of managing stress. Organizations can also reduce lawyer stress by adopting technology that streamlines particularly odious legal tasks.

How legal technology can reduce lawyer stress

A tremendous amount of legal work involves reviewing (and re-reviewing) lengthy, boring, and repetitive documents with unflagging attention to detail and an infallible memory.

Unfortunately, people — even lawyers — are inherently fallible.

That’s where legal technology comes in, with AI-powered tools like these:

• LinkSquares Finalize, which enables legal teams to quickly and easily draft, review, and approve clear and consistent contracts without spending hours poring through terms or double-checking clauses
• LinkSquares Analyze, which keeps all the organization’s active contracts organized in a single searchable repository, transforming contract data into actionable insights
• LinkSquares Prioritize, which gives the legal team a bird’s-eye view of all their work priorities, streamlining communication and collaboration both within the legal department and externally with other business units and stakeholders

Sign up for a free demo to see how these tools, especially when unified in the LinkSquares Cloud, can reduce stress and enhance job satisfaction for your organization’s legal team.