Lawyers' Mental Health Suffers When They're Viewed Only As Billing Machines By Their Firms

How can law firms improve attorney wellness? By valuing associates as more than profit centers.

onJune 10, 2022 at 2:42 PM

Take a look at your evaluation process, your mentoring process, your work allocation process, your internal communications—all of it. What’s the message? Do people feel like you just care about their about billable hours, or do you actually care about how good of a lawyer and a person they are?

— Patrick Krill, an attorney who advises legal employers on wellness issues, in an interview with Reuters discussing a new study that he co-authored on the “connections between lawyer well-being and employer values.” The peer-reviewed study — said to be the first empirical analysis of its kind — was published in the June edition of the scientific journal Behavioral Sciences. The results of the study revealed that lawyers who say their employers value them for their talent, skill, and humanity have better physical and mental health than those whose employers value them for their productivity and financial worth.

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.