The People Holding It Together: Why Your Best Lawyers Are Your Biggest Risk
Welcome to Legal Ops Briefs—inspired by the mot-r mindset, this blog series of 3-minute reads gives in-house Legal Ops quick, operational insights. Each post will explore the tech, trends, and tactics that boost operational effectiveness and ease legal team stress—without adding to the noise.
The People Holding It Together: Why Your Best Lawyers Are Your Biggest Risk
Every legal department has them. The ones who stay late when a deal is closing. Who absorb the extra work when someone goes on leave. Who quietly pick up the slack when a colleague resigns and the backfill takes four months.
They don't complain. That's not who they are. They knuckle down when there's a bulge in workload. They create workarounds when systems fail. They hold things together through sheer effort.
They are carrying too much.
The Hidden Cost of Operational Dysfunction
Look closer. The missed dinners. The weekends that disappeared. The hobbies set aside for "when things calm down"—knowing they won't. The annual leave that keeps rolling over. The "quick call" at 9 PM that could have waited until morning.
This isn't dedication. It's operational failure dressed up as commitment.
These aren't heroics. They're warning signs. When your most reliable people are also your most overworked, you haven't built resilience—you've built a single point of failure wrapped in a person.
Why Reliable People Stay Silent
They won't tell you it's too much. That's not who they are. They're the ones who solve problems, not create them. The ones who make things work, not the ones who complain that things don't.
But silence isn't consent. It's erosion.
Every workaround they create masks a broken process. Every late night papers over an understaffed function. Every weekend they work delays the conversation you need to have about what's actually sustainable.
By the time they do speak up, they're not asking for help. They're handing in their notice.
The Breaking Point You Won't See Coming
You won't get a warning. One day they'll simply be gone, taking with them not just their skills but their institutional knowledge, their client relationships, and the invisible systems they built to keep everything running.
And you'll be left wondering what happened. The answer is simple: you mistook endurance for capacity.
Building Systems That Support Your People
The fix isn't complicated, but it requires intention:
Make operations work visible. If improving how the team works isn't tracked, measured, and valued the same way billable work is, it won't happen. Block time. Create space. Make it clear that working on the way the team works is as important as the work itself.
Listen to the people doing the work. They know what's broken. They live it every day. They've already built the workarounds. Now give them the authority and resources to fix the underlying problems instead of patching over them.
Stop celebrating heroics. Every time you praise someone for working through the weekend, you send a signal about what you value. Start celebrating the people who finish on time because their processes actually work.
A Call to Legal Leaders
Your best people will never ask for this. That's not who they are. When the weight lifts, they'll help you fix it—not because you asked, but because that's who they are.So don't wait for them to ask. See them. Protect them. Give them what they need to build something sustainable.
Because holding it together through sheer force of will isn't a strategy. It's a countdown. And your best people deserve better than being the ones left holding the pieces when it falls apart.
Chime In. Be Heard.
Who are the people holding it together in your legal department? What would it take to give them room to breathe? Share your experience with the Legal Ops community—the workarounds you've seen, the breaking points you've witnessed, or the changes you've made that actually worked. Your story might be exactly what someone else needs to hear.
mot-r is the next-generation ELM platform for modern Legal Ops teams. Unlike traditional ELMs, CLM tools, or disconnected point solutions, mot-r provides a low-risk way to resolve the structural causes of legal overload—not just track matters after the fact. By bringing structure to legal intake and visibility to execution, mot-r helps legal teams improve service quality, regain capacity, and reduce burnout. The result is better decisions, higher-value legal service, and an operating model teams can sustain as demand grows.
