Lawyers take on many duties. Duty to clients. Duty to the profession. Duty to the public. Research on wellbeing suggests each person has a natural baseline level of happiness, called a set point. Good and bad events move people away from this baseline for a while. Most people return to it over time.
For decades, researchers thought the set point was mostly fixed. External events didn’t change it much. More recent research disagrees. Psychologists Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon Sheldon, and David Schkade found that intentional, effortful activity can shift the set point upward, if that activity connects to meaning and to a person’s own choices.[1] Professional duty, when it is more than mere compliance, is exactly this kind of activity.
This matters for how the legal profession treats an expanding duty of care. Courts increasingly ask lawyers to foresee climate-related risks in the contracts they draft. This is not a narrow technical shift. It changes what “competent” legal advice means.
Expanding duty could go two ways. It could raise wellbeing, if lawyers experience it as meaningful growth in their own competence. Or it could lower wellbeing, if lawyers experience it as an imposed burden with no end in sight.
The evidence for a downside is real. Professionals in law, medicine, and social work report falling wellbeing when the scope of their duty keeps expanding without matching support. This is a known driver of burnout. A duty that grows faster than a professional’s capacity to meet it does not feel like growth. It feels like exposure.
Commercial law makes this harder. It is adversarial by design. Billable hours reward caution over exploration. Mistakes surface as negligence claims, not as private lessons. This is close to the opposite of the conditions that psychologist Kurt Lewin identified as necessary for people to change and grow.
Lewin described change as three stages: unfreezing old assumptions, moving to a new way of working, and refreezing the new way as normal.[2] Later, organisational psychologist Edgar Schein added a key insight. People only unfreeze when the fear of not changing outweighs the fear of trying and failing. Schein called this the balance between survival anxiety and learning anxiety.[3] Reducing learning anxiety, not increasing survival anxiety, is what makes change stick. Psychological safety is what reduces learning anxiety. Commercial law offers little of it.
So the question is not whether expanded duty is good or bad for wellbeing in the abstract. It is what conditions turn a burden into a source of growth.
Six things can turn duty into wellbeing rather than burden.
Identity. Duty raises wellbeing only when a professional sees it as consistent with why they became a lawyer, not as an external rule bolted onto their job. This is the base condition. The other five support it.
Community of practice. People manage an expanding standard better when they face it alongside peers. A working group of lawyers wrestling with the same climate foreseeability questions reduces the sense of facing new duty alone.
Procedural justice. People accept new obligations better when the process that created them feels fair and consultative, not imposed from above. A duty built through open drafting with practitioners lands differently to a duty imposed by a single court ruling.
Pacing. Duty that expands gradually gives professional norms and training time to catch up. Duty that expands abruptly, as case law often does, leaves no such time. This is the direct link to Lewin’s model. Gradual, supported change unfreezes old assumptions safely. Abrupt, unsupported change does not.
Training as rehearsal. Structured training lets lawyers practice a new standard before a court applies it in a live case. This gives professionals a version of psychological safety, a space to get things wrong without real consequences, before the stakes become real.
Defensibility. Fear of negligence claims causes real anxiety, separate from any question of meaning or identity. When regulators and insurers set out clear guidance for what competence and the expected standard of care looks like, some of that fear falls away.
A seventh factor limits all the others. Cognitive load. Every foreseeability judgement is a demand on a lawyer’s attention and working memory. Even under ideal conditions, more factors to weigh means more mental effort. Duty needs room to grow without asking professionals to hold more in their heads at once than they reasonably can.
When these conditions are in place, something useful can happen. Meeting an expanded duty successfully builds the sense of competence and psychological safety that Schein’s model says makes further change possible. This is not one moment of adaptation. It is a cycle. Success at each stage supports the person’s capacity to take on the next stage.
TCLP’s model reflects this directly. We build identity and communities of practice through open, consultative drafting with practitioners. We create training that lets lawyers rehearse new standards in a low-stakes setting, before a court sets them cold. This does not remove the pressures of a competitive, adversarial profession. But it gives lawyers a way to meet expanding duty as growth in their own expertise, not as a threat to manage.
At least this is the theory. The next step is to try and test this through the work we do at The Chancery Lane Project.