One of the easiest ways to become indispensable at work is to do good work. Show that you are dependable. Meet your deadlines. Return phone calls promptly. Volunteer to help when someone is in a bind. Before long, people begin to rely on you.

That is generally a good thing. Lawyers should strive to be the kind of professionals their clients and colleagues can count on. Reliability builds trust. It builds reputations. It builds careers. But a newly published 2026 research study caught my attention because it suggests there may be an unintended downside to being “the reliable one.”

The study, Managers Allocate Additional Tasks to Intrinsically Motivated Employees: Exploring Mechanisms, Consequences, and Solutions, examined how managers decide who receives additional work. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that extra assignments tend to go to employees who appear genuinely engaged, committed, and motivated.

If you have spent much time in a law firm, this probably doesn’t sound like groundbreaking news. Every office has those people. They are the associates who volunteer to help with a difficult project. They are the partners who somehow find time to answer one more client call. They are the paralegals and legal assistants who quietly keep everything moving without asking for recognition. When something unexpected comes up, everyone knows exactly who can handle it.

The interesting part of the study is why this happens. The researchers found that managers were generally not trying to take advantage of their best employees. Instead, they often assumed that because these employees enjoyed their work or found it meaningful, they would welcome additional responsibilities. The researchers called this “motive oversimplification.” Managers unconsciously equated enthusiasm with capacity.

Those are not the same thing.

One of the study’s more surprising findings was that managers also became less concerned about burnout when employees appeared passionate about their work. In other words, once someone develops a reputation for loving what they do, supervisors may be less likely to notice that the person’s plate has become completely full. That strikes me as an easy mistake to make.

Lawyers are deeply committed to their work. They enjoy solving difficult problems, helping clients through crises, protecting businesses, or preserving families. They are willing to put in long hours because the work matters. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem arises when dedication becomes confused with unlimited availability.

Purpose does not eliminate fatigue. Enjoying your work does not prevent cognitive overload. And being the person who usually says “yes” does not mean you always have room for one more assignment.

The study also found that this pattern tends to reinforce itself over time. Managers repeatedly returned to the same highly motivated employees whenever something new came along. Gradually, those employees became the organization’s default “go-to” people.

This dynamic can eventually hurt not only employees but also organizations. Over time, overloading your most dependable people can lead to resentment, inefficiency, inequity, and eventually exhaustion. From a malpractice perspective, that matters. Many malpractice claims are not caused by lawyers who lack intelligence or legal ability. They happen because capable lawyers become overloaded. Deadlines are missed. Communications fall behind. Important details slip through the cracks. Even outstanding lawyers have limited cognitive bandwidth.

The answer is certainly not to stop recognizing or rewarding strong performers. Nor is it to discourage lawyers from going the extra mile for clients and colleagues. Those qualities are part of what makes great lawyers great. Instead, this study serves as a reminder that managers should occasionally step back and ask whether reliability has unintentionally become a reason for assigning even more work to the same people.

A few questions are worth asking:

• Who almost always receives the last-minute emergency assignments?
• Who is mentoring others while also carrying a full caseload?
• Who gets additional responsibilities simply because they are unlikely to say no?
• Who has quietly become indispensable in ways that may no longer be sustainable?

Sometimes the people who appear to be handling everything effortlessly are the very people carrying the heaviest load. This new research suggests that their commitment may be the reason their overload goes unnoticed.