Hierarchy Is Not the Problem. How We Exercise It Is.

I did not enter the legal profession expecting to be welcomed.

As a first-generation lawyer, an immigrant, and a non-native English speaker who applied to law school from a women's shelter, I had already been told many times what I could not do. In law school, a professor suggested I return to ESL classes rather than pursue a legal career. A well-meaning lawyer later advised me that my accent was too strong for litigation, that no judge would understand me, and that I should perhaps consider other paths.

I went into litigation anyway.

But those early experiences planted a question that stayed with me long after I was called to the bar: what exactly does hierarchy in the legal profession do to the people who live within it? And now that I lead a team of my own, a harder question follows: what kind of leader am I becoming?

Hierarchy Is Necessary — But It Is Not Neutral

Let me be clear about something that is often misunderstood in conversations about workplace culture: hierarchy is not the problem. Law requires structure. It supports supervision, accountability, and the transfer of expertise from experienced practitioners to newer ones. A supervising partner's authority over an articling student is not inherently harmful — it is part of how professional standards are maintained.

But hierarchy is not neutral. It is a framework for the exercise of power, and power can be used to build people or to diminish them. The same reporting structure that enables mentorship can, under different leadership, enable abuse. The same office hierarchy that ensures quality can, if misused, create silence.

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety has been transformative in how I think about this.[2] Her work shows that high-performing teams are not those without hierarchy — they are those in which people feel safe to speak up, ask questions, and acknowledge mistakes despite the hierarchy that exists. The structure stays; what changes is whether it creates clarity and growth or fear and compliance.

In legal practice, that distinction matters more than we acknowledge. Silence does not reduce risk. It hides it — until it becomes a much larger problem.

The Difference Between Excellence and Harm

I have been on both sides of the desk in this profession. I was the articling student who froze at the sound of a raised voice calling me “Stupid! Waste of my money”. I was the associate who rewrote a document several times until 10 p.m. at the office alone, not because the work was genuinely wrong but because the feedback felt like punishment. I was the person who hesitated to ask questions because the cost of asking — the impatience, the condescension, the implicit message that I was not smart enough — felt too high.

None of that made me a better lawyer. It made me a more anxious one. So l left and started my own practise at a fairly early stage of my career.

In my earlier article for the OBA Young Lawyers Division, "Serving Clients with Trauma" (February 2025),[3] I wrote about the lasting damage that careless professional behaviour can inflict. The lawyer who told me I "looked too smart to be a domestic violence survivor" was not malicious. He was thoughtless. The effect, however, was real — it took me years to trust the legal system again. If one remark can do that to a client, what does a pattern of contempt do to a junior associate who encounters it daily?

Research on power structures and workplace behaviour confirms what most lawyers already know but rarely say aloud: harmful professional behaviours persist not because they are invisible, but because they are tolerated.[4] They get wrapped in the language of excellence — "high standards," "thick skin," "paying dues" — until the harm becomes part of the culture.

High standards improve work. Contempt diminishes people. The two are not the same, and conflating them is the central mistake that unhealthy legal hierarchies make.

What Healthy Leadership Actually Looks Like

I have learned more about leadership in the last few years from people outside the legal profession than within it.

Craig Groeschel, a mega-church leader whose Leadership Podcast I return to regularly, offers a principle I have found myself quoting more than once: "Your leadership lid determines the level of your organization." [5] His argument is simple — your team cannot outperform the ceiling set by your own self-awareness, growth, and values. A leader who has not done the work on themselves will impose their limitations on everyone around them. That observation has made me more honest about my own growth edges.

Jefferson Fisher, a U.S. litigation attorney, in The Next Conversation, makes a related argument from the perspective of communication. How we speak to people — particularly in moments of tension or correction — either builds or erodes the foundation of trust.[6] Fisher's core insight is that difficult conversations, handled poorly, do not just damage a single relationship. They teach everyone watching what kind of interactions are acceptable in this space. In a law firm, where junior colleagues absorb cues about professional culture constantly, that lesson travels fast.

