City lawyers have long been prone to burnout. Are changing attitudes seeing law firms finally face up to the challenges of mental health and extreme stress?
‘I decided the sensible thing to do was walk across four lanes of French motorway traffic. Eventually I was accosted by a toll gate assistant asking: “What are you doing?” I had to confess that I really had little idea. I wasn’t aware of the warning signs.’
Byrne Dean’s Richard Martin, formerly an employment partner at Jones Day and later management committee member at Speechly Bircham, recounts his stark experience of mental illness. His story is extreme, but burnout, stress, depression and anxiety are well-known features of the working and personal lives of many City professionals.
Such issues have for years bubbled under the surface, as the 1980s and 1990s saw the City shift from a relatively sedate club to a connected, 24/7 culture. Law firms were particularly impacted thanks to a business model based on hours worked.
Yet the legal profession has only recently begun to treat mental health and chronic stress issues with anything more than cursory box-ticking as attitudes have changed and tolerance for stiff-upper-lipped forbearance has waned.
Quantifying such issues is difficult but statistics from the NHS indicate the number of people in England reporting at least a mild common mental health disorder, such as anxiety, depression, panic attacks or obsessive compulsive disorder, crept up from one in eight in 2007 to one in six in 2014.
Although mental health issues are generally accepted to be more prevalent in those with lower incomes, unemployed people and people from ethnic minority backgrounds, attempts to tackle the stigma behind mental health have entered the professional services world.
But can the profession get to grips with an issue that seems to challenge its very economic basis? A growing number of veteran lawyers are now talking up the possibility.
Slaughter and May executive partner Paul Stacey comments: ‘Mental health has come to the forefront as an issue in the last five years or so. In our culture we are always looking for the brightest people to be performing at the top of their game throughout their time with us, so they need to know where they can go for support from us.’
War wounds
There have been sporadic attempts in the profession to analyse the impact of stress and mental health in law. In a series of reports over three years, the latest being in 2014, the Law Society concluded that 96% of practising certificate holders suffer from stress, with 19% of the 1,500 respondents in its study saying they suffered ‘severe’ or ‘extreme’ levels of stress at work. A more recent survey (although with a small sample size of 214) from the Law Society’s Junior Lawyers Division published in April claimed that 26% of junior lawyers suffered from severe stress at work, while half felt their employer could do more to combat these challenges.
Paul Gilbert, the head of legal consultancy LBC Wise Counsel, argues that the scale of the issue is still rarely acknowledged. ‘I must have mentored 150 lawyers. In the first four or five years one in ten were showing signs of stress. They would be angry, sad or crying. Now I would say of the people I mentor, 40% to 50% of them show signs of stress.’
Gilbert points to cultures unforgiving of mistakes, heavy time commitments and pressure that is ‘tantamount to bullying’. It is an unwelcoming picture of the modern City workplace. But the high pressure environment brings together people who drive themselves… for good and ill. ‘Lawyers usually have a to-do list which is astonishingly ambitious,’ notes Gilbert, ‘there’s a perfectionist streak.’
Surveys of the profession mirror Gilbert’s comments. The Junior Lawyers Division report noted 65% of respondents blame high workload for stress while 50% blamed their partners, citing ineffective management.
‘In the first five years I mentored lawyers, one in ten were showing signs of stress. Now 40% to 50% are.’
Paul Gilbert, LBC Wise Counsel
While these have often been perennial complaints of lawyers, other factors have seen the legal landscape evolve into a more hard-driven environment. The past 25 years have seen the transformation of the legal profession, recasting a largely domestic industry into a global market that has pitted law firms against each other across borders. In the City, US entrants with higher salaries and profitability have piled pressure on City rivals and pushed law firms to keep up in a global arms race to attract top lawyers.
Just as fundamentally, dramatic changes in communications technology have broken the once-clear demarcations between work and personal life – an issue repeatedly cited by veteran partners interviewed for this article. ‘There is a communications onslaught, it’s harder to get a work/life balance,’ says White & Case global private equity co-head Ian Bagshaw. ‘Naturally people want to step up and take responsibility on a 24/7 basis. While that’s to be admired, we’re stirring up a problem.’
