A female Partner in her 40s I coached at a city law firm had been late diagnosed with ADHD earlier that year. This brought both relief and grief. Relief because things she had thought were just her personal failings now made sense, and grief because the 'how much easier might things have been if I had known earlier' question haunted her. She was undoubtedly successful and, on the outside, looked like she had it all together. She also genuinely loved the essence of her work; the variety, the intellectual challenge, her relationships with colleagues and clients, and the constant stream of deals and deadlines worked to engage her. But her 'guilty secret' as she called it, was that she was always behind on administrative parts of her work, her email inbox was out of control, her home life felt chaotic, she "secretly over-prepared" for client presentations because she did not feel able to respond articulately otherwise and she was burning out. She had always hidden these struggles – which she was ashamed of and felt were deficiencies – beneath a mask of self-assurance and self-composure.
A male Senior Associate came to coaching because he felt he was unlikely to make Partner and was wondering whether to quit the law. Technically he excelled at his job. He was fascinated by his area of law and, given his monotropic focus, had become something of an expert. At one level, he knew he delivered something that others couldn’t. But partnership at his firm required more. Networking and broader relationships internally and externally, communicating in what he called ‘the right way’. Although he had been diagnosed with autism at primary school, no-one at the firm knew. He felt it was too risky, that there was too much prejudice. He had developed a set of protective strategies – got a colleague to check the tone of client emails before sending them, had a list of polite email starters, and more recently had been using AI to support him on tone. He had some strong and trusted one-to-one peer relationships at the firm but had always avoided wider networking within the firm and the industry. He recounted historic examples of social mishaps, colleagues offended by his bluntness, and on one occasion a client complaining he had been rude. These situations had encouraged him to pull back and mask further. His masking often took the form of carefully watching and mimicking what others did in conversations, but it looked stilted and felt tiring.
These aren't isolated stories. Whilst there are many aspects of law careers that attract and play to the strengths of neurodivergent minds, there are also structural hurdles hindering their sustainable progression and success. I spoke to a former Partner of two Wall Street firms about what he had seen over his career and he agreed that “neurodivergent people often get stuck at senior associate/attorney or counsel-type levels, or maybe salaried partner, but are often not the ones that make equity because of a lack of understanding and a simplistic approach to skill sets”, and he referenced the very same hurdle to partnership the senior associate had talked about “that networking and business development are such an important part of making equity Partner at these law firms”.
Many of the common traits found in neurodivergent people – traits such as hyperfocus, love of variety, pattern recognition and urgency-driven engagement in many with ADHD, the sustained deep-domain focus, systematic thinking and pattern recognition in many autistic people – map well onto the intellectual aspect of legal work. But other expectations around it often disadvantage these same minds when there is no tailored support: billable-hour tracking, deadline tracking, inbox management and long due diligence document reviews may be difficult for many with ADHD, while the emphasis on relationships and networking may be taxing for autistic people in the absence of supportive structures.
Despite the benefits of appropriate adaptations, the perception persists for many neurodiverse people that revealing a diagnosis or asking for support is not safe. In a small-scale 2024 survey by neurodiversity charity Neurodiversikey, 78% of the 183 respondents working in the legal sector said they had not disclosed their neurodivergence. The two lawyers above didn’t get this far because the profession accommodated them and created win-win conditions for their strengths to be leveraged. They did it by working harder overall, and hiding the parts of themselves they felt the profession would judge negatively, absorbing the cost themselves in the form of overcompensation, anxiety and fatigue.