#160 Diagnosed at 54: Rewiring How Lawyers Work After Burnout

Lawyers Who Learn · Sep 28, 2026 · 40m

Somewhere in his 40s, Doug Brown made a deliberate decision. He was not going to be the version of himself at 60 who wondered whether he'd ever gotten where he wanted to go. He's 60 now, and the work he does with clients is the work he had to do for himself first.

The questioning started much earlier. As an associate under 30, Brown looked at the partners twenty and thirty years ahead of him — tired, overworked, quietly unhappy — and asked whether that was really the goal. His answer drove three decades of deliberate change: corporate counsel, executive director of the Connecticut Bar…