How to Tackle Stress in the Legal Profession: 6 Tips for Law Firms
The legal profession is one of the most stressful industries, with teams dealing with sensitive and critical information for their clients every day. On top of that, priority tasks are numerous and add up quickly, along with billable hour requirements, large workloads, and tight deadlines to adhere to.
As the stress epidemic continues to grow, preventative action must be taken with increased mental health support for lawyers to protect their wellbeing in this challenging, high-pressure occupation.
What contributes to stress in the legal profession?
Legal firms work to maximise revenue per client by hitting billable hour targets throughout the year, while being on-call around the clock to ensure high quality work and customer approval. Because of this, lawyers tend to become time-poor, working graveyard shifts to give clients all-hours coverage.
The overarching need to maintain the good reputation of the firm is also a critical factor and adds to the growing difficulty in dealing with stress as a lawyer. High levels of client satisfaction are essential for winning future cases against competing firms, which often translates to an “always say yes” attitude towards client work, even if demands are unreasonable. Particularly for junior employees in the early stages of their career, this contributes to an additional layer of performance pressure and stress.
How to tackle stress in the legal profession
No matter the size of your organisation, there are ways to tackle the problem of law firm stress and improve the wellbeing of your team long term.
1. Understand that stress is a key risk to legal firms
When assessing the strategic and operational risks to your firm, the typical areas of concern are around economic turbulence, rising competition from other legal businesses, and retaining your top talent.
But stressed and burnt out employees make mistakes. And mistakes in the legal industry can be incredibly costly, making this an area not to overlook when thinking about risks to your company. Research has found that as pressures increase for lawyers working with clients directly, so too do the number of issues caused by lapses in concentration. A seemingly small data-entry error can have serious consequences when a client goes to court with incorrect information.
Addressing the causes of these mistakes, usually related to employee health and wellbeing, is the best way to minimise this risk upfront.
2. Acknowledge that organisational systemic change is necessary
The main causes of stress in the legal profession can be attributed to three distinct categories—unmanageable workloads, unsupportive work environments, and toxic relationships with managers. To see tangible and lasting reductions in stress on your team, the culture of your firm must be completely overhauled.
Billable hours burnout is nothing new when earned fees have traditionally been tied to the number of hours worked. The idea that “the more you bill, the more you’re worth” has long fed the perception that employees must regularly work beyond their contracted hours to be able to bill clients for more time. This pressure of teams to track their hours in extensive detail for client records and to maximise profit has created a generation of highly stressed employees.
Unless these workloads are addressed in some way, the situation won’t change. While the billable hours system is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, look for alternative ways to support your employees and their wellbeing. Focus should instead be placed on building a supportive environment where teams feel a sense of psychological safety, knowing that their supervisors are empathetic to the pressures that come with this job, and providing the right support systems and stress management solutions for individuals to seek help.
Investing in manager training, particularly if issues in this area have been raised, is critical for creating long term, impactful change throughout the whole firm. This is also important for bridging the gap in generational differences that can cause friction on a team, ensuring that support is provided to meet the needs of all employees.
3. Continually assess team stress levels using real data
Knowing what stress levels look like across the firm is vital for taking steps to manage it appropriately. By looking at the causes behind stress and burnout first, preventative measures can be implemented to take proactive steps towards managing stress as a lawyer, rather than simply looking for options to deal with them later.
Surveys to understand team stress and burnout levels, psychology safety levels, and why teams may be feeling stressed are an excellent way to start capturing hard data. From there, ongoing data gathering and team feedback can be used to improve firm wellbeing strategies. This is particularly important if repeated themes come up in data analysis—this will point to areas where change needs to happen at an organisational, rather than team or individual, level.
Monitoring ongoing performance can be difficult, but tools like the WONE Index can help. As a leading industry indicator of stress, your firm can anonymously gather stress data across the organisation using both physiological and self-reported information. Trends are visible in a comprehensive dashboard, making it easy to track changes and progress over time, allowing you to prioritise changes that are most relevant to your team.
