Newsletter – March 2023

Spotlight on… the latest from LawCare

LawCare offers free, confidential, emotional support to anyone working in the law. As a Costs Lawyer, you can use our services at any time. But even if you don’t personally need support right now, there is a lot going on at LawCare that you can get involved with, and we have various resources and information that might be useful to your practice. I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some of our recent and upcoming work that is relevant to all lawyers.

Workplace trends
We recently published our 2022 Impact Report. We saw a significant rise in support contacts about career concerns, rising from 8% in 2021 to 22% of all contacts in 2022. This was the first time the number of contacts about these issues equalled the number of contacts we had about stress.

Our contacts have been raising concerns such as struggling with training to become a lawyer, wanting to retire early or not seeing law as a lifelong career. Perhaps an indicator that as we move out of the pandemic and the current tough economic client, these are prompting people in the legal profession to reflect on what they want from life and work.

This reinforces the importance of creating inclusive, healthy cultures in legal workplaces that welcome and retain a diverse range of people and foster a sense of belonging, where people feel valued. People are the greatest asset in our sector and supporting their mental wellbeing should be a priority for everyone in the legal community.

Fit for Law Part 2 – working with others
We are launching Part 2 of our Fit for Law programme on 8 March. This module explores how to manage relationships with clients, colleagues and other professionals and was developed in collaboration with Dr Emma Jones at the University of Sheffield and her colleagues at the Open University.

This free, evidence-based resource will be available online to all Costs Lawyers and can count toward your annual minimum CPD requirement. We are launching this module with a webinar on 8 March at 12:30. You can sign up for it here.

Reverse Mentoring
We are very excited to be working with the University of Leeds on a reverse mentoring project. The project is around aspiring law students and current trainees/junior lawyers from a range of minoritised and underrepresented backgrounds mentoring those with responsibility for training recruitment and organisational wellbeing within participant law firms. This will be one of the first research projects to empirically explore the impact of reverse mentoring in this context.

We ran a series of roundtables in December with the pilot project getting under way this year. The project aim is to produce a toolkit for organisations to implement reverse mentoring in this context. Watch this space!

The Legal Mind Podcast
We are now in the third series of our podcast The Legal Mind, which explores a range of issues around mental health both from an individual and organisational perspective. The latest episode is about workplace banter and how this relates to mental wellbeing. If you haven’t tuned in yet, please do; you can access it wherever you get your podcasts from (the most popular sources are Apple and Spotify) or visit here for more info.

LawCare presentation for your staff
We have a 20 minute online presentation called ‘Introduction to LawCare and workplace wellbeing’ that we are offering to firms and inhouse teams, which is proving very popular.

We would be happy to provide this to your team, so if you feel this would be helpful for your colleagues to learn more about how we support people working or studying in the law, please get in touch.

Upcoming dates
There are several dates coming up that might provide a good opportunity to celebrate diversity within your firm or team, or to begin important conversations with colleagues. These include:
• 13 to 19 March – neurodiversity celebration week
• April – stress awareness month
• 15 to 21 May – mental health awareness week (this year’s theme is anxiety)

You can access any of our services, or find more information, by visiting our website www.lawcare.org.uk.

Elizabeth Rimmer, Chief Executive, LawCare

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