What Doing Your Best Is Costing You as a Lawyer

What Doing Your Best Is Costing You as a Lawyer

From The Former Lawyer Podcast by Sarah Cottrell

April 6, 2026 · 7 min · Episode 303

About this episode

This episode discusses the high costs of the 'do your best' mentality for lawyers.

For a lot of lawyers, hearing "just do your best" as a kid didn't feel reassuring. It felt like a requirement to give every ounce of everything they had until there was literally nothing left. That's not incidental. The kind of person who interprets "do your best" that way is often exactly the kind of person who ends up becoming a lawyer. And that standard follows them. In this episode of The Former Lawyer Podcast, Sarah Cottrell talks about what that standard is actually costing lawyers who ...

People in this episode

Host: Sarah Cottrell

Topics covered

  • lawyer standards
  • self-improvement
  • mental health
  • career challenges
  • work-life balance

Keywords

  • lawyers
  • best effort
  • mental health
  • career
  • self-improvement

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