Arthur C. Brooks, a Harvard Business School professor, whose writing in The Atlantic and books including From Strength to Strength I have returned to many times, argues that people do not only need success — they need to feel that their work has meaning and that they are valued as human beings.[7] Legal professionals can handle pressure. What they often cannot sustain is persistent disrespect. Dignity is not separate from performance. It is part of it.

In my OBA article "Be Your Best Friend" (OBA Sole Small Firm and General Practice, January 2026)[8], I wrote about the connection between self-compassion and resilience. That same connection holds in leadership: a leader who cannot extend grace to themselves rarely extends it to others. The harshness we normalize internally tends to leak outward into the cultures we create.

Practical Steps for Building Healthier Hierarchies

This is not an abstract conversation. Here are the shifts that have made a concrete difference in how I lead:

1) Name the norms explicitly. 

In my firm, I have said out loud: mistakes are expected, and they are to be reported promptly, not concealed. Concealment is a problem; honest error is not. That statement alone changed the information I receive from my team.

2) Distinguish feedback from contempt. 

Feedback is specific, timely, and forward-looking: "This letter should have cited the regulation directly. Here is why it matters and how to fix it." Contempt is about the person: "I cannot believe you missed something this obvious." One teaches. The other diminishes. The content of criticism can be identical; what differs is whether the recipient leaves feeling capable of growing or incapable of belonging.

3) Create deliberate space for questions. 

Harvard Business School research on leadership and well-being identifies the integration of performance expectations with psychological safety as a defining feature of effective leadership.[9] In practice, this means designating regular time, a check-in, a debrief after a hearing, a brief standing meeting, where questions can be asked without hierarchy making them feel costly.

4) Acknowledge your own mistakes visibly. 

In my OBA article for the Young Lawyers Division, "Think Bigger: Three Things I Wish I Could Tell My Younger Self" (November 2025), I wrote about the unexpected mentors who shaped my career — people who were generous precisely because they had no ego investment in appearing infallible.[10] Those were the leaders I trusted most. I try to be that for the people in my office.

5) Watch for isolation. 

In "It Is Not About You" (OBA Young Lawyers Division, September 2025), I wrote about holistic care for vulnerable clients.[11] That same attention applies to junior colleagues. Isolation in this profession — particularly for lawyers from equity-deserving communities — is often a systemic outcome, not an individual failure. Reducing it requires visible mentorship, genuine peer networks, and the kind of consistent structural support that goes beyond occasional kindness.

The Profession We Want to Work In

I am not suggesting we make law easier. The work is hard, the stakes are real, and high expectations are part of what makes the profession meaningful. However, a profession that relies on fear as its primary motivational tool will lose its most capable and conscientious people, often the ones who feel things most acutely, who ask the most honest questions, and who would have grown into its best leaders.

The goal is not a kinder profession in some vague, sentimental sense. It is a profession where dignity is structural — built into how we supervise, how we give feedback, how we respond to mistakes, and how we treat the people whose careers we help shape.

Every lawyer who is in a leadership position and reading this article is already building a culture, whether they intend to or not. The question is only what kind.

About the Author

Dr. Ningjing (Natalie) Zhang is the founder and principal lawyer at Bridgepoint Law Professional Corporation, where she practises immigration and refugee law (www.bridgepointlaw.ca)

Natalie is one of the few refugee-turned-lawyers in Canada. Originally from China, she holds degrees from Fudan University and Queen's University, and has conducted academic work at Stanford, UCLA, and Pepperdine University. She arrived in Canada as a post-doctoral researcher, and her path took an unexpected turn that brought her face-to-face with the very systems she would later navigate on behalf of others. As a single mother with young children, she took the LSAT while on Ontario Works at a women’s shelter and completed law school at Queen's University before being called to the Bar in Ontario. She practises business immigration, individual immigration, and immigration refugee litigation, and is the one of the few lawyers with Chinese as a native language who accepts Legal Aid Ontario certificates for refugee matters. Natalie writes regularly for OBA publications on legal culture, trauma-informed practice, and the profession's responsibilities to its members. She is also a contributing author for Thomson Reuters in the Business Law section. She can be reached at natalie@bridgepointlaw.ca.

For Natalie, the law is a bridge — not a barrier — for the people who need it most.

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