The need for taking action to improve the mental health of legal professionals

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George Artley
Bar Issues Commission Project Lawyer, International Bar Association
geogre.artley@int-bar.org

Tomás Gabriel García Micó
Commissioner of International Relations, Mental Health Institute of Legal Professions
tomasgabriel.garcia@upf.edu

There is a mental health crisis in the Spanish legal profession. This we know. Yet speak with any senior leader in the sector, and you would be forgiven for thinking that nothing is wrong. For several decades, academic researchers around the world have been analysing the toxic working culture of the law, and the behaviours and business models which create and sustain this environment. Over the last few years, this work, and the conversations around how things must change, have broken into the mainstream in the English-speaking world. Yet in Spain, the subject remains, both professionally and culturally, taboo.

Today, the law is a global industry, and any efforts to reform it need to be taken at the global level. It was for this reason that the International Bar Association, the global voice of the legal profession, decided to act at the end of 2019. The president of the IBA, Horacio Bernardes-Neto, began by commissioning a wellbeing taskforce to investigate what needed to be done. Its specific role was to start conversations in those parts of the world where lawyers currently suffer in silence, as well as to ask what law firms and legal regulators are doing – or not doing – to help.

Yet a global response needs a global picture against which to respond. To paint this picture, the IBA has created two ground-breaking surveys. The surveys – the Global Mental Health Surveys, were launched on 9 July 2020. They address wellbeing in the law from the perspective both of employers and employees. The surveys are available at: www.ibanet.org/Mental-wellbeing-in-the-legal-profession.

The first survey specifically targets the problems and perceptions of individual lawyers: How does their work affect their mental wellbeing? How open are their employers to speaking about these issues? Can lawyers ask for help, or would this be career suicide?

The second survey asks questions of legal institutions themselves: bars, law societies and law firms. Is the mental wellbeing of their members and employees a priority issue? What are they doing to help those who are struggling? Is wellbeing even something they acknowledge as a problem?

The surveys also take account of the recent impact of Covid-19 on both the legal sector and society as a whole. The virus has undoubtedly exacerbated tensions in lawyers’ professional and personal lives, but it has also accelerated trends towards a more open discussion in society as a whole about the damage that stress, anxiety and depression can have on people’s lives.

In acknowledgement of the growing movement for change in Spain, the IBA ensured that its surveys are also available in Spanish. But this is not the first survey on the subject in Spain. In May 2019, the Mental Health Institute of Legal Professions launched its own survey. The report of the survey results can be downloaded at: www.efl.es/catalogo/ebooks-gratuitos/estudio-sobre-la-salud-y-el-bienestar-de-la-abogacia-espanola. The survey showed the following worrying results:

• 70 per cent of participants worked more than 40 hours per week and of these 13 per cent more than 60 hours;
• 30 per cent of participants, if given the chance, would not choose to study law again;
• 82 per cent of participants were willing to reduce their wages to enable a better family-work balance;
• 81 per cent of participants were sleeping less than the minimum required by the US National Sleep Foundation; and 
• the health risks associated with the profession are stress (98.8 per cent), sedentism (91 per cent), insomnia (81 per cent), and being overweight (66 per cent).

What these statistics show is that wellbeing is not just an issue for the individual lawyer. Legal professionals who are stressed, tired, and overworked make mistakes which can damage the interests of their clients, the reputation of their firm and the integrity of the law itself. It is not surprising to hear that the law also has an image problem among the young. If it wants to continue attracting the best talent, the profession needs to change. Reports consistently show that Millennials and Generation Z are simply not prepared to put up with the increasingly brutal demands being placed on them by law firm working culture. There is only a certain distance this model can be pushed until it breaks.

When ready, the IBA survey data will form a useful comparison to the statistics from Spain, as well as existing data from the UK and the US:

• The Law Society – ‘Resilience and wellbeing survey 2019’, available at https://tinyurl.com/y5723ojc.
• The ABA-CoLAP and Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation – ‘The Prevalence of Substance Use and Other Mental Health Concerns Among American Attorneys’, https://tinyurl.com/y9z498e5.
• The Journal of Legal Education – ‘Suffering in Silence: The Survey of Law Student Well-Being and the Reluctance of Law Students to Seek Help for Substance Use and Mental Health Concerns’, https://tinyurl.com/y38ab4aq.

Nevertheless, surveys are just a starting point. What needs to emerge from them are concrete proposals for programmatic and structural changes to tackle the main issues identified in these reports.

These initiatives are also vital in letting the public know that mental health concerns do exist in our legal profession, as well as in fighting against the stigma that surrounds these conversations. This is especially true in Spain and those other parts of the world where mental health still seems to conjure up images of the asylum, not the normal struggles all of us face on a daily basis. It will be a difficult task, but the work of the IBA and MHILP perhaps represents the beginnings of that change which is so vitally needed.

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