Beyond Pizza and Yoga: Let’s Get Serious About Mental Health for Lawyers

9 min read

Our guest writer, Murray Gottheil, a retired lawyer, shares reflections on mental health based on his personal experiences from his past career. Please note that the industry has evolved, and not all current aspects and groups may be addressed in this article. 

It is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the usual law firms will be making the expected posts about how they value mental health in their workplaces, touting their help lines, and reminding lawyers to check in on their colleagues.  

I will leave that self-serving nonsense to others.  I am here to tell you the real truth. 

In a law firm, you do not get mentally healthy by using the suicide prevention line or the psychologist or social worker provided by the firm’s employee assistance program. Your stress levels do not decline because the firm provides free yoga sessions at lunch. Your personal relationships do not flourish because the firm encourages you to go home early enough to have dinner with your children, after which you work until midnight to make up for the ‘lost’ time.  

There are indeed a few things that law firm management can do to promote mental health. Here they are: 

The first, and most important, is to reduce their billing expectations so that people do not have to consistently work evenings and weekends, but law firms tend not to want to do that. 

The second is to implement real mentoring and supervising programs to support the career development of their lawyers. Mentoring is different from supervising, but in law firms they are often mashed together, so I will refer to them together here. By a ‘real’ mentoring and supervising program, I mean one where the mentors/supervisors: 

• are chosen because they are interested in helping newcomers succeed in the profession; 
• are given training and support so that they become good at helping others;   
• are paid for their non-billable work helping their Associates to develop, at a rate which reflects that their role is just as valuable as what the client originators and big billers do. Spending time on mentoring and supervision does not count against them in compensation or hinder their partnership prospects; 
• are not so overwhelmed with billable work that they do not give a damn; 
• deal with their mentees respectfully; 
• have the patience to provide clear and concise instructions; 
• are really, really good lawyers; 
• are smart and strategic and can teach the Associates these skills; 
• are willing to involve their Associates in client meetings and negotiations with the other side; 
• do not look at their Associates simply as the losers who have been assigned to do low-level work to make the senior lawyer’s life easier; 
• help their Associates become self-sufficient, both as practitioners doing technical work, and as lawyers having their own client base; 
• do not take credit for the Associate’s work when speaking to clients; and 
• give their Associates credit when they contribute to published articles.  

The third is to develop a culture where everyone is treated with respect. It is pretty hard to be mentally healthy when you feel that you are looked down upon or that your career prospects are limited by your personal attributes. This includes people of different nationalities, ethnicities, religions, and genders. It also includes the neurodiverse.  

The fourth is to create a culture which values the various types of contributions that are made by lawyers with different skill sets.  A firm that wants their lawyers to be mentally healthy will make all of the lawyers feel valued. They will abolish the usual hierarchy which goes something like this: 

• Client origination lawyers (‘finders’). 
• High billing lawyers (‘grinders’). 
• Technically proficient lawyers and Mentors/Supervisors (‘minders’). 
• Worker Bees (‘drones’). 

The fifth is to create transparency around how the career path of lawyers will progress in the firm.  What do you have to do to become a partner?  When do you have to do it? How is the firm going to help you get there?  

Finally, at the other end of things, put policies in place around retirement. When do you have to retire? What will the firm expect of you as you head off in the sunset, and what will you expect of the firm?  The young folks may not see the applicability of this latter point to their mental health, but trust me, when the partners who are becoming long in the tooth start feeling like ‘yesterday’s man or woman’ and look around for when and how to make their exit, it does not promote firm morale for anyone. Plus, good policies may help to reduce turnover, retain clients, and foster a more cohesive firm culture. 

If you are a young lawyer trying to determine whether you are in a firm that is serious about mental health, my first suggestion is to ignore just about everything that the firm’s marketing department has to say about mental health. It is, for the most part, self-serving nonsense.  

