Jones: This isn’t about reinventing the wheel
Concerns about wellbeing in the legal profession have been elevated to such a level that employers may feel overwhelmed by the thought of tackling it, a LawCare event was warned last week.
However, there are “lots of fairly easy, simple, quick wins” that firms could find to improve their working environments.
The event in London was held to mark the launch of LawCare’s latest Life in the Law report earlier this month.
Lucinda Soon, a solicitor, organisational psychologist and academic, reflected how “the wellbeing conversation has really grown over the past decade”.
She went on: “It’s great that we are talking about it, but I do wonder whether we have elevated it to something huge and in these events I feel like and others can talk at the audience say, ‘Do this, you’ve got to do that, but you’ve got to remember this and that’.
“I wonder, especially with smaller firms, when they go away and take it back to the office, they’re like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to change all our systems, we’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that’.
“When you think about wellbeing in those really massive terms, what tends to happen is that you don’t do anything.”
In fact, Ms Soon said, “we are not talking about wholesale changes”.
She continued: “You can do as much or as little as you want, but try to do something and see wellbeing development as not something where we are trying to reach perfection. We’re never going to get there.”
Rather, it was something that firms should feed into their business-as-usual processes, “which means incremental small little things”.
She explained: “It could be just having meetings with some of your team saying, ‘What do you think it’s like working here? How can we improve this?’ But that’s still you taking one step towards bettering the wellbeing in your workplace.”
Dr Emma Jones, a senior law lecturer at Sheffield University and lead author of the LawCare report, agreed that “this isn’t about reinventing the wheel”.
She said: “There are lots of fairly easy, simple, quick wins that firms and other legal environments can experience.”
The report laid out multiple ways that people said benefited them, “even down to having a five minute check-in with somebody to just talk through ‘How’s your workload, how are you feeling today?’
“It doesn’t have to be a huge costly initiative. It can be about making a range of smaller changes that actually make good business sense as well as improving the workplace for everyone.”
Dr Jones pointed out too that, while there was always going to be a role for reactive provision such as employee assistance plans, firms should think more about their culture – by the time staff need to access that kind of service, “there will be a range of different problems created for the firm”.
There was “increasing evidence” that poor wellbeing and mental health could impair ethical judgment.
There were plenty of Solicitor Disciplinary Tribunal cases in recent years where the initial mistake was compounded by the lawyer trying to hide it because of a “toxic working environment”, she noted.
Poor wellbeing could also lessen productivity and ultimately affect retention and attrition rates.
“So there’s a huge business case there for actually taking wellbeing and embedding it into the day-to-day practice of law, making it a normal part of life,” Dr Jones said.
“I used to practice construction law – you wouldn’t send construction workers onto a building site without a hard hat and the right protective equipment. So why are we doing that to people in the legal sector?”
Ms Soon also talked about how lawyers should see supervision as a way to support wellbeing.
“When you are supervising a piece of work and someone sends you a draft, do take time to have a discussion, not just reply via email. Take time to put comments on the draft – don’t just send it back with amendments, but please try to explain.”
Law Society president Mark Evans told the event that wellbeing was one of his priorities for his year in office, as well as one of the three core themes in the society’s 2025-28 corporate strategy.
“We’re going to develop clear strategic messaging around wellbeing in the profession, take a proactive leadership role in addressing poor practices within the profession and look to foster relationships with organisation to enhance wellbeing initiatives.”
He stressed: “There’s an awful lot of work that needs be done.”
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