The cost of carrying it: trauma and the people who work the files

Most conversations about trauma in the legal system focus on Survivors, and they should. But there’s a quieter cost that never shows up in a file, and it’s carried by the people doing the work.

If you spend your days reading assault disclosures, reviewing video evidence, and sitting with Survivors as they describe the worst thing that ever happened to them, that exposure accumulates. It has a name - vicarious trauma, sometimes called secondary trauma - and it isn’t a sign of weakness or a lack of professionalism. It’s a predictable result of absorbing other people’s pain for a living.

The Canadian numbers are not subtle

In 2022, the first national study of its kind examined the mental health of Canadian legal professionals. More than 7,300 lawyers, Quebec notaries, paralegals and articling students took part, in research led by Dr. Nathalie Cadieux at the Université de Sherbrooke, with the Federation of Law Societies of Canada and the Canadian Bar Association.

What it found:

More than half of respondents reported psychological distress and burnout.
28.6% had experienced major depression, against roughly 15% of the general population.
35.7% reported generalized anxiety, against around 13%.
24% had thought about suicide since starting their career. In the general population, that figure is about 12%.

And one finding that should stop anyone in their tracks: of the legal professionals who had experienced thoughts of suicide, two out of three never sought help.

It isn’t spread evenly

The toll lands hardest on younger lawyers, those in their first decade of practice, women, professionals living with a disability, and those who identify as LGBTQ2S+. According to the same Sherbrooke research, distress rates among professionals with less than ten years of experience climbed past 70%. The Omnibus Report - the study's second phase, released by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada in 2024 - broke the findings down province by province. The headline didn’t change.

It's also worth naming who "the people who work the files" includes. The Sherbrooke study surveyed lawyers, notaries, paralegals and articling students specifically, but the same exposure isn't confined to law firms. Case managers, legal assistants, union representatives, and anyone else who spends their working life close to disclosures, evidence and Survivors' accounts carries a version of the same weight - even where the research hasn't caught up with them yet.

This is structural, not personal

It’s tempting to read those numbers as a pile of individual struggles. They aren’t. The pressures are built into the work itself: the billable-hour model, the always-on culture, the adversarial environment, and - for anyone in trauma-adjacent practice - steady exposure to human suffering with very little built-in recovery. People in this profession are also trained, from law school onward, to project competence and control. That makes asking for help feel like a professional risk. The two-in-three who stayed silent weren’t careless. They were doing exactly what the culture taught them to do.

What actually helps

None of this is fixed with a wellness webinar and a fruit bowl in the break room. But some things genuinely move the needle:

Naming vicarious trauma openly, so people have language for what they’re carrying.
Building recovery into how files are distributed, so the heaviest matters don’t always land on the same desks.
Making support confidential and easy to reach, not buried three clicks deep in an intranet.
For firms and organizations handling a lot of trauma work, bringing in people who understand the clinical side to help teams recognize what trauma exposure does and how to manage it.

This one is close to home for us. We spend our days in trauma assessment, and we think hard about the people who do that work - our own team of experts included. The trauma-informed training we run for organizations is partly about serving clients better, and partly about protecting the people in the room while they do it.

There’s a professional argument here too, for anyone who needs one beyond the human one. A lawyer running on empty doesn’t serve clients well. Compassion fatigue dulls judgment, shortens patience, and makes it harder to sit with a distressed client and actually hear what they’re telling you. Looking after the people who do trauma work isn’t a soft extra, separate from the real job. It’s part of doing the job properly.

World Suicide Prevention Day is on September 10th, and its theme - changing the narrative - applies as much inside the profession as outside it. The work matters. So do the people doing it. If something in those numbers sounds like you, or like someone two desks over, the conversation is worth having before it becomes a crisis.

If you or someone you know is struggling, 988 - the Suicide Crisis Helpline - is available across Canada by call or text, any time. Reaching out is a strength, not a liability.

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