Party timewhether you are a lawyer at a top corporate law firm or a small practice, you will need a holiday.

STEPHEN WARD talks to solicitors who have gone on trips of a lifetime to get away from it allMost people return to the office after the festive season fighting post-Christmas depression and with a new year resolution to take a break from work.But Anthony Fairweather is preparing for a six-month trip taking in fly-fishing in Chile, the carnival in Trinidad, and riding a horse across Bolivia.By the end of this month the clinical negligence associate at Clarke Willmott & Clarke in Bristol, who has been in practice for ten years, will be on the first leg of his journey, heading for Venezuela.

A colleague is moving across the firm to take over his clients, with a carefully managed handover to smooth the change.Envy is the common reaction among his colleagues, followed by a list of reasons why they cannot follow his example, usually domestic commitments.

Mr Fairweather, 32, is still single, and does not have a mortgage.He first put the idea tentatively to his managing director David Sedgwick in November, explaining that there were things he wanted to do, remote places to visit, which could not be squeezed into a normal length holiday.

'If he'd been lukewarm, I'd have dropped the idea, but he was all in favour,' Mr Fairweather says.

The firm wants to retain staff and keep them satisfied, and they were happy to find a way to make his break work.Clarke Willmott & Clarke has more than 50 partners.

What Mr Fairweather is doing is impossible for solicitors in small firms, says Laurence Bennett, one of two partners at Liverpool firm Gregory Abrams, and chairman of the Law Society's high-street task force.'They just don't have the time,' he says.

'They need a break because of the pressures, but it isn't possible.' Colleagues cannot cover for them because they are fully stretched themselves.

And they cannot pick a quiet time, because there are three sets of tight deadlines imposed by the Woolf civil justice reforms, legal aid and conveyancing.In the big City firms, sabbaticals are possible not because the lawyers are less pressured, but because they work in bigger teams.They are often an entitlement of partnership, and are typically taken at a time of progression in a career.

Simon Clark, for example, a property partner at Linklaters & Alliance, took a sabbatical in the summer of 1999 before returning to be head of the department.A career break worked well too for another top City lawyer, Hugh Nineham, head of corporate at Lovells, who has been particularly busy this year advising Barclays on its 5.6 billion bid for the Woolwich, Racal on the Thomson-CSF take over bid, and the OM Group on its 900 million bid for the London Stock Exchange.

All year he has been leaving home before 7am and getting in, if at all, after 9pm.

'And I have a full briefcase at weekends,' he adds.He says his sabbatical in autumn 1999 was crucial.

Four months were divided between the Australian outback with his family, three weeks trekking in Nepal with a friend, and finally some art history classes at the Victoria and Albert Museum, specialising in early Renaissance and 18th century art.'It was a wonderful breather.

A regenerative experience.

It was not a career crisis, it was a physical crisis, of exhaustion.

If I had not had that time away in 1999, I wouldn't have been able to get through the level of activity[I had] in 2000.'Mr Nineham had enjoyed the sort of career which end in burnout.

After training with the firm, he spent two years in its New York office, and then went to Hong Kong as a partner.

He then worked exclusively in the mainstream corporate area, on merger and acquisition transactions and flotations, and became head of corporate in May 1999.Things can work out differently.

Andrew Millmore, a highly rated litigation partner at mid-sized but hugely profitable City firm Macfarlanes, took a break in late 1999.

But on his return, instead of accepting an offer to be head of department, he decided he had had enough of life as a City lawyer.He says: 'I took the sabbatical firmly intending to come back refreshed and renewed.' He was 38, had been a solicitor for 15 years, and a partner for ten.

'I did come back refreshed and invigorated, but also having come to the realisation that it was time for me personally to do something different,' he recalls.

'The time to sit and contemplate my navel was a large contributory factor in coming to the view I did when I did, but with me it would have come at some point.'Although his case appears to confirm every senior partner's nightmare - that if you let them see there is a world outside, they will never come back to work - Mr Millmore says this is not so.'I'd be mortified if sabbaticals were questioned in my old firm or any other one because I decided not to come back.

That would be completely mad.

Lawyers can't work an 80-hour week year after year without a long break.

Many of the partners I worked with have taken their sabbaticals, recharged their batteries, and moved to the next stage of their careers.'One he knew went round the world, while another worked as a cowboy on a ranch in the American mid-west.

Mr Millmore had a series of holidays lying on beaches or by pools.

'I was the first I know to take a break and come back and decide to do something different,' he says.What he is doing now is less different than he intended; after a few months pausing for breath, he is working as hard as ever on his own with a dispute resolution consultancy.

He says he has discovered that 'you can't be a serious lawyer if you don't work serious hours.' Once you are successful, the work just comes, he has found.

'If you have a following of clients you care about, you put yourself out for them, and you want to see the work done well.' He and Mr Nineham both maintain that it is in firms' long-term interests to encourage solicitors to take breaks, partly to keep their batteries charged, but also to prevent clients becoming too reliant on one partner.

They need to be clients of the firm.

As Mr Millmore says: 'It is good for the firm for clients not to have personal relationships with just one partner.

They might be unavailable, run over by a bus, or join another firm.'Tim Archer, for nine years until last year senior partner at City firm Richards Butler, has had two sabbaticals during his career.

With one, a major case came up and he set off late, and with the second he had to come back early.

Despite that, he is a firm believer in the need for busy lawyers to take their breaks.As senior partner he used to insist partners took their holidays.

'I would see they were getting more and more stressed, and I would say "go on holiday, and don't take your mobile with you".' They did not all take his advice: 'In some firms it is quite common not to take sabbaticals or all your holidays.

If they work long hours in the office, some solicitors wonder what will be there when they come back.'Meanwhile, if it is any consolation to those left behind, Mr Fairweather does have some mixed feelings as he leaves a cold, wet Britain in the middle of winter.

He says: 'Some of my clients are severely disabled.

There is no doubt that you get to feel very strongly about these clients, and you become attached to them.

It is an important bond.' Stephen Ward is a freelance journalist