Episode 26: The ADHD Advantage with Sarah Ennor

Welcome to Legal Off The Leash, the podcast where we take the legal profession out of the box and into a happier, more fulfilling future! Sarah Ennor was already a successful lawyer when she received an ADHD diagnosis at 44. It helped her understand years of feedback about time management, as well as the strengths that made her good at her work. Sarah joins Scott and Elizabeth to ask whether law firms truly support neurodivergent lawyers when their ways of working clash with long-standing expectations. They discuss disclosure, burnout, better support from managers and why a successful career should leave room for lawyers to work as themselves. Main Themes - Success can hide a struggle. Sarah’s diagnosis changed how she understood feedback she had received throughout her legal career. - Law firms can value a strength and penalise its effects. Curiosity, intensity and comfort with complexity may be welcome until a lawyer works outside the usual process. - Support starts with a conversation. Sarah suggests asking what helps someone do their best work, listening and believing the answer. - Disclosure requires trust. Lawyers may have good reasons to describe what they need without sharing a diagnosis. - High performance can mask burnout. Sarah describes the exhaustion that followed intense periods of legal work, even when colleagues saw her as successful. - There is more than one legal career path. Sarah questions the pressure to follow convention and urges lawyers to think about the working life they want. Memorable quotes “We forget that we're actually losing these valuable traits from some people. And we also don't realise how much more profitable it could be if we were to build teams around people's strengths.” — Sarah Ennor “I was succeeding wildly. And I burnt myself out very regularly. It was almost cyclical.” — Sarah Ennor “Those characteristics that attract people with ADHD to the legal profession and actually make them really good as lawyers, we then almost punish those people for having those traits when they're no longer convenient to us.” — Scott Simmons “If you have a policy that says ‘we'll accommodate anybody with ADHD. All you have to do is you need to go to the doctor and get an assessment... and then you have to fill out this form that says what accommodations you need…’ Well, if that was the process for me, I would just sit and suffer in silence.” — Sarah Ennor “Remove the notion of paying our dues ... and doing things the way that we've always done them. I think that expectation is a way that firms and organisations are just trying to control people.” — Sarah Ennor “\[It’s a myth] that if you work hard, you'll succeed. I just don't think that that's enough. ... If that were the case, we would have pretty proportionate representation of minorities and others in the legal profession, and we don't.” — Sarah Ennor Important Insights & Actionable Takeaways - Ask about the work and the support needed to do it well before assuming a missed deadline or difficulty with admin is a lack of effort. - Give people room to request changes to meetings, focus time or task allocation without requiring them to disclose a diagnosis. - Look beyond a lawyer’s visible results. Strong work during a demanding period may come at a cost that only appears afterwards. - Consider how a team could share work according to people’s strengths, instead of expecting every lawyer to excel at every task. - Make career planning a continuing conversation. The conventional route may suit some lawyers, but it should not be the only route they can picture. This program contains 55 minutes of Law Society of Ontario EDI Professionalism Hour(s). Law Society of British Columbia: 0.88 HRS You can find Sarah at https://www.growthcounsel.ca/ and on her LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-ennor/