LawCare has its roots in the Lawyers Support Group (LSG), a group of lawyers from all walks of the profession who were in recovery from alcohol dependency, which started in 1983.
In 1995, partly prompted by a letter in The Law Society Gazette, Charles Elly, president of the Law Society for England and Wales, set up a working party to investigate helping solicitors who were misusing alcohol. This led to SolCare being established as an independent charity in April 1997, with Barry Pritchard, a retired solicitor based in North Wales and in recovery from alcohol dependency, as the first CEO. Barry was given a modest grant and a surplus-to-requirements Law Society computer, which he set up in a corner of his kitchen. During that first year, he took 60 calls from lawyers with alcohol problems. Members of LSG were among those who became the first LawCare volunteers, offering support to these callers.
Over the next few years, LawCare expanded its remit to support other branches of the profession, including those working in non-legal roles and the legal professions in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Our name was changed to LawCare in 2001 to reflect this, and our support widened from our focus on alcohol.
Managing pressures
In the early days of LawCare, there wasn’t the pervasive discussion about mental health in the workplace that there is now. However, there was a recognition that lawyers were turning to alcohol as an unhealthy coping mechanism for managing the pressures of their legal careers. The challenges of life in the law are not new: the long hours, the pressure to meet targets and the expectations of clients have long been a part of every legal professional’s working life.
Here we are 26 years later, with a team of eight staff, supported by about 100 volunteers and champions. We offer a range of support services, training, advocacy, and resources to the legal community on managing mental health and how employers can create healthy working environments. Crucially, we also advise on why mental health matters to the delivery of effective, competent legal services and a sustainable, inclusive, and thriving profession. Our goal is not just pulling people out of the river; we want to go upstream and find out why they are falling in and what we can do collectively as a profession to prevent that.
We published our ‘Life in the Law Study’ in 2021 to do just that. We wanted to understand what it is about the culture and practice of law that is undermining mental wellbeing. Our findings made for challenging reading: 69% of respondents reported poor mental health in the 12 months prior to completing the survey. They were at high risk of burnout and one in five said they had been bullied, harassed, or discriminated against at work. Low psychological safety, lack of supervision, high work intensity and lack of autonomy were crucial workplace factors undermining mental wellbeing.
These findings are supported by our knowledge and experience of listening to over 10,000 people since the early days of Solcare. Every day, we hear from juniors wondering if they are cut out for the law, those worried about a mistake they have made but are too frightened to speak up, those struggling with demanding clients or feeling the pressure to meet targets. The perfectionist, driven, self-sufficient, ruminating, self-critical, fear-of-failure thinking styles of legal practitioners, coupled with a fast paced and competitive environment, creates the perfect storm for the issues we are so familiar with at LawCare. It also makes it hard for legal professionals to seek help, for fear of being perceived as weak or not good enough. Despite the mental health awareness weeks, mental health first aid training, and the range of education and support provided in legal workplaces, stigma is still a significant barrier to seeking help.
We are living in a time of accelerating change—digital, climate, social and political—and there is a growing pressure on people in our sector to do more with less. We see this reflected in our support contacts which were up 35% for the first quarter of this year, compared to the same period in 2022, with an emerging trend of more people reaching out to us who are questioning their careers in the law.
Shifting legal culture
We are a small charity with a modest income of £400k p/a. Until recently, nearly all our funding came from professional bodies, but this has remained at the same level for almost a decade, so we are now raising funds from people, firms/chambers, and legal organisations, so we can meet the increasing demands for our services and strengthen our advocacy. If you want to contribute, you can donate via our website, choose LawCare as the charity partner for your event or organisation, or get involved in one of our community events such as the London Legal Walk or Big Give (details on our website).
We want to bring our profession together to build a movement to shift legal culture from the stigma that silences people from speaking up when they are struggling and accepts a reactive, time-pressured, crisis-driven, overloaded working day as the norm, to a culture where people flourish, can be themselves, feel valued and respected and do great work for their clients. Get involved—send a note to colleagues about LawCare, keep an eye on our website for volunteer and trustee opportunities, and, perhaps most importantly, speak up for mental health in your workplace.
Elizabeth Rimmer is CEO of LawCare, the mental wellbeing charity for the legal profession.
