Law firms: are you supporting your people enough?

It’s World Mental Health Day and this year’s theme is ‘it is time to prioritise mental health in the workplace’. 

But what does this actually mean for law firms?

It’s been a rocky couple of years for the reputation of the legal profession. The death and inquest of Vanessa Ford highlighted the pressures on lawyers and the press reporting around it has (rightly) had many law firms souping up their support and training for staff.

But are firms doing enough? Has any of it made a difference?

Another story that caught the eye over the summer was the scandal around Health Assured, one of the biggest Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs).

Access to EAPs is heralded by many law firms as a key part of their benefit structure, whereby employees have access to confidential support, professional advice, and short-term counselling, funded by the firm.

However, Health Assured, one of the biggest providers, has been investigated by the BBC for dubious practices. The BBC found that, amongst other issues:

• corporate clients were allowed to listen in on confidential helpline calls without the callers’ knowledge or consent;
• non-clinically trained staff were recruited to handle initial helpline calls and manage backlogs, including initial handling of calls from suicidal callers; and
• on more than one occasion, the corporate clients themselves became distressed at what they were listening to from high-risk or suicidal callers.

The British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) is currently investigating these claims which, if true, breach data protection and privacy laws.

And they may drive a wedge through the confidence many people have in such EAPs.

Examining EAPs

There’s no doubt that EAPs provide support to many. But, even aside from the above, there are aspects of the system which mean lawyers can be reluctant to use them.

For many lawyers, it’s hard to open up. It’s hard to admit your vulnerabilities, your frailties in a profession where you still need a professional veneer, where you have to inspire confidence in your clients, and in which standards are high.

In my work (as a former lawyer who retrained to become a therapist for lawyers), I’ve noticed that lawyers often have delayed reactions to situations and stressors. They’re so used to ‘running on fumes’ that they don’t realise they’re about to crash until the situation is already on top of them.

All of this makes it hard for them to ask for help and hard to recognise when they need that help. Many lawyers teeter close to burnout for months and years but coming back from the brink. Lawyers can hold it together in a work sense for a long, long time. While secretly falling apart inside.

Why am I telling you all this?

In such circumstances, providing a lawyer with an EAP phone number, at the end of which will be, at best, a somewhat anonymous, generalist counsellor and, at worst, someone who has little or no therapeutic qualifications, may not cut the mustard.

Also, credibility is crucial when working with lawyers. I hate to state the obvious but lawyers are clever. They are also time poor. They will lose faith quickly in a therapist who is not of a similar intellect to them or who lacks an understanding of what they‘re going through. There are many great counsellors who work for EAPs. But they are often generalists. And they are unlikely to have had experience of working in the upper echelons of law firms. I’ve lost count of how many lawyer clients have said to me that a divide in terms of experience and understanding with a previous counsellor led to the relationship fizzling out. Or that their previous counsellor couldn’t understand why that lawyer just didn’t say no to their boss or insist on leaving the office at 5:30pm each day.

What’s the alternative?

I believe that the gold standard of wellbeing support in law firms is going to become high-quality, personalised therapeutic support which is as easily accessible as possible to your people. If you’re working in HR, my advice would be to hire in-house counsellors. Distribute their details, their photos, their profiles. Get them in to provide training, mental health sessions. Make them part of the fabric of the firm (full disclosure - I do have ‘skin in the game’ as my firm provides these services. But the point remains true!).

When people are stressed, they want to speak to someone they can trust. Someone they’ve heard of. This is true of most clients who instruct lawyers at City firms – they want to speak to a specific person they’ve heard of or who’s been recommended to them. The same principle applies to your lawyers when they need emotional/therapeutic support. And if you have an in-house counsellor who people get to know and who gets to understand your firm, they can provide your learning and development teams with targeted ideas for training, through having observed the themes coming up in the therapeutic sessions.

Finally, and sadly, particularly since the start of the pandemic I have noticed an increase in high-risk situations involving law firms such as suicidality or death of clients and lawyers themselves. In tragic situations such as these, a wise law firm will have more specialist, trouble-shooting urgent therapeutic back up available, rather than relying on EAPs.

I believe this is what the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Law Society will be expecting to see of City law firms in the future.

Let’s finally give our lawyers the support which meets the high demands placed on them.

 

Annmarie Carvalho is CEO and Founder of TCC, a specialist agency providing therapy, coaching, therapeutic supervision and training to lawyers and law firms. She was previously a solicitor at Farrer & Co