There has also been ample statistical evidence of the numbers choosing to quit private practice in the City, not least through the poor retention figures of female lawyers in major practices and the dramatic expansion in the numbers flocking to in-house roles.
In a handful of cases there are more dramatic and tragic consequences. The suicide of Hogan Lovells trade mark partner David Latham in 2013 was preceded by sleepless nights over a case. There was also the death of SJ Berwin partner Catherine Bailey in 2009, suffering from suspected post-natal depression. The 41-year-old mother-of-three drowned in the Thames in an apparent suicide.
Most top partners acknowledge the strain they put themselves and their teams under on deal deadlines and all-nighters. But, as Gilbert notes, firms could be doing more: ‘The model hasn’t changed. There’s a huge amount of attrition. We train a lot of people knowing a significant proportion of them are likely to fail. That can’t be right.’
Stacey concedes that firms must be careful to avoid the platitudes that have been trotted out in the past. ‘We don’t want to just jump on the bandwagon. It’s important that whatever we do introduce here has real substance. Empty declarations will lead us nowhere.’
Insecure alphas
Lawyer personality types have been well documented in academic research over the years. Cass Business School professor Laura Empson, director of the centre for professional services firms, likens law firm hires to the kind of ‘insecure overachiever’ personalities sought out by investment banks and top consultancies: ‘They will have people who can never be successful enough. The acceptable answer to what is your greatest flaw at interview is: “I am a perfectionist.” If you look at what’s behind this there are issues around insecurity and the desire to achieve relentlessly.’
Research generally points to particular issues with the typical lawyer personality against the backdrop of intense competition. Broadly, lawyers like structure, focus on detail and are uncomfortable with risk. They typically also have a low resilience and struggle with failure. It is plain that this mix of characteristics makes lawyers particularly vulnerable to stress.
Such phrasing is echoed by top City partners themselves, with one Allen & Overy (A&O) partner commenting: ‘We’re super alpha but deeply insecure people.’
Addressing such issues have emerged a band of specialist doctors, psychiatrists and advisers who deal with mental health in professionals. For example, Bill Mitchell is a clinical psychologist who counts Linklaters and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer among his list of law firm clients. As well as individual counselling, Mitchell has run training and talks for management of all levels. ‘Many people who have been robust personalities wander down a pathway that they don’t recognise, where they feel they are no longer coping, right down to physical and mental ill health and burnout,’ he says.
One City partner to speak openly about her struggles with depression is Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) partner Samantha Brown. She experienced a depressive episode in 2015. While Brown does not pin any one cause to her breakdown, work played a major part in her personal and professional life.
‘I wrapped it all up with the idea: “I am a junior partner, I work in the City, this is really high pressure” and I put more pressure on myself.’
‘Whatever we introduce here has to have real substance. Empty declarations will lead us nowhere.’
Paul Stacey, Slaughter and May
But while exhaustion and stress contributed to her sick leave, Brown’s work helped her: ‘Taking ownership and doing work, even on a reduced basis, was what I needed to do for my own recovery.’
Martin had been through similar challenges. ‘I was having a severe panic attack, which can look a lot like a heart attack. My psychiatrist suggested hospitalisation. I asked him if I was the sort of person who goes to hospital. I didn’t know if people like me were ill enough.’
Martin’s recovery ultimately took two years, after which he decided it would be impossible to go back to private practice. Martin says that Speechly Bircham was ‘immensely supportive’, keeping his position open until he said he had to leave. He now works at employment consultancy Byrne Dean, advising on mental health and wellbeing issues for corporates.
Mirroring the comments of the medical professionals and Brown, Martin notes that work provided a useful structure as he was striving to recover: ‘Work felt like a refuge, I felt certain about my work.’
Aside from the potentially harmful work/life balance, and the professional drive that can cause some to spiral, there is some consensus that alcohol and substance addiction has receded somewhat as a stress-related issue in recent years. The City is certainly dryer than 20 years ago, with the long lunches and boozy client events in decline. The blurry line between work-related drinking spiralling into dependency is less of an issue than for earlier generations of lawyers.
