Photo: Andrey Popov

Punishing working hours have long been accepted as part of the legal profession. But in Australia, a growing number of professionals are pushing back, with one senior lawyer warning that firms will need to hire more lawyers at the expense of partner salaries.

Some lawyers in Australia have lodged complaints with workplace regulators, and one firm has told young lawyers they should leave work by 6pm.

Last year's Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking Superannuation and Financial Services Industry brought the issue of working hours to the fore, as its tight deadlines had large teams of lawyers regularly working late into the night and on weekends.

"As exceptional as the circumstances of the Royal Commission are, this episode points to a deeper truth that most lawyers are already aware of – that overwork is endemic to the profession," the Legal Forecast, a not-for-profit group that represents early-career professionals, wrote in a recent position paper.

The Legal Forecast believes the legal profession should respond to ongoing challenges by developing smarter and better ways of practising law. "It is our position that the time has come for the legal profession to overhaul its work practices to significantly reduce overwork in the profession," the group stated.

Overwork complaints filed

The comments come after a staff member at King & Wood Mallesons lodged a complaint with the workplace and safety regulator in Victoria, in southeastern Australia, about working hours arising from the Banking Royal Commission.

The firm responded to the resulting "improvement notice" from the regulator by adding additional staff; introducing fortnightly monitoring of hours worked and check-in conversations with those people working long hours and planning for their recovery; and by introducing extra processes to identify and manage what it calls extra demand matters, among other initiatives.

In February, the regulator said it was satisfied with the response and that no further action was required.

"The Worksafe Victoria situation was difficult for us given the importance of the health, safety and wellbeing of our people," said King & Wood's Australia chief executive partner Berkeley Cox.

"However, it provided a catalyst for renewing and enhancing our focus on this critical issue. We have learned a lot from the experience. In fact, we believe it will lead to positive change for our firm and for the broader industry."

In New South Wales, a young lawyer at top-tier local firm Gilbert + Tobin filed a complaint to health and safety regulator SafeWork NSW about working hours, alleging some lawyers slept in their offices 60 to 80 nights a year and took caffeine supplements to keep up with the workload. The regulator did not take any action and managing partner Danny Gilbert rejected the claims.

When the Banking Royal Commission was at its height last year, Scarlet Reid's team at McCullough Robertson was working to midnight and on weekends to meet the deadlines. While the Royal Commission's "extreme" deadlines made for intense workloads, long hours at the firm were not unprecedented, said Reid, a Sydney-based partner at the firm, which spans Australia's east coast.

She said work in a law firm usually ebbs and flows, where very busy periods are balanced out by quieter times, but added: "If it gets to the point where you're just constantly too busy, that's a wider resourcing issue."

Achieving a work-life balance

Reid questioned the business model of law firms, which relies on billing as many lawyer hours as possible to clients.

"The key that's driving all this is revenue and I think, if you wanted to change the culture across the industry and make it more of a job and less of a lifestyle choice where you work all kinds of hours, then partners of big firms are going to have to make a lot less money," she said. "Whether or not they want to do that is a different story."

However, Reid said the solution isn't always to reduce working hours, but instead to give lawyers more control over their work. "Lawyers get passionate about their work and they want to stay on the matter. Sometimes, that necessitates long hours if they see the sense of ownership in the work and they want to stay on it," she said.

In her own team, she makes an effort to recognise staff who have been working long hours with time off or rewards such as vouchers to have dinner with their loved ones.

National firm HWL Ebsworth has gone even further in its efforts to discourage overwork – the firm has responded to the issue by telling its young lawyers that the firm wants them out the door by 6pm.

Managing partner Juan Martinez believes providing reasonable work hours helps the firm retain more staff. "Pumping hours at an unreasonable rate is not culturally, or from a business perspective, aligned with how we think in the long term," he told the Australian Financial Review recently. Martinez declined an interview.

The firm – Australia's largest by partner numbers – expects young lawyers to meet billing targets of just 3.5 hours a day.

"As a profession, we must be more conscious of the pressures we place on our colleagues and particularly young lawyers," said Sydney barrister and Law Council of Australia president, Arthur Moses SC. "Law firms, especially large top-tier firms, must ensure their employees are not overworked."

Moses said it was incumbent on judges and royal commissioners not to set unrealistic deadlines for lawyers.

The profession is changing, with flexible work conditions and agile workplaces becoming more common, allowing lawyers to choose when and where they work.

"The mental health and wellbeing of members of the legal community is increasingly a central concern and one the profession has taken numerous steps to improve," Moses said.

He urges more employers to promote the importance of work-life balance.

That may not be so easy.

In a 2012-13 national survey of more than 1,000 lawyers, University of New South Wales law professor Janet Chan and her colleagues found long working hours were a major cause of stress for lawyers. Yet according to her paper, Lawyering Stress and Work Culture: An Australian Study, nearly three quarters of lawyers agreed that "to excel as a lawyer, one must be willing to work long hours".

"Commercial firms' concern with profit has escalated billable hours and in turn the number of hours worked, so that working long hours, being adaptable to the timezones of international clients, and meeting the quota of billable hours have become expected practice in large law firms," Chan wrote.

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