Expanding roles for in-house lawyers heighten stress

It’s no surprise that work expectations for lawyers have dramatically increased in recent years. This is especially true for in-house legal departments across the United States.

Following a global pandemic, large-scale cybersecurity breaches, and an increasingly complex regulatory environment, general counsel now more than ever are expected to take on advanced roles in their companies, experts say.

“General counsel no longer limit themselves to a tactical and reactive role, but instead transition into key members of the corporate decision-making team as strategic partners,” strategist Andy Teichholz wrote when revealing the results of a recent survey of in-house attorneys about their work environment.

Results from the Corporate Counsel Business Journal survey detail what its 289 respondents believe their roles have become as general counsel.

About 87% of all respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the role of general counsel has changed from a typical legal adviser role to that of a strategic and influential partner to senior executives at their company.

Because of this shift, general counsel must know how to respond to new threats from regulations and compliance mandates, drive profitability for their companies, and digitally transform their departments, Teichholz wrote.

In the survey, 69% of respondents said their responsibilities have expanded into other risk areas, like cybersecurity, risk management, and data privacy.

Indianapolis in-house lawyers sometimes feel that pressure, but they say it’s always been there to some extent.

“As in-house counsel, there’s kind of the idea that you’re jack of all trades, master of none,” said Sonya Seeder, in-house counsel for Guidon Design.

One of the biggest challenges Seeder faces in her job is her being the only person in the legal department at Guidon.

“I don’t have a lot of people to bounce ideas off of or to go to for other legal support,” she said.

Both she and Debi Dobbins, in-house counsel at Heritage Environmental Services LLC, said that because their legal departments are so small, they often rely on their network of fellow lawyers to guide them when they have questions.

“What I relied on them mostly for is affirmation, if you will,” said Dobbins. “Just somebody to go to and go, ‘This is what I’m doing, this is what I’m thinking. Is this right?’”

“Being able to have kind of your own trusted counsel who’s not charging you by the minute is so helpful and helps you just feel not alone and not be scared to ask the dumb question, or just reach out for help,” Seeder said.

Rising stress

According to a 2024 survey by Axiom, 97% of the 300 survey respondents reported feeling stress and burnout in their in-house counsel roles.

In response to heightened feelings of burnout, the Association of Corporate Counsel created a toolkit to better support general counsel.

The kit, which is currently available to ACC members in its online resource library, is filled with guidelines to help lawyers meet the expectations of their roles while maintaining their mental and emotional well-being.

“It’s meeting the needs of the profession,” said Susanna McDonald, vice president and chief legal officer for the ACC.

The toolkit provides resources on how to build a network of lawyers to support one another with legal advice and in everyday challenges.

Through the toolkit, in-house lawyers can learn more about their individual well-being, work-life balance, and how to be an effective leader using five focused checklists.

The ACC began offering mental health-related resources during the pandemic but continued when members responded positively to the help, McDonald said.

Veta Richardson, president and CEO of the ACC, said members have increasingly expressed a need for resources to help them navigate their complex and ever-changing roles.

“The topic of well-being in the legal profession has been increasingly important, especially with research over the past few years highlighting concerns related to mental health and substance abuse in the profession,” Richardson said in an email. “Even since the early days of the pandemic, we’ve seen continual interest in these resources from members.”

One checklist, which tackles establishing a healthy work-life balance, suggests in-house lawyers set clear boundaries between their work and personal life, in addition to planned social time and “me time.” The ACC also recommends regularly assessing one’s workload and stress levels.

For lawyers who work remotely, separating work from home life can be difficult.

But the ACC suggests setting business hours for work, and when off the clock, to stay off business emails or chats.

The checklists are designed to offer brief, to the point advice to help in-house lawyers establish effective habits in their careers.

“We design all of our resources to try to be practical information with actionable advice,” McDonald said.

In tandem with each of the checklists, the ACC offers users articles by in-house counsel and other resources that provide more information on how lawyers can establish healthy routines for themselves on and off the job.

Hopes for AI

One way that legal departments are pursuing relief for in-house counsel work is through artificial intelligence.

According to survey results from the Corporate Counsel Business Journal, 60% of respondents believe AI would free up more time for in-house lawyers to perform higher valued work instead of spending time on routine tasks.

Shelley Jackson, a partner at Krieg DeVault who specializes in AI, said use of the technology has its benefits.

“It’s good, essentially, at certain types of tasks that need to be completed much more quickly than a human can complete them,” she said.

Jackson pointed to sorting large data sets and other great quantities of information as a task that artificial intelligence can tackle rather easily, and at a rate that’s faster or just as fast as a lawyer could.

Data collected from Thomson Reuters’ Future of Professionals Report, published in July, shows that AI could free up four hours of additional work time per week in one year, equating to an annual total of roughly 200 hours.

But while there are notable benefits to using AI, companies looking to use the technology should also be wary of its potential dangers.

For example, while AI can sort through hundreds of job applications and resumes, the technology could produce biased results.

“The entity that is going to bear the responsibility of those biased results is, by and large, the employer that’s leveraging the technology,” Jackson said.

Another potential problem is knowing where the information the technology is sorting through ends up when an attorney inputs it into the technology.

“In order to learn from the information, it actually has to take that information and it has to keep it in some way, because otherwise it doesn’t learn,” Jackson said.

Ultimately, artificial intelligence has been around for decades, but generative AI has recently become mainstream and the United States’ legal and regulatory environment has yet to catch up.

Because of the risks involved, companies need to adopt both a compliance and risk management approach toward the technology, Jackson said.

She recommends companies and lawyers who do pursue AI to support their workloads ensure they have risk management policies in place to combat any side effects.

“In understanding that managing risk in this space, because it is an emerging space, you have to think more broadly than just, is it legal or not to do this?” Jackson said. •