Boiling Point: Why Mental Health Is the ‘Existential Crisis’ Facing the Legal Profession
How to spot issues and create healthy solutions in a post-COVID world
By Bryan R. Parker, Scott Langley and Nadia Lee | August 16, 2021 | Read the full article here.
Mental health is an acute issue that the legal profession must find systematic ways to address. The very future of its most prized participants—its lawyers—depends upon the industry identifying better systems and processes to promote mental health.
This is especially the case given the stressors added by the global pandemic.
As Orrick’s Chief Talent Officer Siobhan Handley recently explained, mental health is “an existential crisis facing our profession.” Handley’s comments during a “Law in Black and White” podcast focused on legal professionals, but by no means is the mental health crisis limited to lawyers. If you’ve tried to find a therapist lately, you’ll know appointments are hard to come by and waiting lists are long.
Superstar tennis player Naomi Osaka made headlines when she withdrew from the French Open in May to focus on her mental wellbeing. U.S. gymnastics gold medal favorite Simone Biles joined the public conversation when she withdrew from Tokyo Summer Olympics to focus on her mental health.
Both women faced bitter backlash, condemnation, and waves of empathetic support. Osaka’s response to Time Magazine—“It’s O.K. not to be O.K.”—should be a rallying cry for overstressed workers and a bellwether for employers.
In the legal profession, a more intentional and focused conversation should help it to become more acutely aware of the seriousness of the need for a stronger focus on mental health and wellbeing.
To its detriment, the legal profession embraces a reputation characterized by high stakes and even higher stress with little room for empathy. The work is important and inherently stressful. That’s not going to change. However, it can, be more forward-looking in its approach and response to the impact on its professionals.
The problems are well documented. A 2016 American Bar Association/Hazelden Betty Ford study revealed that 28% of lawyers suffered from depression, 23% from stress, 21% were problem drinkers and 19% suffered from anxiety. When we include race as a factor, the numbers worsen. In its 2021 Mental Health and Substance Abuse Survey, ALM reported 31% of black lawyers had contemplated suicide during their careers. This stat is 1.5x the rate for white lawyers. In researching this article, a Black male, Big Law Partner, confided that earlier in his career, he had contemplated suicide. The crippling law school debt, feelings of isolation, worries of job security and trying to maintain a semblance of a personal life led him to the brink of a potentially disastrous decision. What helped him through this tough time was investing in counseling and working with a life coach. All are obviously thankful that he found the resources to help him get through this most difficult moment in his life. That said, if there had been a better system in place to sense signs of trouble, and then secure the appropriate mental health resources, perhaps he would not have gotten to such a dire place.
Exacerbated by the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has been the most devastating crisis the world has faced in decades. Its impact on mental health is well documented. Isolationism from working in apartments and homes remains a major concern. New lawyers who started during the pandemic were unable to form social circles, or to identify mentors that could better guide them through their work. There has been no separation between work lives and home lives. Lawyers of all levels have long faced 24-7 pressures to be on call, immediately answer the phone or respond to another email. Without the usual social and leisure outlets many lawyers are mentally exhausted.
Add to the mix, a confluence of social issues: the murder of George Floyd and its emotional aftermath, the attack on the U.S. Capitol and a growing tribalism. Is it any surprise many are at their wits end? Many law firms and corporations are preparing to soon welcome their lawyers back to work. We should not view this return to the office as a panacea for mental health challenges. Returning to work in a period of uncertainty will add its own challenges.
Returning to the Office in a Post-COVID World
As offices prepare to reopen, what is the role of firms, corporations and ALSPs in promoting mental health and putting in place processes and systems to address the potential impacts of mental health on their various workforces. A 2020 law review article from the University of Miami “Capitalizing on Healthy Lawyers: The Business Case for Law Firms to Promote and Prioritize Lawyer Well-Being” succinctly makes the business case for focusing on mental health. The article contends that systemic changes designed to support and provide resources to lawyers results in lower medical costs and a decrease in lost-work time: “for every dollar spent on employee wellness programs, medical costs fall by $3.27, and increased costs associated with absenteeism falls by $2.73.”
