Working as a Lawyer is Hard - Do You Have What You Need to Succeed?
Today’s blog is going to discuss why working as a lawyer is hard, along with what we can do to improve our working conditions. This isn’t just me expressing my opinions from 38 years in the profession—this is based on data from the Phase 2 Alberta Report of the National Study on the Psychological Health Determinants for Canadian Legal Professionals. As followers of this blog know, Phase 2 of the National Study on the Psychological Health Determinants for Canadian Legal Professionals which contained province-specific data was released in October, and I shared some high-level findings about Alberta lawyers a couple of weeks ago. But now it’s time to start diving into what we now know about how Alberta lawyers and students are doing.
First, a word about terminology: The National Study included Canadian lawyers and articling students, Ontario paralegals and Quebec notaries. To the extent possible, when I am dealing with national data, I try to extract lawyer and articling student data. Because we don’t have regulated paralegal and notary professions in Alberta, Alberta data is by its nature restricted to lawyers and articling students. Following the lead of our Code of Conduct, references to lawyers in this blog includes articling students.
If you were asked which is harder, articling or practicing law, which would you pick? Personally, I faced harder work and longer hours as an associate than I did as an articling student, but my experience was job-specific and is not the norm. Whether we act on them or not, being a lawyer means that you have more options available to you than an articling student
Today, let’s dive into the data again, looking at some of the major themes that researchers identified in the Alberta legal community.
The mental health and wellness themes most prioritized by Alberta lawyers who participated in the interview section of the survey were:
- Working Conditions and Cognitive Demands
- Work-life Balance
- Coping Strategies and Lifestyle.
These three priorities were the top three priorities arising from the Canadian data, except that Work-life Balance was ahead of Working Conditions and Cognitive Demands.
Do you agree that these are the top 3 mental health and wellness issues facing the Alberta legal community? What would be on your list?
When I look at the one-two punch of Working Conditions/Cognitive Demands and Work-Life Balance (or Work-Life Balance and Working Conditions/Cognitive Demands if you are in other parts of Canada), I see that lawyers do not like the structure of legal practice. We have accepted working conditions that we resent, and we have made sacrifices in our personal lives that we didn’t like making.
But is this the only way that law can be practiced in the twenty-first century?
Let’s drill down into what specific data points respecting Working Conditions/Cognitive Demands—we will look at Work-Life Balance and Coping Strategies and Lifestyle in subsequent blogs.
Each priority, in this case Working Conditions/Cognitive Demands, is composed of both positive elements (Resources) and negative elements (Constraints.) And, according to the researchers, Constraints are perceived as having more impact than Resources, so we likely need more than one Resource to outweigh each Constraint.
Constraints
The most common Constraints relating to Working Conditions/Cognitive Demands include the following:
Qualitative Overload—identified by 82.5% of respondents.
The National Study defines “Qualitative Overload” as “having too many different cases or too many different tasks at the same time” and is significantly correlated with perceived stress, indicating high cognitive demands” which sounds like most lawyer jobs.
We are all familiar with this concept—we crank out as much as we can in the time available, but we rarely have as much time to spend on individual tasks as we would like. And we can’t take the time to savour a job well done because we have to plough into the next task. We can call this a perpetual state of being stretched too thin.
I had fewer instances of Qualitative Overload when I ran my own (small) practice, but it still happened—sometimes, clients had crises at the same time, and you have to do whatever it takes for all of them.
Billable Hour Pressure—identified by 64.2% of respondents
It is easy to demonize billable hours as a stress-inducing factor. But the Constraint identified by National Study researchers is based in the pressure to reach billable hour targets. But according to Phase 1 of the National Study, billable hour pressure becomes an issue at 1200 billable hours, a low target by most law firm standards—78.4% of lawyers with billable hour targets of less than 1,200 hours felt pressure to meet their targets as opposed to 85.3% of lawyers with billable hour targets between 1,200 and 1,800 hours.
Regardless of what the metric is, if the consequence of not achieving it is losing your job, you are going to feel pressure.
But there does appear to be a link between high billable hour targets themselves and all of psychological distress, burnout, depressive symptoms and anxiety symptoms:
Another interesting finding from Phase 1 is that 81.5% of lawyers with billable hour targets of 1800 or more hours per year and who would like to have children fear having a family—they are already anticipating Work-Life Balance issues—while only 58.5% of lawyers with targets of 1200 hours or less feel this way.
Long Hours—identified by 56.8% of respondents
The National Study doesn’t define what “long hours” means other than acknowledging that “long hours” includes non-billable hours like business development, and I assume continuing professional development as well.
I have queried why law culture relies on longer than average work weeks since I was graduating from law school. We know that if you have a target of 1800 billable hours, you need to bill about 7.5 hours per day if you want to take a vacation, and we know that much of the time we spend at work each day is non-billable or lost. Phase 1 of the National Study found that lawyers bill about two-thirds of the time spent at work, so we are working about 10 hours per day to meet our targets.
