Guest post by Dr Georges Petitjean, clinical director at Inclusion Drugs and Alcohol Treatment Services, part of Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, and founder of WARM: the Workplace Addiction & Recovery Movement CIC
Petitjean: Seniority can create its own barriers
A law firm can have excellent support on paper and still have a serious gap. The gap is the person who cannot imagine using it.
Many firms now offer employee assistance programmes (EAPs), private healthcare, mental health support and increasingly sophisticated wellbeing strategies. But availability is not the same as accessibility.
A service can be confidential, professionally run and entirely appropriate, yet still feel unusable to the person who believes they have too much to lose by being associated with it.
That problem can become particularly acute when the person struggling with addiction is a partner or other senior lawyer.
Addiction does not automatically make someone incapable of working, nor does it usually announce itself through sudden professional collapse. Someone can continue advising clients, managing teams, generating fees and appearing outwardly successful while privately finding it increasingly difficult to sustain the same level of functioning.
Unhelpful stereotypes
That is one reason the stereotype of addiction is so unhelpful in professional environments. We tend to imagine the person whose life has visibly fallen apart. In reality, serious problems with alcohol, drugs or gambling can coexist with seniority, status and considerable professional achievement.
The legal sector already knows something about the pressures surrounding professional wellbeing. LawCare’s 2025 Life in the Law research found that nearly 60% of respondents had poor mental wellbeing and almost 79% regularly worked beyond their contracted hours. It also found relatively low levels of psychological safety.
None of this is evidence of addiction, but it does describe a profession in which pressure, long hours and concerns about speaking openly are hardly theoretical.
When addiction does enter the picture, the question of confidentiality becomes especially important.
There is a difference between actual confidentiality and perceived confidentiality.
A firm may explain that an EAP is confidential. A clinician may be bound by professional duties. A support pathway may be carefully separated from performance management. But the person considering using it may still be asking very different questions.
Who will know? Could this alter how I am viewed? What happens to my clients? Could it affect my position in the partnership? Does this create a regulatory issue? What if somebody finds out?
For somebody whose professional identity has been built over decades, those fears can carry enormous weight.
Some of them may also be greater than the regulatory reality.
SRA guidance
The Solicitors Regulation Authority’s own guidance is more nuanced than many people may assume. It says solicitors do not need to report a health condition simply because they have one if they are taking appropriate steps to address it and mitigate any regulatory risks.
The position changes where someone cannot safely manage the risk to their practice or comply with regulatory requirements.
That difference is worth spelling out.
Fear of professional consequences can itself delay help-seeking. In a wider UK workplace survey commissioned by Bupa in 2025, 45% of employees surveyed said they would rather hide an addiction than discuss it at work, while 43% said they had avoided medical or professional support because of fear of workplace repercussions.
Those figures are not specific to lawyers, but the underlying concern is easy to recognise in professions where reputation and judgement carry considerable weight.
For firms, the question cannot stop at: do we provide support? It also has to include: would one of our partners actually use it?
That means looking at how people access help, how independent that route feels, whether confidentiality is explained clearly rather than assumed, and whether the person providing support understands both addiction and the realities of senior professional life.
Partner support
This is not an argument for treating partners as more deserving of support than anybody else; it is an argument for recognising that seniority can create its own barriers.
Nor is early support simply an act of compassion. If addiction begins to affect judgement, reliability, relationships or professional performance, the consequences can extend to colleagues, clients and the firm itself.
The SRA explicitly recognises that health issues can, in some circumstances, affect a solicitor’s ability to exercise appropriate legal or ethical judgement and practise safely.
The best time to help someone is not necessarily when everybody else has finally noticed there is a problem. It may be while they are still functioning, still producing, still leading and still hoping nobody can see how difficult things have become.
The real test of a firm’s support system is not whether it exists. It is whether the partner who has spent years being the person others rely on can imagine becoming the person who asks for help.
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