Taking a Real Vacation as a Lawyer

The first vacation I took as a junior lawyer, I answered emails from a beach in Nova Scotia. Not once. Roughly forty times over five days. I remember the specific feeling of my thumb hovering over the phone while my family swam, telling myself I was being responsible. What I was actually doing was teaching everyone at the firm that I was always reachable, and teaching myself that I could never fully stop.

It took me years to unlearn that. This is what I wish someone had told me sooner: taking time off is not the same as taking a vacation, and the difference matters more than you think, both for you and for the quality of the work you go back to.

Booking days off is not the hard part

Most lawyers, even busy ones, technically take vacation. They put the days in the calendar. They set the out-of-office. The problem is what happens next, which is nothing. They keep the phone within arm's reach, they "just check in" every morning, and they arrive back at their desk more tired than when they left.

A vacation where you monitor your inbox is not rest. It is work with a nicer view. Your nervous system does not get the signal to stand down, because it never actually stands down. You spend the whole time in a low hum of readiness, waiting for the message that ruins the afternoon.

The hard part is not the booking. The hard part is leaving.

A partner once told me she measured a good holiday by how long it took her to remember what day of the week it was. If she still knew on day three, she hadn't really left yet.

Why disconnecting makes you better at the job

I want to be practical about this, because "self-care" language tends to make lawyers roll their eyes, and I understand why. So let me put it in terms the job respects.

Your value as a lawyer is your judgment. Not your hours, not your availability, your judgment. And judgment degrades when you are chronically depleted in ways that are hard to notice from the inside. Tired brains miss issues. They anchor on the first plausible answer. They get short with clients and terse with colleagues. They confuse activity with progress. You have almost certainly reviewed something at hour eleven and found nothing, then caught the problem in ten minutes the next morning. That is not a character flaw. That is how brains work.

Real rest is not a reward for good work. It is an input to it. The lawyers I know with the longest, steadiest careers are not the ones who never stopped. They are the ones who learned to stop properly and came back sharp.

There is also the plain fact of longevity. The profession has a well-documented relationship with stress, anxiety, and burnout, and every provincial law society now runs some form of member assistance program precisely because the need is real. If you are struggling, that is worth knowing about, and it is confidential. But the ordinary, preventive version of looking after yourself is simpler: actually use the time you are entitled to, and use it fully.

How to actually disconnect

Disconnecting is a skill, and like most skills it works better with a system than with willpower. Here is what has held up for me and for the lawyers I have coached through it.

• Tell people early and specifically. A week or two before you leave, tell the people who rely on you exactly when you are gone and who to go to instead. Vague "I might be away next month" invites interruption. A clear "I am fully offline from the 14th to the 21st, and Sarah is covering the Whitmore file" does not.
• Name a real backup, and brief them properly. The single biggest reason lawyers can't unplug is that no one else can move the file. Spend an hour before you leave handing off the two or three things that might actually come up. This is the work that buys your freedom.
• Take the apps off your phone. Not "resolve to check less." Remove the email and messaging apps entirely for the week, then reinstall them when you're back. Friction is your friend. The extra thirty seconds it takes to log in on a browser is often enough to stop the reflex.
• Set an honest out-of-office. Say you are away, say when you return, and give an alternate contact. Do not write "I will be checking email periodically." That sentence is a trap you set for yourself, and clients will take you at your word.
• Decide your emergency bar in advance. There may genuinely be a matter where you want to be reachable. Fine. Define it narrowly, tell one person the private number, and let everything else route to your backup. The goal is one door, not a hundred windows.

The through-line is that disconnecting is mostly a logistics problem disguised as a discipline problem. Handle the logistics and the discipline gets a lot easier.

The handoff is the whole trick

I want to sit on this one, because it is where most attempts fail.

Lawyers don't stay tethered because they love working on vacation. They stay tethered because they are the only person who knows where things are, and they know that if something moves while they are gone, it will land on them anyway. So they hover.

The fix is boring and it works: build a file that someone else could actually pick up. Before you leave, for each active matter write two or three lines on status, the next likely step, and where the documents live. Flag any deadline that falls inside your absence and make sure it is either done or assigned. This is the same clarity you would want if you were hit by a bus, minus the drama, and it is a good habit for reasons that have nothing to do with holidays. It is also, quietly, one of the questions worth raising in an interview when you are sizing up a firm's culture: ask how they handle coverage when someone is away. The answer tells you a lot.

If you are a student or junior and this feels above your pay grade, it is not. Handing off cleanly is one of the fastest ways to be trusted with more, which is part of surviving your articling year with your sanity intact.

Culture matters, and you can read it early

Some of this is on you. Some of it is on where you work. A firm that treats a booked vacation as a soft suggestion, or that quietly rewards the person who answered on their honeymoon, will make all of this harder no matter how good your systems are.

You can read a workplace's real posture on this before you ever join it. In interviews, listen to how people talk about time off. Do they describe it with a little guilt, or as a normal thing that normal people do? When you browse roles, notice which employers talk about well-being like they mean it and which treat it as a line on a benefits page. Culture is not what a firm says in its recruiting brochure. It is what happens when a good lawyer takes two weeks off and the world does not end.

This is also worth weighing when you think about the shape of your whole career, the big-firm versus small-firm question and everything downstream of it. The right environment for you is partly about the work and partly about whether the people around you believe rest is legitimate.

Start small if you have to

If the idea of a fully offline week gives you hives, do not start there. Start with a single unbroken weekend where the apps come off your phone. Prove to yourself that nothing burned down. Then a long weekend. Then, when you trust the handoff and trust yourself, a real stretch.

The point is not to become someone who doesn't care about the work. The point is to become someone who can care about it for thirty years without hollowing out. You will do better work, make fewer errors, and be someone people actually want to practise alongside. And once in a while, on a beach somewhere, you will lose track of what day it is, which is the entire point. For more on protecting yourself over the long haul, our writing on mental health in law and the wider profession is a good place to go next.

Book the days. Then actually leave.