The Phase 2 Alberta Report tells us that 72% of lawyers without billable hour targets work more than 50 hours per week, while 52.2% of lawyers without billable hour targets work more than 50 hours per week. It makes sense that lawyers whose targets cause them to work about 10 hours per day are working 50 + hour weeks, but many lawyers without billable hour targets still have heavy workloads.
We often hold on to the belief that as we get more senior, more knowledgeable and more efficient, we will be able to work something resembling a normal workday or work week, but this appears to be more myth than reality.
Emotional Demands—identified by 53.9% of respondents.
When we think about legal work with emotional demands, we tend to think of family law, criminal law, wills and estates and immigration—areas of law where human beings are front and centre amid stressful situations.
But are there practice areas with no emotional demands? Even when our clients are corporations or other non-human entities, we deal with representatives who may have their bonus eligibility tied up in the issue in dispute or who feel that their jobs may be on the line.
I don’t know if the National Study included emotional demands from co-workers and colleagues. We know that senior lawyers and principals sometimes steep their juniors and students in their stresses, losing their tempers, throwing staples and kicking garbage cans. As juniors and students, we do everything in our power to placate these lawyers which is, in my opinion, a challenging type of emotional demand.
Quantitative Overload—51.7% of respondents
Quantitative Overload is defined as “Feeling unable to manage the full scope of workplace urgent matters”—a condition common in law workplaces.
Almost 60% of Alberta lawyers say that they frequently to always have so many urgent matters to deal with that they don’t have enough hours in the day to get everything done. Sixteen percent say “sometimes” and 24% say “occasionally to never.”
This reminds me of one of my General Counsel’s favourite responses when my inhouse colleagues or I would raise overload issues: “We hire for the valleys not the peaks”. No doubt this is a sound business strategy in the shorter term, but at what point does a peak become a plateau, and how long can a lengthy peak (i.e. a plateau) be sustained without burning out lawyers, with heavy recruitment and disability costs for employers?
Resources
Alberta participants identified resources which can mitigate constraints including the following, most of which are obvious and do not need definitions or commentary:
- Skills utilization (using people with the right skills for tasks, I believe)
- Teleworking
- Autonomy
- Consistency of Values
- Recognition
- Support from superiors
- Support from colleagues
- Career opportunities
Many of us, particularly junior lawyers and students, feel that we don’t have power to change our working conditions. It may be easier and less intimidating to talk to our senior colleagues about supports that can help mitigate the demands of the job, so this list of Resources may be helpful as you assess what could make your workload/work environment more manageable.
Skills utilization as a resource may involve enhancing your competency—not knowing what we are doing is stressful! A certain amount of practicing law involves learning by doing (hopefully with supervisors who understand that an unsupervised or junior lawyer is not going to get everything right the first time.) But if you find that you are being assigned work in an area where you do not feel fully competent, please investigate educational offerings and pursue mentorship through the Law Society’s programs like Mentor Connect and Mentor Express (and remember Rule 3-2 of our Code of Conduct: A lawyer must perform all legal services undertaken on a client’s behalf to the standard of a competent lawyer. Please call the Practice Advisors if you are concerned that you are being asked to take on work outside of your competence!)
Correct skills utilization also means having the right person with the right training performing tasks. Are there tasks that you can delegate to a properly trained assistant? Is there expertise within your organization that you can tap into? Sometimes, doing everything ourselves is not efficient or enjoyable.
Consistency of values is something that only you can assess. Law is a business in the twenty-first century. If the type of work you are doing or the way law is practiced at your workplace does not resonate with your sense of purpose, you may want to consider aligning yourself with an organization whose values are more consistent with your own—this isn’t something that an employer will change their business model to accommodate you on.
Recognition can be tied to delivery of constructive and timely feedback so that you know what you are doing well and where you need to improve, but providing recognition can be much more. We generally perform better when we believe our work is valued, so simple forms of recognition like acknowledging a job well done at a team meeting go a long way.
“No one is an island”—this reflects the fact that we need support from higher-ups and our peers. If you don’t feel supported by either group, please call Assist to talk about job-finding.
Career opportunities likely means that you have the ability to develop your practice and advance in your firm, or that you are developing skills and relationships that will allow you to move to a new position. Having hope is essential during times of struggle. If you have lost hope that your workplace is viable, it is time to consider other opportunities.
If you are a junior lawyer who is evaluating your workplace demands and resources, please consider meeting with firm leadership to advocate for what you need. You may not be able to convince firm leadership that billable hour targets should be significantly cut as this is ingrained in the firm’s business model but try to make a business case for additional support staff to enhance your skills utilization (and ability to generate billable hours), educational resources, recognition and support. If you want help structuring your conversation, Assist can connect with a peer support volunteer lawyer who provide feedback and suggestions.
If you are a senior lawyer and you are concerned that junior lawyers in your workplace are weighed down by Constraints without being buoyed up by Resources, please consider having one-on-one chats with your young colleagues. Consider asking them how they are managing with heavy workloads and what supports would be valued by them. We know that a workplace can’t grant all wished from team members, but showing an interest in helping them succeed is valuable in and of itself—but do see what you can do!