Mitchell comments of his counselling practice: ‘We do deal with people who drink too much as it becomes their way of switching off at the end of the day, the amount can just creep up and up.’
Control of working life seems to play a major role in lawyer wellbeing. For those who feel out of control, working in an unsupportive environment aggravates the feeling. As well as the push to meet client demands and billing targets is the culture of firms themselves. Despite the protestations of many management figures interviewed for this piece, the pyramid structure of law firms comes under criticism by many who have been through the machine.
Gilbert comments: ‘You think now: OK, firms are taking it seriously, but fundamentally the model hasn’t changed. It feels to me like we’re building field hospitals on the battlefield to pick up the casualties rather than changing the way we work so we don’t have to fight wars.’
And for lawyers particularly, work is a huge part of life, part of identity – losing that can feel like failure. One partner Legal Business spoke with, who suffered with mental health issues, reflects: ‘When you have identified so long through having a successful career, not being able to do those things that are a big, defining part of your life is terrifying.’
‘We talk early’
There is no doubt that law firm approaches to wellbeing have evolved substantially from 15 years ago, even if many believe the rhetoric has changed more than reality.
Freshfields finance partner David Trott recounts one episode early in his career as a senior associate: ‘In ’91/’92 I was doing a transaction where I was not feeling great. It was absolute madness. I ended up collapsing after ten days and spent several weeks in hospital with pneumonia. Welfare wasn’t really talked about at all then. Firms have got better.’
Recent years have seen firms begin to move to address at least extreme signs of stress and staff buckling under pressure.
As Millnet managing director and former consultant and City lawyer Julia Chain notes: ‘I have often had to mentor young men and women and one of the key points was managing stress and work/life balance. Until about five years ago firms paid lip service to this. The business model was everybody working 100 hours a week and that was the way it was.’
Legal Business canvassed the top ten firms in the LB100 to assess their policies on stress and mental health issues as part of a wider focus on quality of life (see The quality of life report: Wellbeing, mental health and quality of life – the UK top ten). The results indicate tentative progress, though many of the initiatives are recent, being introduced in the last five years.
Among the Magic Circle, certainly among the firms with lawyers and staff facing the most pressure, all have implemented some measures to address mental health and wellbeing.
Linklaters set up its first health and wellbeing partner champion back in 2010, a role taken up by commercial partner Nigel Jones. The post has since been taken on by finance veteran Nick Syson, one of the firm’s most prominent transactional lawyers. Jones subsequently helped co-found the City Mental Health Alliance (CMHA) in 2012, which has since signed up the rest of the Magic Circle and includes HSF, Hogan Lovells, White & Case, Bird & Bird, Berwin Leighton Paisner, Gowling WLG, Fieldfisher, and Holman Fenwick Willan as supporting law firms.
At Linklaters’ annual partner conference in March, Jones says the firm held a plenary session focused on health and wellbeing with six partners who had suffered from mental or physical ill health, encouraging lawyers to talk more openly about these experiences. The debate brought together hundreds of partners and directors from around the globe.
The CMHA was founded by City businesses and is supported by charities Mental Health First Aid England and Mind. It now has support from 40 organisations, with the aim of helping businesses to talk about mental health and to address such issues in the boardroom.
‘The bankers blamed lawyers, lawyers blamed accountants, accountants blamed clients – it was always because of other people. We needed a space to come together and talk.’
Nigel Jones, Linklaters
Jones reflects: ‘I spoke to people about why we work in the way we do, knowing it is not conducive to good mental or physical health. The bankers blamed lawyers, lawyers blamed accountants, accountants blamed clients – it was always because of other people. So it was thought we needed a space to come together and talk about these issues and have a real go at changing things.’
A&O, meanwhile, points to efforts that have provided ‘resilience training’ to 750 people across the firm. In 2015 Norton Rose Fulbright claimed to be the first firm to launch a formal programme of training mental health first aiders, staff and lawyers trained in spotting and engaging with individuals who appear to be stressed or overworked. The firm now has 35 first aiders in its London office and many of the firms questioned have followed suit.
HSF has introduced mental health and wellbeing programmes, which includes 60 mental health mentors in its practice groups and business services teams.