4. Involve the board in stress management initiatives
Clear, data-led wellbeing initiatives will resonate most with senior leadership, and crucially, the board. Securing their buy-in is essential to secure ongoing investment into wellbeing strategies and initiatives, so providing a clear link between performance and wellbeing is essential for sustainable, company-wide changes.
Measuring employee stress against key performance indicators (KPIs) will make it apparent where improvements need to be made. By establishing the cost of worsening key performance indicators such as turnover, absenteeism, and productivity, as a result of stress, you will build the business case and secure buy-in from leadership and the board on the value of preventative action. This in turn will enable you to demonstrate a return on investment figure when you have impact data from your chosen solution, securing future budget for further investment. For example, if employee retention is an issue and a consistent pattern of managers causing extreme stress resulting in their team leaving the business, then manager training can be identified as a priority for investment.
5. Provide wellbeing solutions that actually work
Rolling out a new wellbeing strategy is a good start, but for many firms, this ends at reactive and surface-level support like meditation apps or free therapy, which usually have poor take-up levels and low engagement after initial sign up. That’s why you must find a wellbeing solution that works for your employees, not against them.
With billable hours to maintain, having time in the day to step away from your desk for a break is challenging. A solution like Walking on Earth takes this into account, by building short breaks into the working day that work within the confines of a billable hour system.
The app provides micro moments of recovery in as little as 5 to 10 minutes and can be easily completed from your desk, ensuring that stress levels can be effectively managed with minimal disruption to workflow and productivity. We lead the way with workplace integration thanks to our short sessions and work calendar integration that fits around a billable hours schedule.
6. Spot and prevent burnout ahead of time
Rather than dealing only with the aftermath of burnout, firms must instead look at implementing a preventative approach to employee wellbeing.
Initiatives and policies should be focused around addressing triggers for stress and burnout before they occur, rather than only dealing with issues after an employee reaches the point of crisis.
Reactive approaches to wellbeing, such as through the services of EAPs, are simply unable to stem the rising tide of employee burnout and mental health. Their low utilisation at an average of just 5.5% total employee utilisation, and limited to no ability to measure impact on key business metrics, further justifies the need for a preventative approach to employee health.
Mental health resources for law teams
There are a number of legal-specific organisations, along with nonprofits, that provide lawyer mental health resources that are there for you when your team needs additional help.
One of the biggest resources available is Law Care, a company that provides legal professionals and support staff with resources and somewhere to reach out for anyone struggling at work. They offer a free and confidential support hotline, email, and online chat that’s available throughout the week.
The Law Society represents, protects, and supports solicitors throughout England and Wales. Not only is it their responsibility to ensure that the legal and justice system is being upheld, the society also works with members to provide networking and career development opportunities, along with support resources when needed.
Mind UK is one of the largest national mental health support charities in England and Wales, providing support and advice to those needing mental health services. They have both a general and a legal telephone helpline that can be contacted throughout the week.
Samaritans is a 24/7 support service that takes calls from those who are struggling with their mental health and need someone to talk to, with no pressure or judgement. Although known for their crisis response, Samaritans take calls every 10 seconds to listen to those in need and provide guidance on how to manage their mental health.
Legal firms can also look to become part of the Mindful Business Charter, an organisation aimed at identifying and eradicating the causes of workplace stress. Members have access to insight sessions from leading stress experts, along with a library of shared resources and member-only events and workshops.
Additional support services available to legal professionals include:
For more general advice and resources specifically around stress management and mental health, lawyers can find information at:
- The International Stress Management Association
- British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy
- CALM-Campaign Against Living Miserably
Addressing legal stress and burnout starts with your firm
The legal industry is one of the most common fields for excess levels of stress and burnout. But with a preventive approach to workplace burnout, we can turn the tide on the stress epidemic.
Schedule a demo of the WONE app today and say goodbye to reactive solutions to stress in the legal profession.
