Burnout: are law firms doing enough to protect the mental wellbeing of their staff?

The conversation on how law firms can better protect the wellbeing and mental health of their employees has been reignited over the past few months. Could there finally be a culture shift ahead? Sarah Speight reports.

The Mindful Business Charter recently published an open letter addressing the legal profession, urging firms to join an increasingly loud debate about preventing suicide among lawyers.

The Charter, established in 2018, aims to reduce unnecessary stress within and between organisations. It is a “practical framework” that encourages a thoughtful, respectful modus operandi.

The Charter’s open letter was written in the context of the untimely death in September 2023 of Vanessa Ford (known professionally as Vanessa Heap, who was a senior equity partner at Pinsent Masons).

However, the letter forms part of a bigger conversation that has taken place—and gathered momentum—during the months since.

Ford, who had reportedly been working 18-hour days on a large acquisition for a client, was struck by a train after going missing following closure of the deal.

While the coroner concluded that Ford had “consumed a significant amount of alcohol while undergoing an acute mental health crisis”, there was “insufficient evidence to suggest that she intended to take her own life”.

Despite this, the incident has reignited the broader debate on how to mitigate the risks of poor mental health—including burnout (a work-related syndrome recognised by the World Health Organization) and poor work-life balance—in the legal profession.

Since the Charter's open letter was published in March, the response from businesses and individuals, says Richard Martin—CEO of the Mindful Business Charter—has been “overwhelming”.

Around 80% of organisations that have been in touch since then are law firms, including some in-house legal teams, he tells WIPR.

Indeed, the Charter was founded by three banks and nine law firms—with Pinsent Masons, Addleshaw Goddard and Barclays leading the way.

“As we said in the letter, through this tragedy, there is an opportunity to say, this time we’re going to try and do something different,” Martin says. “I think that’s a commonly shared view at the moment.

“Obviously, the next question is, what do we do?”

Identifying risk

Finding the answer to that may be no mean feat, especially since it’s no secret that lawyers are at a significant risk of burnout. 

For example, this was noted recently in a white paper entitled Raising the bar: Addressing the state of mental health in the legal sector, published  in 2023 by the Mindful Business Charter; and in the Life in the Law study, 2020-2021 by LawCare.

Elizabeth Rimmer, CEO of LawCare—a mental health charity for law professionals—suggests that the conversation needs to shift from being about an individual’s problem, to a systemic organisational problem.

“Our traditional approach to supporting mental health in the workplace is about dealing with problems when they’ve arisen.

“We need to identify and mitigate those risks in the workplace to poor mental health, and try to prevent work-related factors from undermining people's mental health.”

This could begin with monitoring staff’s working hours and the rest they are getting, suggests Martin, a former employment lawyer.

“When you identify risk—high levels of persistent long hours, long periods of not getting enough rest, disconnection from family or loved ones—that's a risk,” says Martin.

“You need to intervene, and manage that risk. That might be a number of different things.”

Action might include sitting down with staff to see how they’re getting on; suggesting that they see an in-house counsellor, consider pushing back on some of their deadlines; or adding resources to support the work they’re doing, he suggests.

“But something, in order to address the risk that’s been identified. It’s not rocket science.”

Prevention is better than cure

Taylor Wessing has been a signatory to the Mindful Business Charter since 2021. The Charter provides a “common language” built on four pillars: openness and respect; smart meetings and communications; respecting rest periods; and mindful delegation.

The third pillar—respecting rest periods, balancing client service and the need to switch off—chimes particularly with Anneka Dalton, a partner in the firm’s Technology, IP and Information team.

“This resonates with me because I hear often (and can relate) that one of the hardest things to do is to find any time ‘for yourself’, between work, family and other commitments,” she tells WIPR.

“I think this is a crucial part of the work-life balance equation: a regular slot to do something just for you, which makes you feel more like yourself.”

Culture shift

Further scrutinising the traditional law firm model, both Rimmer and Martin believe in the need for a culture shift.

For example, Martin sees the chargeable-hour model as problematic, since it incentivises staff to work more hours.

“For as long as I’ve been in law, or connected with law, there’s been the promise of the death of the billable hour, and it's never happened,” he explains. “But there is much more non-billable-hour work done now than there used to be and more value-based billing.

“If you were to say to your client, ‘do you want your work done by a stressed out exhausted associate who hasn't seen friends or family for weeks, sleeping in the office and so on?

“Or would you like your work done by somebody who's fresh, rested, creative? You know what the client would say every time.”

