I’ll just come out and say it and likely annoy countless tech evangelists and some well-meaning law firm leaders at the same time: Apps aren’t the way to solve the legal profession’s mental health and addiction problems, despite their widespread availability.

Currently, apps are out there for managing anxiety, coping with depression, meditating, quitting drinking, getting more sleep, building resilience and more. Do these products have any role to play, and can they be useful tools? Yes and yes. But that role should be an unambiguously secondary or tertiary one, and tools deployed without well-guided purpose can actually make a problem worse. I’ll come back to that last point.