Mental Health in the Legal Profession: Critical and Overlooked
By: Aaron Baer
Tags: Law Student, Professional Development, Mental Health, Law, Lawyers

When I talk to friends outside of the legal industry, they’re often shocked by what I tell them. About the processes that many lawyers use when they work. About the reluctance to embrace technology. About the lack of metrics, the dated leadership styles, and the short-term thinking.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. How did we end up here? How did we fall so far behind the times? How did we decide that’s okay?

In some ways, it’s unfortunate that many law firms seem to be doing well financially in spite of COVID. Law firm leadership pats themselves on the back. They have steered the ship through the storm. We have made it through unscathed.

Yet we haven’t. The storm rages on. There is a massive access-to-justice crisis, yet somehow Ryerson opening a new law school wasn’t okay because ‘there are too many lawyers’. The world is changing rapidly, and many lawyers are barely treading water — doing the bare minimum to adapt, while clinging to hope that the old days will return. But at what cost?

The old days — they weren’t so great for most people.

Mental health in the legal profession isn’t exactly great at the best of times. If you’re lucky enough to finish law school, find an articling position and get called to the bar, you get to join a profession with top-notch rates for alcoholism, depression, anxiety, stress, and suicide. At least your parents might be proud of you, even if you can’t be proud of yourself. You can blame impostor syndrome — a legal profession specialty — for that.

Why is mental health so bad in the legal profession?

Some say it’s selection bias — that the people who enter the legal industry are more prone to bad mental health. Others say the adversarial nature is a contributor. Maybe it’s the fact that many lawyers — in order to do their jobs well — have to constantly contemplate the worst case scenarios (which it turns out is called ‘catastrophic thinking’ in the real world, and it’s the kind of thing that people go to therapy for). Did I mention the fact that many lawyers work very long hours, which they have little control over (a well-known contributor to job dissatisfaction). And of course, the unrealistic expectation of perfectionism that firms place — sometimes unknowingly — on entrants to the profession.

Those are all valid reasons — and I have no doubt whatsoever that they are all contributors.

But there’s something that rarely gets talked about as a culprit for adverse mental health amongst lawyers and law students. It’s completely overlooked — an afterthought.

Training.

Of law students. Of articling students. Of associates. Of partners. It is broken. So very, very broken. And I think that if we can fix the training aspect, we can make a big dent in so many of the things that are broken about the legal profession. About the way we deliver services; about lawyer happiness; about client satisfaction.

But to fix something that’s broken, we first have to admit that it’s not working.

I’ve spoken to more than 100 young lawyers and law students this year and asked how they would rate the quality of their training. The answers are almost identical. The training — they tell me — is inadequate.

Yet it’s not for lack of trying. It’s generally not a pretty picture at many smaller firms. Not to mention in-house. Yet even at the bigger firms — the ones who advertise on their websites that ‘they’re invested in your growth’ and ‘provide bespoke training to help you maximize your potential’ — many of their younger lawyers feel that they’re being let down.

And it’s not fully the firms fault. But they often commit the one fatal sin — they never ask. Or if they do, the younger lawyers aren’t in a position to provide honest feedback. In an environment where perfection is expected — where how are you is answered with ‘I’m really busy’ and ‘things are good’ — it’s no wonder that psychological safety is often lacking.

But if more senior lawyers asked (in a way where their younger lawyers could be honest and authentic) — and if they listened — they’d hear a very different story than what they believe. Younger lawyers are struggling. To pay off student debt. To learn the tools of the trade. To work their way out of situations at work where they’re set up to fail.

The training system is broken. It starts in law school, with methods of teaching that date back hundreds of years and are notorious for being terrible pedagogically. They continue with articling. And they get worse as the pressure and expectations grow as a lawyer.

But it’s not all doom and gloom however. Change is on the horizon.

There are law schools that are focused on teaching practical skills. There are professors who are doing their part to set their students up for success. There are law firms that are doing an incredible job providing legal training. There are young lawyers who are building companies focused on making sure that future lawyers will never feel the way they were made to feel.

In the coming series of articles, we’ll take a more in-depth look at some of the shortfalls of current legal training and meet some people who are doing their best to bring some much-needed change to the profession.

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This article was originally published by The Lawyer’s Daily (www.thelawyersdaily.ca), part of LexisNexis Canada Inc.

More about me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronbaer2/

Want to share your story (either positive or negative)? Please feel free to send me a message.

While some of the upcoming articles have already been written, I am looking for more people who are comfortable talking about their experiences with training in the legal profession and the impact on them. Additionally, if you know someone who is working to make legal training better for lawyers/law students, please also encourage them to reach out!