Law firms should introduce “trigger warnings” to protect lawyers’ mental health when working extreme hours, a senior industry figure has claimed.
Colin Passmore, the chairman of the City of London Law Society and former senior partner of Simmons & Simmons, is calling for action amid heightened scrutiny of mental health in the City.
It comes after the recent death of Vanessa Ford, a senior partner at Pinsent Masons who according to a coroner’s inquest was suffering from an “acute mental health crisis”.
Mr Passmore told The Telegraph he has had an “epiphany” since Ms Ford’s death, since recognising that “something very serious and bad is going on” in the legal procession.
At some City firms lawyers are working more than 3,000 hours a year, with some not finishing until 11pm after starting at 9am. Mr Passmore claims this should sound the alarm for management.
Working 3,000 hours a year equates to an 11.5-hour day for five days a week, or an eight-hour day for seven days a week.
A standard full-time job is usually considered to be eight hours a day, five days a week – a total of 2,080 hours a year.
He said: “That is a massive amount of work on any basis. That is an amount of work that should send a trigger warning and that person needs to be spoken to and looked after as appropriate.
“Those sort of hours are massive. I suspect I won’t be hugely popular for saying things like that but if we are to address this then these are the things that need to be looked at.”
In his own career as a litigator, working for clients such as Barclays Bank, Mr Passmore claims the most he ever racked up over a year was 2,250 hours – which left him exhausted.
He said: “While a number of lawyers may feel sufficiently resilient and sufficiently supported to get by, it is not good enough to assume that this is the case for everybody.”
While accepting that a nine-to-five routine will never work for the legal profession, Mr Passmore insists more must be done to avoid the risk of regulation.
He said: “Frankly, if we are to avoid having the position dealt with by regulation, as some are suggesting, then we as responsible leaders must act and must act now: we cannot go on with a significant number of lawyers at all levels who are suffering from the way in which we now expect them to work.”
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