When Leah Steele was working as a lawyer she had a gruelling schedule – putting in as many as 50 hours in four days – and often felt anxious.
Matters came to a head in 2014 after she suffered a bereavement. She remembers constantly checking and rechecking letters, and waking up in the early hours troubled about an email she thought she had sent to a client.
“I was suffering quite a long time from burnout. I was sleeping four hours a night at times,” recalls Steele, who was employed in various law firms for almost 12 years, specialising in private client work.
“The culture in law is that everyone pretends they are fine,” she adds. “There is a feeling that everyone is coping except me, and who am I to feel that I can’t cope when other colleagues have it so much worse.”
Steele, who lives in Bristol, decided something in the profession needed to change, so she became a mentor and trainer for those struggling with exhaustion, burnout and impostor syndrome – all while continuing to work full-time as a solicitor. Then, in mid-2017 she took an indefinite career break to expand her business, Searching for Serenity.
City law firms have hit the headlines in recent months for a series of eye-watering pay rises given to newly qualified lawyers – but less attention has been paid to the Faustian bargain many lawyers strike, enduring intense stress and punishing hours in exchange for their generous pay.
Last month Quinn Emanuel, a global law firm with headquarters in Los Angeles, became the latest to increase salaries for newly qualified lawyers employed in London: its starting rate rose to £180,000, matching other elite US firms operating here. UK “magic circle” firms including Linklaters and Clifford Chance have also upped salaries for this group, to £150,000, which is still a lot less than the partners in these firms, who typically take home £2m or more a year.
There is a huge pay disparity between City law firms and areas such as criminal legal aid: this work is also emotionally draining and requires long hours, but in this field trainee solicitors’ pay will be little more than £21,000 a year.
There are signs that increased pressures in all areas of law have led to large numbers of professionals suffering burnout, stress and mental illness. One contributing factor is that technology has also removed work-life boundaries, making lawyers available 24/7 for clients.
However, staff wellbeing has also risen up the corporate agenda in recent years as employers started to become concerned. The new Labour government has said it wants to introduce a “right to switch off”, which would allow UK employees to disconnect outside working hours and not be contacted by their employer. This has already been introduced in countries such as Belgium and Ireland.
The death in September last year of Vanessa Ford – a partner at City law firm Pinsent Masons who had been working long hours on a deal involving Everton football club – has prompted widespread discussion in the profession about corporate culture. Assistant coroner Ian Potter concluded in March after an inquest that Ford was going through an “acute mental health crisis” but said there was insufficient evidence to suggest she intended to take her own life.
LawCare, a legal mental health charity, says it saw a 14% rise in people requesting mental health support last year, with a significant number saying they had suffered workplace bullying. It had provided emotional support to 633 people about stress, anxiety and workplace bullying and harassment.
In its Life in the Law study, published in 2021, the charity found that legal professionals were at high risk of burnout, with 69% telling the charity they had experienced mental ill-health, and one in five reporting having been bullied, harassed or discriminated against at work. Researchers surveyed 1,700 professionals between October 2020 and January 2021, and results showed that 28% said they felt they needed to be available 24/7, and 65% had to check emails outside office hours.
Earlier this year, Richard Martin, chief executive of the Mindful Business Charter, which focuses on creating a mentally healthier workplace, published an open letter to the profession prompted by Ford’s death, and last month met law firm leaders to discuss the effects of stress on the wider profession.
He wrote: “We know that the legal profession suffers some of the highest levels of mental distress in society. Partners in our law firms need to have an honest discussion with each other as to their values and shared purpose and to the balance they are prepared to make between the profitability of the firm and the lives of the people who work in it, including their own.”
Nick Emmerson, president of the Law Society of England and Wales, says: “The legal profession has a collective responsibility to make a positive work environment for everyone. Legal mental health charity LawCare has stated that stress is one of the most common reasons for calls to its helpline, due to long working hours and pressurised situations.
“We must address how some working practices contribute to an increased risk of poor mental health and work together to change things. Tackling excessive working hours and workloads, as well as ensuring better supervision and support, especially for junior lawyers, is essential. We call on firms to take action to address these issues.”
