How do I manage a team and still carry the hard cases?

You made partner. Now you manage a practice and its associates, and you still carry the weight of every family's worst day walking through the door. The leadership did not replace the hard part of the work; it stacked on top of it. Feeling the full weight of that is not fragility. It is the honest math of what you are holding. Two heavy things now sit on you at once: the emotional load of the cases and the responsibility for the people who handle them. Each alone is a lot. Together they can quietly wear down even someone as capable as you clearly are. It is worth saying plainly, because you likely rarely say it: this is a great deal to carry. So carry it more deliberately. The families' pain is real, but it is not yours to absorb whole; your job is skilled help, not endless suffering alongside them. Build a way to set it down, a colleague to talk to, a firm ritual at the end of a case. And lead your associates in a way that models the same, so they last too. Pick one boundary this month that protects your own reserves. You cannot steady families for years if you never let yourself be steadied.