When High Performance Stops Being a Choice: Part One

What Law Firms Can Learn from Laura Empson and Alexandra Michel

Introduction: When Success Changes the Person

For much of the last twenty years the conversation around wellbeing in the legal profession has revolved around a familiar set of themes. Lawyers are working longer hours than ever before. Stress-related absence is increasing. Burnout has entered everyday vocabulary. Firms are investing in wellbeing programmes, resilience workshops and mental health first aid training. Despite these efforts, many professionals continue to describe a working life characterised by exhaustion, emotional detachment and a growing sense that the profession demands more than it once did.

The assumption underpinning much of this discussion is that the problem begins with stress. Excessive workload is seen as the cause, while recovery, mindfulness or better work-life balance become the proposed solutions. Although these interventions undoubtedly have value, they risk overlooking a more fundamental question. Why do exceptionally intelligent, highly motivated and successful professionals voluntarily continue working in ways that they know are damaging to their health, relationships and ultimately their effectiveness?

This question becomes particularly interesting within the legal profession because lawyers are not generally naïve about the consequences of chronic overwork. They advise clients on managing risk, evaluate evidence with exceptional care and make complex decisions under pressure. Yet many simultaneously ignore the evidence emerging from their own minds and bodies. They continue to work through fatigue, dismiss early warning signs and normalise patterns of behaviour that, viewed objectively, would concern them if observed in someone else.

The explanation is unlikely to be found simply in workload or personality. Something more subtle appears to be taking place. Over time the culture of elite professional organisations begins to shape not only behaviour but identity itself. The lawyer who once chose to work long hours gradually reaches a point where working differently no longer feels psychologically possible. High performance ceases to be a deliberate strategy and instead becomes woven into the individual's understanding of who they are.

Two scholars have made particularly important contributions to understanding this phenomenon, although from very different perspectives.

Laura Empson, in her extensive work on professional service firms and particularly in Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas (2017), examines the organisational environment in which professionals operate. Rather than viewing law firms as conventional hierarchical organisations, she demonstrates that they are complex social systems built upon autonomy, informal influence and shared professional identity. Within Chapter Six, she explores how professional cultures subtly encourage individuals to regulate themselves through what she describes as forms of social control that are largely invisible to those experiencing them (Empson, 2017).

Alexandra Michel approaches the question from an entirely different direction. Her remarkable nine-year ethnographic study of investment bankers, published in Administrative Science Quarterly, follows professionals through the early stages of elite careers and examines how their relationship with work, their bodies and ultimately themselves changes over time (Michel, 2011). Rather than focusing on organisational structures, Michel documents the lived experience of individuals whose identities become progressively shaped by their organisations. Her work reveals not simply how professionals work, but how they gradually become different people through the process of organisational socialisation.

Read independently, both pieces represent significant contributions to organisational research. Read together, however, they begin to illuminate something even more important. Empson explains how elite organisations cultivate particular patterns of behaviour and identity. Michel shows what those patterns eventually do to the individual over many years. Between them they describe an almost complete journey from organisational culture to embodied psychological change.

Yet there remains, in our view, a missing piece of the puzzle.

Neither author sets out to explain the psychological mechanisms through which organisational expectations become internal standards, or how repeated adaptation gradually alters attention, self-awareness, emotional regulation and ultimately professional judgement. This is not a criticism of either body of work. Empson is primarily concerned with leadership and organisational dynamics, while Michel's interest lies in the relationship between the body and organisational control. Psychology sits adjacent to both perspectives rather than at their centre.

It is precisely here that performance psychology may have something valuable to contribute.

Over the past two years LegalPsych has been conducting qualitative interviews with solicitors, barristers, legal executives, managing partners, chambers directors and learning and development professionals across the legal profession. Although these conversations have taken place in very different organisational settings, strikingly similar themes have emerged. Individuals describe entering the profession with enthusiasm, curiosity and a strong desire to develop expertise. Over time, however, many report becoming increasingly unable to disengage psychologically from work. They speak of constant cognitive occupation, diminished recovery, difficulty recognising their own fatigue and a gradual narrowing of identity around professional competence.

What is particularly notable is that few describe a single moment at which this transformation occurred. Instead, they describe an almost imperceptible process of adaptation. Long hours become normal. Constant availability becomes expected. Physical discomfort becomes background noise. Emotional reactions become something to suppress rather than understand. Each adjustment appears minor in isolation, yet together they gradually reshape how individuals experience both themselves and their work.

This process bears remarkable resemblance to what Empson identifies at the organisational level and what Michel observes at the individual level. The difference is that performance psychology allows us to examine the mechanisms linking the two.

From a LegalPsych perspective, the central issue is not simply workload. It is the progressive adaptation of the psychological system itself. Human beings possess an extraordinary capacity to adapt to repeated demands. That capacity underpins learning, resilience and expertise. However, adaptation is inherently neutral. The same mechanisms that enable excellence can, under sustained pressure, also produce chronic patterns of self-neglect, diminished self-awareness and reduced psychological flexibility.

Elite lawyers become exceptionally skilled at overriding internal signals because doing so is often professionally advantageous. Court appearances cannot simply be postponed because someone feels tired. Complex transactions require sustained concentration despite fatigue. Difficult conversations frequently occur irrespective of emotional readiness. These are entirely understandable demands within professional practice. The difficulty arises when the temporary suspension of internal signals becomes the individual's default operating mode.

At that point recovery begins to feel uncomfortable rather than restorative. Stillness creates guilt rather than renewal. The absence of work becomes psychologically unsettling because professional activity has become closely intertwined with self-worth. What initially appeared to be commitment gradually evolves into compulsion, although the individual rarely experiences it in those terms.

This distinction matters because it changes how we think about both performance and wellbeing. If high performance has become embedded within identity rather than remaining a deliberate behavioural choice, then conventional wellbeing interventions may struggle to achieve lasting change. The issue is no longer simply one of managing stress. It becomes one of helping professionals develop sufficient awareness to recognise the psychological adaptations that have quietly accumulated over years of success.

The purpose of this article is therefore not to argue against ambition, commitment or professional excellence. Law is, and should remain, a demanding profession. Rather, it is to explore how sustained excellence can gradually reshape the individual in ways that are largely invisible until significant costs begin to emerge.

Laura Empson helps us understand the organisational conditions under which this process begins. Alexandra Michel demonstrates what the journey looks like over time. Our aim is to bring these perspectives together and explore what performance psychology can add to the conversation. In doing so, we hope to move beyond the familiar language of stress and burnout towards a richer understanding of how sustainable high performance can be protected throughout a professional lifetime.

References

Empson, L. (2017). Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas. Oxford University Press.

Michel, A. (2011). Transcending Socialization: A Nine-Year Ethnography of the Body's Role in Organizational Control and Knowledge Workers' Transformation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 56(3), 325–368.