Chain reaction

More and more law firms are offering their harassed staff flexi-working or holistic stress-management treatments. With the profession’s workforce exerting more control over their careers, firms need to adapt, reports Nicola Laver

That lawyers are stressed is not exactly news, but the way both law firms and lawyers themselves are dealing with the problem is changing – with employees starting to call the shots.

Stress – for years predicted to be ‘the next RSI’ – continues to be a serious problem and can be a legal and managerial minefield.


Cumulative research spanning the past decade indicates that lawyers are the professionals most likely to suffer from stress and associated problems because of the job they do.


Although law firms are on the whole strategically facing up to the problem of stress, a study last year by City firm Eversheds revealed that 80% of businesses have no stress management policy and are sitting on a ‘ticking time bomb’, with heavy workload cited as more than half the cause of stress.


Hilary Tilby, chief executive of LawCare, which provides health support and advice for lawyers, says it initially started off as a charity for solicitors with alcohol-related problems: now 75% of its calls relate to stress and depression – and bullying is a major problem.


She says: ‘Bullying is no respecter of persons – victims range from trainee level to 70-year-olds. It just seems there are some people out there who think that to satisfy their own egos they must have go at others more vulnerable than themselves.’


Ms Tilby adds that work-related stress is frequently down to ‘volume of work and financial pressures – varying from partners under pressure from publicly funded work, to billable targets’.



Guidance for employers for the management of stress was published late last year by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in recognition of the fact that employers are not taking adequate steps to deal with this (see [2004] Gazette, 9 December, 37). The guidelines have no power of statute or regulation but will become benchmarks against which an employer’s actions will be judged.



Nottingham firm Berryman Shacklock takes the problems seriously and works to retain its staff. All departments have monthly meetings to discuss the level of work; line managers have meetings with individuals in their department each month and are also trained to spot the possible signs of stress in staff.


Managing partner Andy Matthews says: ‘In this way, excessive stress doesn’t tend to be a real problem. If we did feel that a member of staff was beginning to suffer from stress, then we would talk to them about this, offer them, for example, more flexible hours or remind them of the facility to buy and sell annual leave so that they could take a break.’


He explains: ‘We like to attract ambitious people across the board, and these ambitious individuals need to feel stretched and challenged in order to keep them focused and performing. The main potential cause of stress is the reliance on the individual lawyers and fee-earners to win and generate their own work – and there is a direct correlation here with the overall success of the firm too.’


He adds that it is not just lawyers who can become stressed, as client demands can and will affect the work levels of all staff across the administrative and support side. ‘However we work very, very hard as a firm to ensure everyone feels they are positively supported rather than left to their own devices,’ Mr Matthews says.


The firm also runs de-stress days, which offer staff holistic stress-management treatments such as Indian head massages and aromatherapy treatments. Berryman’s HR manager Cheryl Peto says: ‘While there isn’t a problem with stress levels at the moment, we will always ensure that we address and monitor the issue and, in line with this, we are currently compiling a risk assessment based on the HSE stress management standards.’

Berryman Shacklock is not the first firm to tackle the problem before it rears its head, drastically reducing its incidence in the process. Eversheds operates ‘Lifestyle’, a flexible-working scheme which was one of the first of its kind when introduced nearly three years ago. All employees are able to benefit from a wide range of flexibility such as annualised hours, career breaks and remote working.

Human resources director Caroline Wilson says: ‘This has encouraged everyone to realise that people do have a life outside Eversheds and that it makes for better all-round performance if we are considerate to one another’s personal lives.’ She says it is partly because of this scheme that ‘we don’t have a huge number of stresses’.



But when law firm management is faced with a stressed employee, how should it respond? Smita Jamdar, co-author of Workplace Stress, produced by Law Society Publishing, and a partner at Birmingham-based Martineau Johnson, says it is easy to over-complicate what the appropriate response should be.



She explains: ‘The House of Lords in the Barber case [Barber v Somerset County Council [2004]UKHL 13] made it clear that a “sympathetic ear” can go a long way towards averting a stress-related crisis. So the most important thing should be to react sympathetically, have a meaningful dialogue about what can reasonably be done and be prepared to think creatively about solutions.


‘It’s too easy to respond with a defensive “well in my day solicitors just got on with things” approach. We are in an age where flexible working practices are recognised as both an appropriate business response and a beneficial one. It’s what we advise our clients to do.’


It is not just immediate stress that affects lawyers. Strategic Legal Solutions is a London-based company that places lawyers who have left employment in long or short-term contracts with law firms. Director Alice Gotto says: ‘For pretty much all of them, stress is a defining factor. Especially in private practice there is a feeling that you can work all the hours you can to meet targets and you can work incredibly hard for seven or eight years but find that you are not up for partnership at the end of it.’


She adds: ‘There is the immediate stress of having to work incredibly hard and the long-term stress of the ultimate goal of partnership.’


Whatever firms currently do to address the issues, they should consider new research published by international recruitment consultancy Hudson. The study reveals that employees could soon be calling the shots in a dramatic shift in the way the workforce interacts, and a new ‘organic’ workplace is expected to emerge.


The research predicts that employers of the future will need to become more flexible, and more reliant on attracting and retaining an ever increasingly demanding and autonomous workforce. It says employees will have greater control over their own careers.


A key finding of the report is that employees will change jobs and even career even more frequently throughout the course of their working life – the notion of ‘job for life’ is dead and employees clearly do not want one (according to a survey last year by vocational awards body City & Guilds, one in eight lawyers dreamed of becoming a farmer). A growing number of employees will take sabbaticals or become ‘flexecutives’ – flexible employees working remotely from home or on the move.


Many lawyers work remotely for at least part of their working week, aided hugely by recent advances in technology such as the Blackberry handsets which send and receive e-mails while ‘on the move’.



However, plenty of firms claim to keep an eye on their employees’ well-being but in fact do little to change the traditional modes of working as a solicitor, so long as the billable hours are maintained.


The law is always going to be a stressful profession, but as more and more firms accept new ways of working – there are already examples of ‘virtual’ law firms where all the fee-earners work from home – a degree of revolution is sure to come.


Those that fail to adapt will struggle to retain their best lawyers and will be hit in the place where it matters most – the bottom line. That, more than anything, could be the catalyst for change.


Nicola Laver is a freelance journalist