Rob Booth, The Crown Estate

Crown Estate general counsel and company secretary Rob Booth is making a concerted effort to ensure the mental well-being of lawyers his company uses and says his team "calls out" law firms if they see lawyers recording time at unsocial hours.

Speaking with Legal Week, the U.K. arm of Law.com International, Booth highlighted the importance of "psychological safety" and said: "It's incumbent on us to plan properly and avoid people working late."

"What's happening on psychological safety, including mental well being, is a really big thing going forward," he added. "We've tried in our little panel context to do as much as we can. We want people working at their best."

The Crown Estate, a £14 billion U.K. real estate company that manages land owned by the U.K. monarch, uses firms including Hogan Lovells, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, CMS, Womble Bond Dickinson, Burges Salmon, Forsters and Cripps Pemberton Greenish.

"We spend a lot of time trying to lift the veil and see what's going on: it's difficult to see what law firms are really doing around mental health."

The comments are relatively rare and demonstrate the increasingly open debate on mental health within the legal industry.

Last September, a Legal Week survey of about 250 lawyers found nearly half had experienced mental health-related illnesses such as depression and stress due to their work.

Earlier this month a study by researchers at Birkbeck, University of London found Lawyers in England and Wales have poorer psychological well-being than the general English population.

Tech savvy

Booth also talked about the importance of the technological capabilities of his advisers.

He said Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner had particularly impressed him on the tech side, while Burges Salmon and Womble Bond Dickinson are doing some "interesting thinking" in the area, he cited.

"Efficiency is a big deal for us", he said. "It makes massive differences to how the panel performs."

In-house lawyers are still grappling with tech capabilities, with just 4% of in-house lawyers feeling their legal teams are "fit for purpose", according to research published by U.K. top 50 firm Irwin Mitchell on Tuesday.

Booth also expressed an interest in using more alternative legal service offerings and boutique firms.

He said: "I am seeing trends of looking for angles where ALSPs can work within existing structures to enhance performance on big deals, due diligence exercises etc. I like that because I don't have to compromise."

He also said it was "interesting" that there was an "emergence of mostly boutique level firms" who put themselves forward to act as a hub or coordinator between ALSPs and law firms. He added he would "consider using boutique firms if we had short term demand on a really big deal".