Charity Lawcare has become an invaluable support service, helping more and more lawyers with stress and alcohol-related problems each year, writes Jon Robins


‘Without the 24-hour availability of LawCare, I would be a statistic now. I’d be dead,’ says Peter, a senior solicitor in his mid-60s who has been in regular contact with LawCare, the specialist support group for lawyers, pretty much since its inception.



LawCare’s birth almost ten years ago coincided with Peter’s own breakdown, following what he calls ‘a series of extremely personal catastrophes’. He recalls: ‘I remember waiting for a tube on London Underground and as the train came in I felt a mighty urge to jump. Thank God I didn’t. I was to discover LawCare was there whenever I wanted them, day or night. They were able to calm me down and give me strength.’



Unfortunately, it is a sad reality of today’s legal profession that the number of lawyers seeking confidential help regarding stress, depression, alcoholism and other problems is on the rise. According to LawCare’s latest statistics, the number of calls has grown by 20% over the last 12 months (50% higher than in 2004) to 424. A record high was hit last year when 51 case files for lawyers who could not cope were opened by the charity in March alone.



While such figures hardly bode well for the mental health of the profession, LawCare chief executive Hilary Tilby is quick to point out that the charity has been a victim of its own success. In 2005, LawCare organised training for more than 3,500 lawyers. ‘People are now becoming more familiar with who we are. It takes time to build up the market presence, as it were, and that’s beginning to gradually bear fruit now,’ she says. ‘But also people are becoming less afraid to admit that they have a problem. Confidentiality is still paramount for all lawyers, from students through to judges, but nevertheless people are now more willing to say that they need help.’



There is a question-mark over the future of the service, which is available both to lawyers and their immediate families. The group has just been the recipient of an £82,500 grant from the Law Society Trustees which should keep it going until 2009.



LawCare was originally set up by solicitor Barry Prichard as part of an initiative backed by the Law Society and Solicitors Indemnity Fund to throw a lifeline to lawyers suffering from alcohol or other substance abuse, as well as depression. Mr Prichard was himself a recovering alcoholic. ‘My progress into alcoholism escalated from the time I became a sole practitioner,’ he recalls, in an account of his own problems. ‘The pressures of developing a practice without the benefit of someone to discuss problems with are substantial. The need for new business necessitated entertainment, frequently liquid. As the pressures on me increased, so did my consumption and ultimately bookkeeping errors led to me being disciplined.’



He was advised by a Law Society official ‘to say nothing about my drinking as this could result in an increased penalty’. He adds: ‘Attitudes are rather more enlightened now than they were in the late 70s.’ Mr Prichard stopped drinking in 1984 after having turned to Alcoholics Anonymous, following the support of a number of recovering alcoholic solicitors.



LawCare has changed its focus over the decade – initially just aimed at solicitors (it was launched as SolCare), it now also offers help to barristers and legal executives in England and Wales, as well as solicitors in Scotland. In the first year, it had 60 cases, almost all of them relating to alcohol. Last year, two-thirds of the 424 cases concerned stress and depression.



LawCare administrator Anna Buttimore previously worked as a secretary for an alcoholic lawyer. She explains how her old job started in a typically chaotic fashion when the solicitor called her out of the blue, having received her CV via the estate agency over which he was based and where she had applied for a job.



‘By the end of the first week, I’d seen enough that I insisted being paid in cash because of the state he was in. There were constant complaints and the OSS [Office for the Supervision of Solicitors] was after him,’ she says. ‘Then the job at LawCare came up. Barry interviewed me and asked if I knew anything about alcoholic lawyers. I said: “Funnily enough, I do…”.’



‘I have this theory,’ Ms Buttimore continues. ‘The profession is very stressful, especially at the beginning, and people have different ways of relating to that. A lot of women just leave, whereas men will drink. Consequently, we get an awful lot of women who are calling us who are less than five years’ qualified, as well as trainees, whereas most of the alcohol cases are generally from men who qualified more than 15 years ago. They always tell us: “My job was stressful, I took to drinking and now I have an alcohol problem.”’



According to the 2006 statistics, 59% of calls were from women, and more than half from trainees or those who qualified less than five years ago. Fewer than one in 10 calls was about bullying (8%) but the majority of those calls were from women (70%) and an even greater majority (78%) from those less than five years’ qualified or trainees.



Are there particular pressures to do with the legal profession? Anne Charlton, a former solicitor who has been with the charity for 14 months and covers the Midlands region, points to the ‘commercial realities’ that affect any business. ‘You set yourself targets and you need to make enough to cover your overheads and a decent amount of profit,’ she says. ‘It is the same in law, but added to that there are of course client expectations which can often be unrealistic. If you are a plumber, somehow the expectation the public has of you is black and white, but with the legal profession you’re supposed to provide them with happiness, joy and resolve all their problems. The service we are offering as a profession is totally different.’



‘Asking for help is a major issue for lawyers,’ reckons Ms Tilby. ‘Because what we do is solve other people’s problems, we expect to be able to always solve our own and if we can’t, we start being very judgemental about ourselves.’ Although calls relating to bullying in the workplace are a minority, Ms Tilby says the problem ‘exists to a staggering extent considering that we live in the 21st century with lawyers who should know better both legally and intellectually’.



‘The problem ranges from trainees through to people in their 70s and there are, sadly, some times where you just have to tell people that they have to go. There is no other way out,’ she says.



There is an ‘intensity’ about the legal profession, reckons Bryan Emden, formerly a property partner at a City firm. He is now an executive coach and psychotherapist and has helped LawCare for a number of years. ‘Lawyers measure everything in

six-minute units in a way that, for example, accountants and surveyors do not,’ he says. ‘This causes a great deal of stress. The work I do gives people some reflective space so that they can work out where they are going, take stock and actually make active decisions about where they want to be as opposed to simply being on the treadmill.’



LawCare is not run by qualified counsellors (although Ms Buttimore is qualified), and Mr Emden points out that there are instances when callers have to be referred on to other services. ‘There is a sense of wanting to help everyone and anyone who might call but sometimes people need professional support,’ he says.



‘Some people just want somebody to talk to whereas others are on the verge of clinical depression and so we have to encourage them to go their GPs and have counselling,’ notes Ms Tilby. So how does LawCare advise the lawyer who is on the edge? ‘The one thing that we don’t do is tell people what to do,’ she says. ‘We will, as one of my colleagues puts it, walk the path shoulder to shoulder, but the choice of path is yours and that is how it has to be. We are there to support and assist, not to tell people what to do.’



Does it help that LawCare is a service mainly run by lawyers for lawyers? ‘It is always comforting to speak to one of your own,’ says Peter. He has been calling the service throughout the last ten years and credits it with him getting through recurrent depression. ‘They always understand the situation, whereas if you speak to a doctor, for example, he will have a different set of worries and problems,’ he says. ‘It is very difficult when you’re a senior lawyer to go anywhere for help. I lived and worked in the local community and therefore I found I couldn’t show how bad I was feeling. Who can you trust to keep their mouths shut?’



Jon Robins is a freelance journalist