Shifting your tools, workspace and pace can protect the parts of practice that matter most
When lawyers talk about changing how they work, there is often an unspoken fear in the room. If they rely too much on technology, work remotely, or even take time off from practice, they may be perceived as less committed to a profession steeped in tradition.
New tools like generative AI will replace a lawyer’s critical eye; remote work will hollow out firm culture; flexible offices are just a way to cut corners. And if a lawyer steps away from practice for mental health reasons, the worry is that you don’t just pause your career – you forfeit your professional identity. In other words, these are shortcuts that undermine effective lawyering.
Look more closely, though, at lawyers who are making these changes thoughtfully, and a different pattern emerges. The most interesting shifts are not rejections of what it means to be a lawyer. They are attempts to protect and deepen it.
The most visible story of change in the profession is how we use technology. McMillan’s adoption of the legal generative AI platform Legora is a good example. CEO and managing partner Bruce Chapple compared generative AI to the smartphone: something every lawyer will be expected to use, not a niche add‑on. The firm piloted several tools, put Legora head‑to‑head with a rival and opened access to 100 users. Usage didn’t plateau; it climbed, as lawyers found ways to use it in litigation, regulatory work and deal due diligence.
Doing legal work faster was not the only goal. Legora CEO Max Junestrand says the best use cases are not about shaving minutes off a task. “It can actually make it take longer to complete a task – but the quality goes up,” he says. A litigator who uses AI as a thought partner might spend more time with a brief than before, but walk away with strategies they otherwise wouldn’t have considered.
That is not an attempt to do less law. It is a deliberate choice to pull some work out of the grind of document review and first drafting so there is more room for judgment, strategy and creativity.
Changing how we work is also about the physical structures that shape a lawyer’s day. BC lawyer Rocky Kim’s practice shows what happens when you treat office space as a tool rather than a symbol. After years of one‑ to two‑hour commutes into downtown Vancouver, he rebuilt his real estate and lending firm around work that can be delivered from anywhere, backed by a flexible office model.
As he explains it, the point is not to shave a few dollars off rent. It is to buy back time. Using the Regus network and mobile signing agents, he and his team meet clients near their homes rather than forcing them to travel to downtown cores. Inside his Kelowna hub, he pays for secure, enclosed offices within a flexible network and can add rooms as he grows.
When he launched, Kim tracked his time “like I was in the military” and discovered that 20 to 30 hours a week were disappearing into administrative work: arranging internet and IT, dealing with photocopying and security, and all the invisible labour of being his own office manager. By outsourcing building services and hiring quickly, he built a structure where his time is spent on billable legal work, not fixing printers. As he put it, “It’s all about efficiency, not necessarily about cost saving.”
Again, this is not a retreat from being a lawyer. It is a refusal to let the mechanics of running an office crowd out the substance of legal practice.
The most drastic change, though, is the one many lawyers still hesitate to name: stepping away from practice for mental health reasons. Mental health advocate Jason Ward describes leaving his successful litigation practice after years of alcoholism and THC dependence. He now calls that decision “an act of survival, not surrender.”
He hears the same pattern from lawyers across the country: longer hours, rising irritability, social withdrawal and growing reliance on substances to blunt mounting anxiety. In a profession built on billable pressure and a win–lose culture, those warning signs are still too often treated as individual weakness rather than a foreseeable response to structural pressure.
Ward’s message pushes back hard on the idea that leaving, even temporarily, is a betrayal of your professional self. “You don’t lose your identity by pausing your practice. You protect it. Untreated illness takes far more time away than the alternative,” he said. For him, the real career risk is not stepping outside the grind; it is staying in it long after it has become unsustainable.
Taken together, these stories suggest that we may be asking the wrong question about change in the legal profession. Instead of asking whether a new tool, a new office model or even a break from practice will make us do less, we might ask what it allows us to do more of: more thoughtful strategies, more time with clients, more honest conversations about capacity and health.
Stepping outside the default way of working – whether through AI, flexible space or time away – is not a rejection of what makes you a lawyer. At its best, it is a way of doubling down, so that more of your judgment, your integrity and your attention are left for the work that really needs them.