Instead, here is my checklist of information to dig up and questions to think about: 

Look at your firm’s billable hour target. If it is 1,700 hours or more, and you do not fall into one of the following categories, stop kidding yourself that you can work that hard and remain mentally healthy: 

• You are single and enjoy devoting most of your evenings and weekends to work; 
• You are in a relationship, do not have children, and you both enjoy devoting most of your evenings and weekends to work;  
• You are in a relationship, have children, enjoy devoting most of your evenings and weekends to work, and have a life partner who will carry the domestic load and not resent you for it; or 
• You have children and are content to have them cared for primarily by other family members or professional caregivers. 

If you want to have a life, ask yourself if the equity partners at your firm have a life. If they don’t, they are unlikely to let you have one either. 

Calculate the percentage of equity partners in your firm who are women. If it is significantly less than 50%, ask yourself why.  While you are at it, calculate the percentage of equity partners who are moms with children.  If that number is teeny-tiny, ask yourself why people who are trying to have a balanced life do not make partner at your firm. Find out if there is a history of young parents burning out and leaving the firm.   

Assess whether women are being assigned the majority of the non-billable tasks such as organizing CPD conferences or serving on the firm’s charitable giving committees.  

Calculate the number of Associates of all genders who have taken substantial parental leave and returned to work without negatively impacting their career path. If the answer is none, do not imagine that you will be the first. If your mental health demands that you take parental leave or participate as a full partner in the lives of your children, plan to be stressed if you remain at that firm. 

Find out whether parents who return from parental leave report being given less demanding files and fewer prestigious clients. Is there a parental penalty imposed at your firm? 

Consider the rate of turnover of Associates (and even Partners) at your firm. If people are constantly leaving, your firm probably sucks. 

Do lawyers at your firm wear the number of their billable hours and evenings and weekends worked as a badge of pride? (“We work hard and play hard” is so 1985!) 

Investigate which mentoring system your firm uses.  Here are some of the common ones: 

• Sink or swim.  If that is the system, run! 
• M.I.N.O. (Mentor in name only.)   A more senior Associate or very junior Partner is assigned to be your ‘mentor.’  They do not get paid for doing it and it is quite an inconvenience. They meet with you once a month, except for most months, when they have to cancel at the last minute because they are too busy. 
• You are assigned a real mentor who gladly puts aside their own billable work when you need some help. Just about every single time. You get the sense that they care about your success in the profession.  If you have one of these unicorns, hold on for dear life. Take a pay cut if you have to in order to get one.

Ask the following questions about the partner to whom you report: 

• Do they remember what it was like to be at the outset of their career and take the time to give you clear and precise instructions with reasonable deadlines? 
• Are they interested in your development as a lawyer, or do they simply want to get their low-level work done as quickly as possible? 
• Do they treat you with respect? 
• Do they make themselves available to answer your questions? 
• Do they involve you in client meetings and encourage you to participate? 

Think about your firm’s approach to business development: 

• Do they make a marketing expert available to teach you what to do? 
• Do they make a marketing coordinator available to you to assist you with your marketing? 
• Do you have a marketing budget, and are you encouraged to use it? 
• Is your billable hour target low enough to make spending time on business development a real possibility?  
• Does the firm award your client origination credits when you bring in work or help others to bring in work? 

Does your firm implement time-saving legal technology, and provide effective training for its use?  When the time savings are realized, do the Associates get the benefit, or do the partners hoover up the increased profitability and dump more work on the Associates so that they can keep their billable hours up? 

Does your firm invest in technology to help keep you abreast of developments in the law and legal practice in your area? 

Does the firm pay reasonable market salaries to all of their employees?  It is hard to be mentally healthy when you cannot pay your rent. It is also difficult to be mentally healthy when everyone around you is worrying about paying their rent. 

Happy Mental Health Awareness Month, everyone! Do stop by for free pizza and cake at 5 pm on Friday, May 31st, to celebrate and don’t forget to be there on time so that we can have the firm picture taken of us celebrating to be posted on our social media accounts!  The party will only go until 5:30 pm.  You can go back to work after that and get a good start on your weekend work. 

Mental illness is hard. If you or someone you know is having an immediate mental health crisis or considering self-harm, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room. Want to make a difference? Your firm can help support mental health initiatives in Canada by donating to the Canadian Mental Health Association.