Avoiding burnout: Stress management in high-pressure law firms

There's no doubt that the law is a demanding business. The very nature of legal work involves complex thinking under extreme time pressure, relentless client demands and deadlines, long hours, pressure to achieve billing targets and constant time recording.

These pressures, which create an intense working environment, are exacerbated by lawyers' propensity towards perfectionism, insecurity, over-analysis and competitiveness. Many lawyers live in fear of losing clients and of making errors in legal judgement. They worry about charging clients for excessive hours and they feel guilty about neglecting their families while working such long hours. Add to this the adversarial nature of legal work that breeds hostility, conflict and cynicism, and it is not surprising that so many lawyers find it hard to cope at some point in their careers.

Statistics show that a legal career is one of the most stressful occupations and that lawyers have disproportionally high levels of health-related symptoms. A John Hopkins University study of more than 100 occupations in the US found that lawyers had the highest incidence of depression¹ and, in 1996, US lawyers overtook dentists as the profession with the highest rate of suicide.² In addition, the American Bar Association estimates that 15 to 20 per cent of all US lawyers suffer from alcoholism or substance abuse.³

The consequences of such a pressurised workplace have a significant impact on talent retention, succession planning and productivity, as well as personal wellbeing. If they are not managed actively and successfully, lawyers end up quitting private practice or burning out, leaving firms with a depleted talent pipeline, client service continuity issues and high medical insurance bills.

To eliminate stress is, however, simply not possible in today's legal environment. What is needed is an understanding of the sources of stress and the impact they can have on individuals. Armed with these insights, firms and individual lawyers can put strategies in place to maximise ?peak performance.

Physiology of stress

As human beings, our nervous system reacts to a perceived threat, or stressful situation, with a fight-or-flight response. This results in physiological changes in our bodies. We produce larger quantities of cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline, which trigger a higher heart rate, heightened muscle preparedness, sweating and alertness - all of the factors that help to protect us in dangerous or challenging situations.

Of course, we need a degree of stress to motivate us and to feel challenged and productive. Too little pressure leads to underachievement, boredom, and lower performance levels. A controlled optimal level of stress, or 'eustress', gives us a competitive edge in performance-related activities such as pitching to a client or dealing with a difficult meeting. Eustress provides us with focus and allows us to think quickly and clearly.

But eustress can easily tip over into distress if the pressure becomes too much to cope with - when there is no longer any fun in the challenge, or there seems to be no relief or end in sight. This kind of stress leads to poor decision making and results in our non-essential body functions, such as our digestive and immune systems, slowing down. It leads to rises in blood pressure, rapid breathing, tense muscles and difficulty in sleeping due to ?heightened alertness.

Stress has effects on our bodies, our thoughts and feelings, and on our behaviour. Back pain and digestive problems are often symptoms of stress, and attention needs to be paid to the underlying causes of physical illnesses, as well as to the more obvious stress-related problems of insomnia, headaches and high blood pressure. Stress can lead to anger, anxiety and depression, to feelings of insecurity and to forgetfulness and fatigue. It can also result in eating too much or too little, sudden angry outbursts and an increased intake of caffeine, alcohol?or drugs.

Different pressures affect us in different ways. What stresses one person may not stress another, and some people have a greater resilience to pressure than others. To deal effectively with stress, there needs to be an individual analysis of what those stressors are, an ability to recognise the symptoms when it is getting too much, and the development of personal coping mechanisms to manage pressure actively and effectively.

Impact on firms

Law firms rely on highly skilled lawyers working at peak performance levels on a sustained basis. They cannot afford to have lawyers stressed out to the extent that work becomes unproductive, client expectations are not met, or key team members fail to perform, become sick or leave the firm for the wrong reasons.

Some lawyers will struggle on until their productivity and performance decline. They may be working harder and harder, but this often results in a loss of focus and in a loss of intellectual clarity and decisiveness. The consequences of this may not be immediately obvious but, over time, a firm will find client satisfaction levels reducing, juniors becoming demotivated by their principal's working patterns and profitability being adversely affected by overruns and write-offs.

When lawyers are tired, they become more prone to making mistakes or missing small but important details in documents. In today's litigious environment, and with clients under their own commercial pressures, this results in an increasing risk of professional indemnity claims.

Law firms need to recognise their responsibility to provide a safe and productive workplace. They need to put in place programmes that both help individual lawyers to understand and cope with the stresses of their work and to help the firm to perform consistently at its highest level.

Stress management programme

In many law firms, there is a macho culture where type-A personalities compete with each other and where boasting about all-nighters is commonplace. It's a hardworking, high-achieving culture in which reaching out for help or admitting to not coping is considered extremely damaging to career prospects.

The first step a firm needs to take towards a change in culture is to acknowledge that stress is something that affects everyone. This can be achieved if highly regarded billers or rainmakers are encouraged to talk openly about the fears and anxieties they have experienced personally. The more that senior people share their stressors and how they have learnt to cope with them, the easier it becomes for others to admit to ?needing support.