Many firms feature on-site counselling. For example, Hogan Lovells has a dedicated counselling service on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays and in January and February this year ran two pilot programmes in mental health awareness training with the charity Rethink Mental Illness. The firm also prints details of wellbeing services and numbers to contact on the back of its security cards.
In addressing such issues, most senior lawyers stress the need for vocal support from the leading figures inside firms and for confidential resources to address problems early in a discreet fashion.
Among HR professionals interviewed, there is a consensus that attitudes are changing in the profession, reflecting more openness in society to the impacts of stress and mental health challenges.
Slaughters head of HR advisory Katie Gledhill says: ‘Absence management used to be reactive and nobody talked about mental health or stress until five years ago. Once you were signed off by a GP then you would be left alone. There has been a shift towards more active management.’
Hogan Lovells UK and Africa managing partner Susan Bright picks up the point: ‘What has interested us more in recent years has been how to be preventative on this. “Talk early and talk a lot.” We talk about wellbeing a lot here.’
‘A true partnership’
If the rhetoric is more soothing and PC on stress and wellbeing, the City profession’s track record on issues like diversity and social mobility makes it apparent that commercial law firms are better at the platitudes and launching initiatives than at forcing change on the ground.
Even the considerable number of 20-plus lawyers canvassed for this piece who feel that genuine progress has been made, concede that there is a long way to go. As CMS Cameron McKenna senior partner Penelope Warne notes: ‘I became aware only a few weeks ago of a pregnant woman in the City being routinely asked to work until midnight. That is just unforgivable.’
All of the ten UK law firms researched in the piece had some formal initiatives to address stress, mental health or wellbeing. There has been a shift towards supporting flexible and agile working, though many remain wary that such measures can become counter-productive as work bleeds into the life of the lawyers and staff, making stress even harder to manage.
What may prove crucial for the profession is the extent to which the partnership and law firm model will – or will not – be forced to change to accommodate softer issues of mental health and quality of life. For years the tournament of partnership has been able to function economically by churning through sizeable ranks of disenchanted ex-City lawyers.
But skilled commercial lawyers these days have more career options than the partnership track, including most clearly the dramatically expanded ranks of in-house lawyers. Career aspirations have also changed somewhat to less exclusively focus on partnership.
In-house lawyers typically report higher levels of job satisfaction than private practice, though Gilbert and many GCs argue that the growth in responsibility of the role means that it is becoming more pressured as it gains more cachet.
Many New Law providers such as Axiom, Obelisk or Keystone Law have capitalised their recruitment drive on floods of high-skilled lawyers becoming disenchanted with City law. Sara Morgan, London head at Axiom, argues that law firms will struggle to address this: ‘Most firms pay lip service to this and don’t make you feel part of the business until you make partner. It’s great that firms are aware of the mental health and wellbeing agenda, but you are still brought up a partnership way.’
Some argue that a restatement or updating of the basic tenets of partnership will go a long way to helping address extreme stress, remembering the old school mentoring between partners and young associates that was more typical when City law firms were smaller.
White & Case’s Bagshaw notes how powerful the bond of partnership can be, recalling the sudden death of his younger brother while they were both working at Linklaters. ‘I can’t thank them enough, they were unbelievable. The partners acted like a true partnership rather than an institutional business.’
And there lies the best hope for addressing the stress and breakdowns that have long plagued the profession. Commercial law remains, intensely, a people business. While the cut and thrust of competitive type As jostling against each other can ramp up the pressure unbearably, the bonds of the team and colleagues are conversely also the most likely way to ease that strain.
Even the cynical could agree that something has changed in the profession. What is uncertain is if the door has been flung open or merely prised ajar. Some at least are hopeful. Says Stacey: ‘Anything that helps the profession gain more awareness is going to be valued.’ Concludes Brown: ‘The openness within my team has changed significantly. In the two and a half years since I was unwell I’ve noticed a big shift.’ LB
matthew.field@legalease.co.uk
Please also see:
Wellbeing, mental health and quality of life – the UK top ten
Perspectives – Samantha Brown, Herbert Smith Freehills
Perspectives – Richard Martin, Byrne Dean
For more coverage, please return to The quality of life report