Justice Jayne Jagot | High Court of Australia
Minds Count Annual Lecture, 2023
“Despite the law providing a potentially fascinating and highly rewarding career, we in the law are routinely informed that we are more miserable, more stressed, distressed, anxious, and depressed than most other professions. How can that be? After all, the law provides an opportunity for work that is intellectually stimulating, involves continuous improvement and development, exposes practitioners to all manner of people and all manner of problems, actively engages the lawyer in solving problems for others, enables lawyers to help people when they most need it and involves lawyers in upholding the rule of law in a modern liberal democracy which depends on the rule of law for its very existence.
I’m going to try to hazard a few guesses.
Becoming qualified as a lawyer
Entry to law at university level is highly competitive. University law courses are highly competitive. Law degrees are also now expensive. While the cost can be deferred under the HECS scheme, day to day living costs cannot. Not all students have families capable of supporting them for the three to five years it takes to get a law degree, let alone on top of a first degree. Failing a course and having to repeat it might be the difference between being able to continue the degree or not.
Being able to work sufficient hours to pay for food and rent, all while trying to study and pass courses, must be enormously stressful. For some people, even the prospect of starting life with so much debt from their tuition costs, albeit deferred under the HECS scheme, can operate as a material deterrent to the undertaking of tertiary education.
In short, there are still significant barriers to entry to the legal profession which either exclude people altogether or, for those who can get over the initial barrier, impose great stresses on them, particularly people from disadvantaged social and economic backgrounds, who could make fine lawyers. I suspect the people who do overcome the barriers to entry and make it through their degree, particularly but not only those from disadvantaged social and economic backgrounds, carry a high stress load before they even enter the legal workplace.
Entering legal practice
When a law student finishes their degree, they must find a job. Again, for many young people, this can involve overcoming significant hurdles. If they don’t know anyone in the law, getting a foot in the door can be tough, particularly if the economy is on a downward swing when they graduate. When I graduated, it never occurred to me that a person like me, who knew no-one in the law, could become a Judge’s Associate. It never occurred to me that I could become a barrister. Why? Because I had no inherited legal cultural capital and no idea how to acquire any.
Many law graduates enter private practice. A number are quite likely to find that the performance pressure in private practice is just as intense as it had been at university. They may also find that the hours they must work often leave little time for anything other than sleeping and eating. They may also find or sense another common aspect of the legal workplace- quite extreme hierarchies and pay differentials.
It should go without saying that this kind of environment- in which more junior lawyers have little autonomy over what they do and where their time is literally of lesser value than that of everyone above them in the pecking order- involves a risk to people’s psychological wellbeing which calls for active ongoing cultural and individual management.
Why legal workplaces might cause burnout
Burnout has been described as ‘a psychological syndrome emerging as a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job. The three key dimensions of this response are an overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job, and a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.’
If we are serious about protecting people’s mental health in the legal profession, we should take a critical look at the culture of legal workplaces.
Let’s point out the first elephant in the room. Work hours in the legal profession is a large systemic issue. Working long hours and not getting weekends to recover and regular holidays uninterrupted by work demands, over the longer-term, place stresses on many people that are unsustainable. Systemic issues include:
- a workplace culture in which billable hours effectively determine the entire system of expectations and rewards- salary, promotions, bonuses, and what conduct gets tolerated
- the absence of any system that rewards expertise, quality of work, ethical leadership, mentoring, or pro bono contributions
- expectations of unreasonable availability outside traditional working hours being normalised and culturally demanded
If the main driver of profit is the leveraging of the time of others, particularly young lawyers who cost far less than they make, you need to take care to avoid a culture of exploitation developing.
These larger systemic issues might be beyond our individual influence, but combating the cultural risks these systems involve are not beyond the collective influence of those who have power in legal workplaces.
10 workplace behaviours destructive of wellbeing
The following are everyday behaviours that people with power might have forgotten can have real impacts on people without power in the workplace. They are the kinds of behaviours that can become so routine and normalised that their potential adverse effects on others can go unnoticed.
If we try to maintain awareness of the fact that every person with whom we work each has their own equivalent centre of self- with their own pressures, vulnerabilities, and ambitions, then we give our more junior work colleagues the best opportunity to fulfil their potential and enjoy the fascinating and rewarding professional life a career in the law can offer.
‘If you wouldn’t do it to someone above you in the hierarchy, don’t do it to someone below you.’
Young lawyers will become old lawyers in their turn. One day, they will have the power. Being kind to young lawyers is not just the decent thing to do. It is just common sense.”
Justice Jayne Jagot delivered this lecture as part of the Minds Count Annual Lecture series in 2023. Minds Count works to promote psychologically healthy workplaces in the legal profession. mindscount.org