Similarly, Rimmer cites the negative aspect of a long-hours culture.

“The challenge that we face in law is a culture where we accept that working long hours is the norm, and we reward that. So people who exceed their billing targets are the ones that get the bonuses, the promotions. We reward those behaviours that are actually challenging behaviours.”

She suggests that firms need to be looking at the way people are working and what's leading to burnout. Rather than seeing it as an individual’s fault that they’ve become burnt out, they’ve been “put in an environment where it's almost impossible to manage without that having an impact”, she says.

She adds that people management is a big factor to which, in law, “we don’t do very well”, and suggests that mental health and wellbeing should be on the agenda in the boardroom, rather than just sitting within human resources, or the benefits and rewards team.

She highlights a finding in the Life in the Law study, which revealed that less than half of those with management responsibilities had had any training in how to manage or lead people.

“I don’t think we’re unique on that in law, but the evidence is out there that the biggest influence on your mental health at work is your relationship with your boss and your colleagues,” she says.

Time for family

Martin points out that typically, lawyers become partners at around the age of 35, which for many is a time when they're having family.

“So the biggest demands on you, from a work perspective, are happening at exactly the same time as the demands of being a parent of young children,” he says.

“That can be overwhelming. Organisations could do much more to understand those dynamics and to recognise that people are going to be working until they’re 80 before long.

“Why not just let people take their foot off the gas for a few years and not have it impact their career? That's just a grown-up conversation to have with people.”

Firm action

The good news is that many firms are taking action to enable more flexible working, especially for families.

Taylor Wessing has recently updated its family leave policies to better support all parents in the workplace, explains Dalton. This includes increasing paternity leave to 12 weeks’ paid leave and introducing up to 12 weeks’ paid neonatal care leave in addition to any other family leaves.

“It’s great to be part of a firm which is actively looking for additional ways to support parents,” says Dalton, who is a mother of three children under six in a two-parent working household.

“I believe it’s very important that law firms support agile and flexible working, which gives people the agency to structure their day in a way that allows them to keep all the necessary plates (just about) spinning.”

She adds that over the past few years in particular, she has felt well supported by her employer in this regard.

“I recognise the importance of leading from the front on this as well. For example, my childcare and personal commitments are in my work calendar for everyone to see, and I’m very transparent about leaving the office in time to see my kids before bedtime as often as possible.”

Setting boundaries

Thinking more broadly about setting personal boundaries and protecting employee wellbeing, the Charter is empowering people to consider the need for boundaries and giving them the permission to put them up, explains Martin.

After a high-flying legal career in the City for 20 years, Martin experienced a serious mental breakdown, resulting in a month in hospital and two years off work. He never returned to the law.

Instead he became involved in promoting mental health and wellbeing in the workplace, joining byrne·dean, a workplace behaviour consultancy, where he is a principal consultant.

Speaking to WIPR, he recalls the anecdote of a horse in a field, which has many sections divided up by fences and is only able to graze in one section at a time to prevent it from becoming ill.

“That’s like a lawyer. If you put us in a field of lush long green work, we’ll just carry on doing it until it kills us. In my case, it nearly did.”

Those boundaries, he explains, don't need to be seven-foot-high concrete walls. “They can be nice, soft hedges with gates in and so on. Perhaps sometimes we can agree to move the boundaries, but at least we’re having the conversation rather than just assuming there are no boundaries.”

And, for those who need to see the business case for setting those boundaries, they are also there to protect client needs.

“There’s lots of reasons why this matters,” says Rimmer. “The law is a highly regulated environment, and poor mental health undermines your ability to make good ethical decisions and exercise your judgement.

“You’re more likely to make a mistake, miss a step on a money laundering process or the onboarding of a client. If you’ve been working 12 hours a day, and you’re tired, you might click on that phishing email, and there's a cyber attack.”

Protecting the future of law

It’s not just about the here and now, either. For Rimmer, it’s about protecting the future of the law profession.

“It will have to change because ultimately, we’re talking about the sustainability of the profession, aren’t we? If we carry on as we are, we may find there are [fewer] people who want to come into law.

“We may find more people are leaving and therefore where are the future lawyers going to come from within organisations or private practice?”

For now, coming back to the reason why we’re having this conversation, there is the need to take care of each other, says Dalton.

“It’s important to acknowledge that absolutely anyone can experience episodic or prolonged poor mental health. Whilst this is a complex issue which can’t be reduced to a one-liner, fundamentally we all need to watch out for each other as well as seek help ourselves, where needed.”