One key issue is that most lawyers are still judged largely on how many hours they bill clients, which affects the firm’s overall revenue. Associate lawyers at big firms who have been qualified for a few years are generally expected to bill between 1,900 and 2,200 hours a year. Some associates at US law firms bill more than 2,400 hours a year, working sometimes from 9am until midnight six days a week.
“I have to bill 1,700 hours a year, which means working at least seven hours a day and then other things like business development on top,” says one lawyer who does not wish to be named. “The hours that associates have to bill has actually gone up over the past few years.”
A survey last year by news and information website Legal Cheek found 12-hour average working days at a number of London law firms, with US giant Kirkland & Ellis topping the table.
Laura Empson, professor in the management of professional service firms at London’s Bayes Business School, says: “The way law firms are set up, insecurity is built into the business model and many have an ‘up or out’ policy. Newly qualified lawyers might earn £160,000 to £180,000 a year, but considerably less than 50% of those who complete their training contract will become a partner.
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“The likelihood of becoming a partner is very slim and so they compete against other members of their cohort. They don’t need partners telling them to work late; they will do it themselves as they want to be noticed and visible. By the time they become partners they do not know any other way of working.”
Elizabeth Rimmer, chief executive of LawCare, says that while there has been talk about lawyer burnout since 1987, focus on mental health in the sector has increased significantly since the pandemic. She adds that professional indemnity insurers are now taking a keener interest in “people risk”, because stressed individuals are more likely to make a mistake at work.
“There are a lot of colliding factors at the moment,” she says. “Stress is an issue affecting the wider sector, because lawyers work long hours and often get involved in cases where things are going wrong or have gone wrong.”
Some City law firms have tried to alleviate stress by offering wellness initiatives ranging from private healthcare, gym membership and employee assistance helplines to yoga classes and bring your dog to work days. Many employers also have doctors and physiotherapists available on site.
Rimmer argues that law firms need to focus more on tackling long hours and offering staff appropriate support. “There is a tendency for firms to think they are doing all the right things and have ticked the mental health box by offering things like yoga – but you are not going to be able to yoga your way out of burnout.”
Younger, gen Z lawyers, however, are now starting to question the long-hours culture, with some even shunning the traditional career path, whereby they are expected to strive to make partner.
And the drive towards a better work-life balance is being seen across the City, not just in law. In 2021, Goldman Sachs increased pay for its junior bankers months after a leaked presentation by 13 first-year recruits claimed that 100-hour weeks and abuse from co-workers had created “inhumane” conditions for new hires. Chief executive David Solomon said he took the complaints seriously and would increase hiring and strengthen the enforcement of a no-work-on-Saturday rule.
James Lavan, executive director of recruitment agency Buchanan Law, says: “Post-pandemic, people are more aware of work-life balance. As a firm, we speak to about 500 lawyers a week, and the number who don’t want to go for a partnership role is ever increasing. People say: ‘I don’t need that stress in my life.’ Lawyers will now go to law firms and say, ‘I will do two or three years and then go and do something else in law with a better work-life balance.’”
Lavan recalls one senior lawyer who left the profession entirely to open a coffee shop.
Empson agrees: “Gen Z don’t want to work like this. There is also likely to be change due to artificial intelligence, where technology will do many of the tasks currently undertaken by junior lawyers, meaning fewer of them will be needed.”
“The incoming generation has different expectations,” adds Rimmer. “Quite a lot of them do not want to be a partner. This puts pressure on senior people in law firms to manage expectations based on existing working practices.
“They’ll say, ‘I’m going to my cousin’s wedding at the weekend and don’t want to work.’ We have a culture of long hours in the law and I think that is now being challenged.”
Edward Stratford, co-founder of legal recruitment agency Fort Stratford Partners, says many younger lawyers now set their sights on earning big money for just a few years and then using their windfall to do something else. “Associates are driven by the cost of living, and many think, ‘I will do three or four years in a big firm and then put my head above water and think what do I want to do with the rest of my life’.”
In Bristol, Steele agrees: “Gen Z has a different reward system and is a lot more holistic in their view. They are not just climbing the career ladder but looking at which wall the ladder is stood against and asking, ‘Where am I going here?’”
LawCare helpline 0800 279 6888 free confidential emotional support for anyone in the UK legal sector, www.lawcare.org.uk. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
