The Hidden Cost of Working in Corporate / In-House Legal

  I’m currently on maternity leave. Under Austrian employment law, you’re required to stop working eight weeks before your due date — and I’m now four weeks into that pre-baby. And honestly? It’s been clarifying in a way I didn’t expect. Stepping out of the corporate rhythm for the first time in years has made visible something I’d stopped noticing: how much that rhythm costs you. The 9 to 5.30 problem Corporate legal — in-house or otherwise — runs on a fixed schedule that has very little to do with when human beings are actually at their best. It’s 2pm on a Thursday. It’s sunny. The kind of afternoon that’s genuinely better spent outside — a walk, a picnic, an hour away from a screen. But you’re inside, at your laptop, on a call that could have been an email, because that’s what the schedule requires. The gym class you wanted to do is at 10am. The park is quietest at lunchtime. The creative thought you almost had got interrupted by a Slack notification at the exact moment it was forming. Life gets squeezed into the margins — before 9, after 5.30, on weekends — and the things that actually sustain you get treated as luxuries rather than necessities. Always on, always thinking One of the things I’ve noticed most in these four weeks is what it feels like to actually switch off. In corporate legal, there’s a constant low-level hum. What do I need to do next? What’s in my inbox? What did I forget to follow up on? Even in moments that should be restful — evenings, weekends, a rare quiet afternoon — the mental load doesn’t fully lift. It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t feel like burnout, most of the time. It just feels like… normal. Like the baseline. But it isn’t normal. And you only really see that when it stops. The corporate environment is structurally designed to interrupt. Emails, Slack, phone calls — the tools that are supposed to make work easier are also the things that make sustained, focused, creative thinking almost impossible. You get very good at reacting. You get very little space to actually think. Powering through — and what it actually costs There’s an unspoken expectation in corporate legal that you show up and perform regardless of how you’re actually feeling. Exhausted after a difficult week? Power through. Struggling to concentrate? Find a way. Burnt out? That’s what weekends are for. The problem is that people don’t perform well when they’re exhausted. Lawyers especially — where the work requires precision, judgement and clear thinking — don’t produce their best work when they’re running on empty and interrupted every twelve minutes. We talk a lot in the legal profession about high performance. But the conditions we’ve created are not high performance conditions. They’re endurance conditions. There’s a difference. What stepping out has shown me I’m not writing this to romanticise maternity leave or suggest the answer is simply working less. It isn’t that straightforward. But four weeks of a different rhythm has shown me what’s possible when you have genuine space — to think clearly, to move your body when it needs moving, to rest when you’re tired rather than powering through it. The 9 to 5.30 model — or whatever variation of it your employer runs — was not designed around how people actually function at their best. It was designed around the idea that presence equals productivity. And in knowledge work, in legal work especially, that equation has never really held up. The answer isn’t working fewer hours. It’s working differently. It’s trusting people to design their own schedules around when they actually perform well — because not everyone hits their peak at 9am, and not everyone falls off a cliff at 5.30pm. Some people do their best thinking early. Others need a slow start and hit their stride in the afternoon. Some need movement in the middle of the day to function properly. Some work better in two focused blocks than eight interrupted hours. A lawyer who structures their day around how they actually work — who goes for a run at 10am and makes up the time in the evening, who takes a proper lunch break and comes back sharper for it, who protects the hours when they’re sharpest for the work that matters most — will consistently outperform one who is simply present for the prescribed hours regardless of what’s actually happening inside them. Flexible, self-directed schedules aren’t a perk. They’re a performance strategy. The legal profession would do well to start treating them like one.