How law firms need their clients to help them make change
We know there is a mental health crisis in the legal profession. We can see it in the Mindful Business Singapore’s excellent Lawyers’ Sustainability Report for 2023 ((2) Post | LinkedIn). For a global perspective there is the IBA 2021 report (available here) and more recently a team led by Lucinda Soon at Birkbeck College in London have done a literature review of research around the world over the last 50 years which is available here.
In Singapore, anecdotally we can see it in the numbers of colleagues who are struggling with their mental health, with the number of people leaving the profession and with the reducing numbers of people seeking to enter the profession.
It affects both private practice lawyers and in house lawyers. The causes are various, but the solution has to be one that the whole profession embraces, and works together to achieve.
From my experience as a law firm partner in London and now my work leading the Mindful Business Charter, I can see that private practice law firms feel trapped. This sense is in part based on the underlying business model, the billable hour, the league tables comparing firms’ profitability and the constant focus on billing targets and financial metrics that result. But there is also a sense of what client service demands of them. There is a fear that clients expect immediate responses, that a high performance culture means they should be always on, and that any deviation from those relentless standards risks the client taking their work elsewhere. In the context of MBC there is a fear that even signing up to such an initiative might risk damaging those precious client relationships.
In my work with MBC I hear this a great deal, particularly when we are talking to potential members from new jurisdictions. In the UK we are fortunate to have built sufficient critical mass among law firms and in house legal teams that MBC membership is very common. But elsewhere I hear law firms saying they would like to be involved but until, for example, their major financial service clients are on board they feel unable to make the move.
At the heart of MBC is the idea that if we work together, we are best able to solve the common issues that afflict the legal profession and wider business community — if I give you permission to be brave by being a signatory myself, you will be able to ask for what you need in return. And, as I have said, it is in everyone’s interest that we make a change. The pandemic of stress impacts not just the physical and mental health of everyone involved, it also impacts the quality of the work we do — when we are stressed our brains do not work so well.
Law firms need to take responsibility for their business models, but their clients can play a huge role in changing the assumptions about what they want/need, and what the notion of service excellence actually means. Law firms talked about diversity and inclusion for a long time. It was only when clients started insisting on it that most law firms started actually doing something about it. With MBC, and with changing the dynamic around working practices, adopting alternative ways of working that are more healthy and also more effective, the same dynamic applies — clients have a huge role to play in encouraging, and if necessary requiring, their panel law firms to change.
MBC began with three banks and nine law firms. It is no secret that some of those law firms that came on board initially, and some of those that have followed since, did so because those banking clients encouraged them, and in some cases told them, to do so — this is how we are going to work going forward, if you want to remain on our panel then you need to be on board with this. From a client perspective, would you like your legal work done by stressed, exhausted and unhappy lawyers, often working on your important affairs late into the night, driven by unspoken assumptions of what it means to be a good lawyer, or would you prefer your work to be done by energised, enthusiastic, well rested lawyers who are able to bring their best selves, with all the wonderful insight and creativity they have, to your work, and to do it in the most efficient manner possible?
Of course, simply signing up the Mindful Business Charter isn’t going to change the world. It is what you do with it that counts. But it is a starting point, and with the common language, the permissive framework and the permission to be brave, that MBC provides, we can slowly begin the process of change that will help to heal our broken profession. In the words of Barack Obama, “Change doesn’t happen, change won’t happen, while we sit around waiting for the right people and the right time. We are the people we have been waiting for.”
Let me give you an example that might bring this to life. One of our initial signatories, a leading UK retail bank, began a major restructuring project in its treasury function at the start of 2020. They instructed Pinsent Masons, one of the founder law firm members of MBC. It was clear from the outset that this was a behemoth of a deal. It would last for a couple of years, involve multi-disciplinary teams, with regular struct deadlines to meet and so on. The sort of deal in which the tendency is to abandon any ideas about working mindfully and simply to throw a group of lawyers at it and tell them to get cracking and to let us know when it is done, if any of them are still standing at that point. We have all experienced deals like that and seen the damage they can do to the people involved and those around them.
But in this case the two principals decided to be brave and to try a different approach. They sat down with the two teams at the outset and talked about working patterns and preferred communication methods. They talked about expectations of response times. They flagged to each other upcoming holidays and so on. Most importantly, the two principals made a commitment to each other on behalf of their teams that they would do what they could, in the confines and context of the transaction, to run it in a way that got the job done but minimised the damage to the people involved — they would treat the wellbeing of their teams as being as important as the success of the deal. They agreed that they would meet regularly to talk about how things were going, to talk about how their teams were, to look ahead and plan around pressure points, and slower periods, and they agreed that is one team was causing undue stress to the other they would talk about it.
And this is what they did. It wasn’t always easy. Telling your major client that they need to back off a bit is never an easy thing for a successful law firm partner, schooled in the notion that the client gets whatever the client wants, to be a graceful swan above the water, whatever mad scrabbling was happening below the surface. And the deal was done, on time, and to standard with everyone still standing at the end of it. This was made possible because the client, through being an MBC signatory, and through their actions following up their words, allowed and encouraged the law firm to engage in this way.
It is also worth noting that the relationship between the teams, between the law firm and its major client, were immeasurably strengthened by having engaged with each other on a human level.
So this is a request to in house legal teams and other major purchasers of legal services. Your private practice law firms need your help. They desperately want to do the best work they can for you and deliver the level of client service you demand. They are also a bit scared of you, and of doing anything that might risk upsetting you, and of even asking what that level of service you demand actually involves.
Please help them have that conversation. Tell them you are on board with building a legal profession that is sustainable, that is attractive to our future lawyers and does not hurt those we currently have. Be the one that takes that first tentative step. It is only by one of us doing so that we ever get to dance gracefully together. MBC does not profess to have all the answers, but it is a common language and an existing permissive framework, with a community of law firms and other businesses from around the world, who have already taken that first step and would love to welcome you and your law firms to the community, so that we may all continue to learn from each other and solve our common problems.
For more information about how the Mindful Business Charter can support you and these conversations, contact info@mindfulbusinesscharter.com, or visit our website.
