As new research reveals lawyers are finding their jobs more stressful than ever, Georgina Stanley asks whether law firms are doing enough to combat work-based anxiety and other mental health issues

Statistics on mental illness speak for themselves. Every year, about one in four people in the UK will experience a mental health problem, with about 10% of the population suffering from depression and anxiety issues. 

Figures from Mind, a UK mental health charity, suggest that 8% of those suffering from mental health issues in any year will require specialist psychiatric help, while 2% will have problems so severe they require in-patient treatment.

Arguably the most severe mental health issues may not be distributed evenly across adult society. But when you look at mental illness as a whole, lawyers – with their blackberry addictions and mounting client/billing pressures – are clearly affected in the same way as other professions.

So if the profession does reflect society as a whole, that would add up to more than 23,000 of about 92,000 lawyers employed by law firms in England and Wales experiencing some kind of issue in any year, including thousands suffering depression and anxiety.

And yet in commercial law, as with other professions, public admission of mental health issues – whether depression, stress or something more severe – is still seen as taboo.

Too often the issue only becomes public when someone does not get the help they need and things go badly wrong. This could mean suicide or accidental death – of which there have been several examples at law firms in recent years – or high-profile scandals such as former Hogan Lovells partner Christopher Grierson, who had previously been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, being jailed last year after defrauding the firm of £1.27m.

So what, if anything, are law firms doing about it?

The action

Speak to any leading law firm about the subject and the response will be similar. All of them have been devoting more time and resources to the issue in recent years and those contacted by Legal Week claimed to offer a host of similar support services to staff at all levels, from back-office employees to partners. 

Law firm initiatives include in-house music rooms and lessons, gyms complete with all-day class schedules, access to GPs and counselling. Several top firms are being advised by clinical psychologists or psychoanalysts. There is also training on topics ranging from the importance of diet and physical fitness to mental resilience and dealing with life-changing events such as bereavement. 

And these efforts, which focus very much on prevention and helping staff, managers and peers spot symptoms, should not be dismissed.

As Kevin Hogarth, head of human resources at Freshfields – a firm that has found its policies under press scrutiny in the past – comments: "This is a difficult and sensitive issue and many organisations have been apprehensive about tackling it. Recognising that a high-performance culture makes significant demands on people, we started working with clinical psychologist Bill Mitchell, who focuses on resilience in the workplace, and it's been a journey over the last 18 months."

Ian Gatt QC, a Herbert Smith Freehills partner who is closely involved in the firm's mental health efforts, says: "Our programme [which includes input from psychoanalyst Mary Bradbury – Herbert Smith's mental health consultant] has made a huge difference here. There's much more awareness that stress is a growing issue for the professional services sector and that well-being has to be proactively managed.

"People need to be able to recognise the signs of stress – such as irritability, anxiety, depression, working unnecessarily long hours, withdrawing from colleagues, experiencing sleeping difficulties and suffering from physical ailments. Then both they and the firm need to acknowledge that mental illness is an illness like any other and that people will need time off to deal with it." 

Why it isn't enough

Despite signs of progress, law firms admit more needs to be done – a belief backed by new Legal Week research, which found that lawyers are finding work more stressful than ever and do not believe their firms are doing enough to deal with the problem.

Every respondent to the survey said they found life as a lawyer stressful, with 62% stating it to be 'very stressful and getting more so all the time', against 38% pointing out that the level of stress is no worse than in other similar careers.

And while almost half felt their firms took anxiety and mental health issues either 'very' or 'quite' seriously, 38% claimed they were 'just going through the motions', with a further 17% going further and suggesting the attitude in 2013 was still very much 'man up' and get on with it.

Only three out of 120 partners responding said their firms had comprehensive safeguards in place to deal with stress-related problems, although a further 66% conceded some progress had been made. Most worrying, about a third of those taking part said their firms had not taken any steps to address the issue, which many felt had got worse since the start of the recession because of the crackdown on performance and job instability. 

Two-thirds of respondents said their roles had 'absolutely' become more stressful since the start of the downturn, with another 22% describing their jobs as 'slightly' more stressful. Despite the common perception that stress becomes worse the busier people get because they have less control over their workload, only 2% of respondents said being less busy had made their working lives less stressful.

In particular, the research highlighted fears about the lack of sympathy from both law firms and clients to longer-term mental health problems rather than single instances of, say, stress-induced depression. 

Only 24% of partners said law firms were 'very' or 'quite' sympathetic to helping staff with longer-term problems, compared with 60% believing firms to be 'not really' very sympathetic and a further 16% stating them to be 'not at all' sympathetic to ongoing mental health problems. 

Similarly, a large majority of respondents (77%) said clients were either not particularly or not at all sympathetic to the idea of their lawyers having to take time out to deal with mental health issues, which has an inevitable impact on how the subject is addressed by law firms.

Even the partners responding to the survey expressed doubts about whether people with long-term mental health issues should really be working as commercial lawyers. Some 15% said outright that it would not work, with a further 31% claiming only that it would 'perhaps' be possible. Only 14% said that it could definitely be compatible with the right treatment, with the remainder thinking it possible but only with more support. 

Leading by example

Certainly law firms are not the only employers that need to make more progress dealing with work-based stress and acceptance of mental health issues generally. 

Looking beyond law to the City more widely there are very few examples of high-profile business leaders who have publicly taken time off to deal with their problems. 

When Antonio Horta-Osorio, chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, took two months as medical leave in late 2011 for a stress-related sleep issue, there were questions about how easy it would be for him to return. He has subsequently proved doubters wrong, but there are few similar examples. 

Nor has the stigma of mental, as opposed to physical, illness been well enough removed to encourage the necessary degree of open communication. Younger staff must also be confident that high-flying colleagues are serious about a problem that high-octane personality types are often quick to dismiss.

Nigel Jones is a Linklaters intellectual property partner and a champion for well-being at the firm, which has developed training for staff of all levels including sessions on resilience and stress as part of its partner induction process. "You can have all the rules and policy in the world but it doesn't matter if junior staff don't see the senior partners following them," he says. 

"We need to show that we take this seriously. It's why, for example, we piloted working from home in the corporate practice as part of our initiative – our message was that if it worked there it will work anywhere." 

Perhaps most importantly, more work needs to be done by the City as a whole to change attitudes, because law firms can achieve relatively little without a corresponding shift at their banking and corporate clients. 

As Jones explains: "We can't pretend that this is a nine-to-five job or that any single firm has the answer but a modification of the way people in the City work is possible without a reduction in quality. Every organisation will have a group of people who 

are depressed or worse and we need to create a forum where mental health can be openly discussed. It will be important for the City to work together to increase awareness."

And the importance of working together to identify problems cannot be underestimated, as one experienced law firm partner concludes: "People can be very good at hiding things – you'd like to think someone would pick up on things like this but there are some incredibly resilient people out there who can be pushed for a long time before they and their colleagues realise they're broken."