In-house lawyers and the burnout data that undercuts the work-life pitch

In-house lawyers are routinely told the move delivers better work-life balance. The data does not support that framing. More than half of in-house respondents to one 2026 survey had considered leaving their role because of stress or burnout, and 77% work beyond their contracted hours. The pressure follows the lawyer rather than the setting.

Does moving in-house improve work-life balance?

Juro’s 2026 State of In-House report found that 52% of respondents had considered leaving their roles because of stress or burnout. The equivalent figure in its 2025 edition was 23.3% reporting burnout in the previous year. Alongside that, 77% said they work beyond contracted hours and 95.5% handle work-related tasks while on leave.

The picture is not uniformly bleak, and ninety per cent described the work as meaningful, with 81% reporting positive engagement. People are not leaving because the work is dull. They are leaving, or considering it, because of how much of it there is and when it arrives.

That sits against the wider sector position. LawCare’s Life in the Law 2025, drawn from a survey run between January and March 2025, found 59.1% of participants reporting poor mental wellbeing and 32% saying they could leave the sector entirely within five years. In-house is not an outlier within that picture; it is part of it.

The in-house lawyer’s independence problem

Workload is not the only pressure specific to in-house practice. The SRA’s thematic review of in-house solicitors found most feeling positive about their role and valued by their organisation. It also found significant political and economic pressure, rising workloads, and difficulty recruiting and retaining people.

One figure from that review is worth sitting with. Five per cent of respondents had been pressured into suppressing information that conflicted with their regulatory obligations. Many teams had no dedicated policies for recording and reporting legal risk, managing conflicts and confidentiality, or handling instructions.

Those two findings compound. A lawyer under sustained workload pressure, in a team without written escalation routes, is being asked to exercise independent judgement at precisely the point it is hardest to exercise. That is a professional risk as much as a wellbeing one, and it is why the SRA guidance on reporting wrongdoing and confidentiality reads differently in-house than it does in a firm.

What should you establish before moving in-house?

The useful questions are structural rather than cultural, because a team can be genuinely well-intentioned and still be resourced to fail.

Is legal in the room early? Teams brought into business planning can anticipate demand and agree where legal resource goes. Teams that are not brought in early spend the year absorbing whatever happens to arrive.

What happens when capacity runs out? Establish the criteria and the budget for instructing external counsel, and who holds the decision. A team with no route to external help has no ceiling on its own workload.

Are there written policies, or just custom? Conflicts, confidentiality, escalation and reporting should exist on paper. When they do not, individual judgement carries the whole weight, and it carries it under pressure.

How does the team handle leave? Given that 95.5% of respondents work while on leave, the honest question is not whether the organisation offers holiday but whether anyone covers the desk.

None of this argues against moving. It argues against moving on the assumption that the setting does the work for you. Firms and in-house teams alike are also absorbing new process obligations, from data protection complaints handling onwards, and those land on the same people. Anyone struggling can contact LawCare, the mental health charity for the legal sector, which offers free and confidential support.