Mental Health Awareness Week is an annual event promoted by the Mental Health Foundation to encourage everyone to focus on achieving good mental health. This year it falls between 15 and 20 May and the theme of the week is anxiety.
Anxiety
Anxiety is a normal emotion experienced by all of us but (like stress) it can lead to mental health problems if it is allowed to escalate and get out of control.
Anxiety may be triggered by all sorts of things we encounter in the world around us. For example, in the current cost of living crisis, more than a third of adults report feeling anxious about their financial situation.
It’s likely that all lawyers will have experienced anxiety to some degree, at some stage during their career.
Lawyers can be vulnerable to mental health issues
The nature of the legal profession and legal work – competitive, hierarchical, deadline and target driven – can result in a highly pressurised environment which takes its toll on mental health.
A lawyer’s job is inevitably client focused, but not only do clients need to be kept happy they can also lean heavily on their advisers as they experience stressful and emotional events such as buying a house, getting divorced, dealing with a bereavement, or being made redundant.
All this means that lawyers (and those who employ them, who have a legal duty to take reasonable care of their employees’ health and safety) need to be constantly vigilant when it comes to mental health.
How can we help?
Legal work is susceptible to ebbs and flows which can be difficult to influence or control. For example, in litigation, if a court makes a ruling as to disclosure of documents by a certain date, this must be met.
Where law firms have staff shortages due to the currently tight labour market, those who remain come under more pressure to work harder to fill the gap. This increases the risk that they will leave or be absent due to sickness, exacerbating the problem still further. In addition, a desire to grow the business may result in work levels increasing before the workforce has had a chance to catch up.
No one wants to lose staff to burn-out or long-term ill health. At Global BPO we have been helping our clients to keep their teams safe, happy and productive by supporting them with our highly expert personnel. We can put help in place quickly and we are entirely flexible, for example, we scale down as quickly as we scale up once a surge of work has passed.
We have a wide range of legal personnel, from partner level specialists to paralegals and legal PAs to deliver a bespoke solution for your short, medium and long-term staffing needs.
We assist with a wide range of BPO and LPO tasks such as document production and checking, e-discovery, data subject access requests, risk and compliance management and PA support.
Talk to us
For more information and to find out how we could assist you, contact our Client Manager, Suzie Young, at: suzie@globalbpo.co.uk. We are always happy to chat on a confidential basis and with no obligation.