The next step involves educating lawyers about the physiology of stress, using scientific evidence to persuade them that this is not a 'soft' topic. Short workshops can help lawyers to focus on how to optimise their stress levels to achieve peak performance. They also signal that it is acceptable to talk about stress and that developing coping strategies to increase stress tolerance is a sign of strength.

To shift the culture further, it is important to introduce stress awareness training early on in legal careers. Making it a part of the firm's overall education programme embeds stress management as part of the skill set required of a lawyer. It also gives young lawyers (who may be struggling with overwhelming demands from partners and clients) an avenue to explore the issues constructively with ?their peers.

This all goes towards creating a culture of support, trust and understanding. A preventative approach such as this reduces the amount of time and money that firms would otherwise spend on dealing with the consequences of people not feeling able to ask for help.

Specific ground rules about what a firm expects of its people and, more importantly, what it does not expect, also go a long way to ensuring stress management programmes are effective. Making it clear, for example, that everyone should take their full annual holiday entitlement, and that BlackBerries should only be consulted on an exceptional basis while on holiday, are powerful signals, particularly if partners lead by example.

Partners and principals have a crucial responsibility when allocating work to recognise the need for downtime between demanding assignments and overnighters, and to be sensitive to the pressures that individuals may have been under. Everyone else should be encouraged in team briefings to look out for their colleagues and to offer help if necessary. A shared understanding of the physiology of stress and how it manifests itself enables colleagues to spot the early warning signs in peers or juniors, and to not be afraid of acting upon them.

In addition, firms could help people to cope with work pressures by offering opportunities to exercise during working hours (such as lunchtime running or cycling clubs), arranging teach-ins on diet and nutrition, and providing confidential counselling services through an employee assistance programme.

HR teams play an important role, too, in putting in place polices that give lawyers access to 'time out' arrangements such as unpaid leave, career breaks or sabbaticals, to allow lawyers to refresh and renew their careers rather than leaving prematurely to escape the pressures of private practice.

 

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Features of an effective stress management programme

• Open acknowledgement from the firm’s leaders that stress affects everyone

• Partners talking openly about their coping strategies

• Embedded workshops on the physiology of stress

• Active encouragement to share issues and seek out help

• Responsibility to look out for colleagues who need support

• Well-designed work allocation systems

• Ground rules on holidays, taking time out

• Opportunities to exercise at work

• Addiction and substance abuse workshops

• Career break and sabbatical schemes

• Employee assistance/counselling services

• The promotion of civility and camaraderie amongst colleagues

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Coping strategies

Armed with information about the nature of stress, its impact and symptoms, it will become easier for lawyers to identify their own particular stressors, to take steps to minimise the situations that stress them, and to develop coping strategies that work for them.

There are a number of strategies that can be integrated into work patterns, including taking an active approach to work scheduling, prioritisation, delegating to juniors, sharing work with colleagues and creating realistic short-term goals.

In addition, taking time to eat regularly and healthily, getting enough sleep, exercise and relaxation are all very important and have a positive effect on productivity, especially when people are extremely busy.

Talking things through with friends or family, and being aware of feelings and emotions, is also crucial to staying calm and avoiding or reducing negative thoughts. Having interests outside of work helps to keep things in perspective and provides respite from the pressures of work, allowing our bodies to regain physiological balance.

 

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Self-help for dealing with stress

• Be assertive – don’t say ‘yes’ if you already have too much to do

• Share and delegate responsibilities where you can

• Prioritise, make lists and break work down into manageable tasks

• Set some time aside each day just for yourself

• Express your thoughts and worries to colleagues, friends or family

• Eat a healthy balanced diet

• Get plenty of sleep

• Avoid excessive caffeine consumption

• Exercise regularly – walk the stairs or cycle to work

• Learn calming breathing techniques

• Stop or cut down on alcohol and drugs consumption

• Seek professional medical help

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Peak performance

By understanding the physiology of stress and their own responses to it, lawyers can optimise their performance at key moments while building stress tolerance and developing coping strategies to deal effectively with the pressures that they can't control. They can work on striking ?a balance between too little and too ?much stress and they can more consciously avoid putting themselves under unnecessary pressure by overtrading, failing to prioritise or not delegating enough.

The ultimate aim for firms is to ?achieve peak performance through effective talent management. An integrated stress management ?programme and supportive culture are vital ingredients to maximising lawyers' skills, capabilities and productivity.

Firms that actively and openly address stress management are perceived as more attractive places to work and can rely more confidently on retaining the ?very best in their talent pipeline. The culture and support structure that a firm puts in place is a strategic approach ?to helping lawyers to manage the ?pace successfully.

Jill King is a consultant and the former global HR director at Linklaters ?(www.jkinsights.co.uk)

Endnotes

1. See 'Occupations and the prevalence of major depressive disorder', W.W. Eaton, Journal of Occupational Medicine, November 1990

2. See 'What about me?', M Geiner, Texas Bar Journal, September 1996

3. See 'Career killers', D Jones in ?A Guide to the Basic Law Practice, B.P. Crowley and M.L. Winick, eds, Alliance Press, 2001

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