Life in the Law – Diversity and burnout

Written by Elizabeth Rimmer, Lawcare

Lawcare Perpectives

LawCare is the mental wellbeing charity for the legal profession. We offer free, confidential, emotional support, peer support, and resources to those working in the law in the UK, Channel Islands and Isle of Man. We promote mental health and wellbeing best practice in legal workplaces and drive culture change in education, training and practice. We’ve been supporting legal professionals for 25 years and we understand life in the law.

Last year we published the findings of our Life in the Law study, https://www.lawcare.org.uk/life-in-the-law/ , this study the first of its kind in this country, with over 1700 respondents looked at how working practices in law affect mental wellbeing in the legal profession.

We questioned legal professionals on a range of areas, including work intensity (workload and working hours), and used three recognised scales for burnout (disengagement and exhaustion), autonomy (ability to control what, where, how, and with whom, work is done) and psychological safety (ability to speak up with ideas and questions, and raise concerns or admit mistakes).