Many health care plans provide mental health benefits. And an increasing number of companies are focused on “wellness” and other programs designed to target and address work-related stress, anxiety, and depression. In addition to treatment, whether that is prevention or active treatment once a mental crisis surfaces, we need early detection systems to provide warning signs of mental distress, so that we are minimizing the numbers of lawyers in crisis.
A few of these signs are:
- Isolation or isolating behavior
- Withdrawal, disengagement and deterioration of interpersonal relationships
- Lack of engagement with firm personnel
- Declining work performance, professionalism and ability to concentrate
- Substance abuse (onset and/or spike in consumption)
- Anxiety
- Big mood swings
- Lack of sleep; decline in personal appearance
Developing or creating systems that train leaders to be cognizant of these factors is the first step toward building a healthy system that can combat mental health issues. To implement such a system, a firm or corporation could incorporate it into their employee handbook, do trainings for both new employees and existing lawyers and issue periodic updates to reinforce the learnings. Group leaders could be trained to look for warning signs and then to elevate as appropriate (in HIPPA and privacy compliant ways).
A Framework for Mental Health
With an “early warning system” established, carefully implemented solutions should follow. As with most successful initiatives, true change must start at the top. Leaders must stress the importance of mental health, set up systems and incentives that encourage a healthy environment, and model the behavior they would like their lawyers to follow. From there, we must realize that there is no one size fits all approach. We must change our rhetoric into meaningful action and work to remove the stigma around mental health. Further, we must listen to our lawyers, both existing and future, about their needs and build those needs into a system that can best serve the collective. From there, we must find ways to measure the mental healthiness of our environments and be transparent, both about where we have made progress, and where we have room for improvement.
Legal Innovators has prioritized mental health as a part of its core business goals because it is the right thing to do for our professionals and the business.
Achieving success will take time. We must be patient, yet committed. We are an industry that provides legal solutions to some of the world’s most complex issues. It follows from that premise, that clear thinking and mental acuity should be at a premium in our industry. We should do all we can to ensure this happens. The future of our industry depends on our ability to do so.
Note: At Legal Innovators, we will continue to write, discuss on our podcast and otherwise share our progress, including best practices we may learn from others, in hopes that this type of transparency can help our industry. One of the co-authors of this article, Scott Langley, is a former Big Law lawyer who also holds an MA in Psychology. He will be working with us and our clients as a performance coach. We have also hired a corporate wellness expert to create a “Wellness” program for us. We are not alone in these efforts.
The following are a few additional solutions that might be considered in building out a mental health framework:
- Partner with law schools to create healthy habits for students that then may be carried into the profession. Professor Shailini George sets forth this framework in her book “The Law Student’s Guide to Doing Well and Being Well”.
- Create in-house wellness and medical teams. Latham & Watkins is one model for this approach as it boasts an extension in-house healthcare (including mental health) team and resources.
- Partners with technology/application partners that provide on demand mental health.
- Learn from Orrick’s “unplugged” initiative (protecting vacation and other stated down time)
- Promote support networks
- Provide resource guides for lawyers and all teammates
Bryan Parker is the CEO of Legal Innovators. He leads the day-to-day activities of the company, is a frequent writer and speaker on legal topics including innovation, the business of law, and diversity, equity and inclusion, and the co-host of the Legal Innovators Podcast—the Law in Black and White.
Scott Langley has degrees in both law and psychology, is a former Big Firm lawyer with the firm of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison LLP and has run his own performance coaching business. He is now engaged with Legal Innovators helping build out the company’s performance coaching and mental health platforms.
Nadia Lee is a recent graduate of the Boston University School of Law. She is a Legal Innovators lawyer, and also works on a variety of special projects for the company.
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