Neil Sands
Susan Rowe
High-flying lawyer Susan Rowe had it all – almost a decade as partner at a national law firm, a happy home life, a wide circle of friends and a shoe collection to die for.
But under the surface, the stresses of work and caring for an elderly parent were eating away at her, not to mention the lingering, unacknowledged impacts of a concussion sustained in a skiing accident years before.
It manifested in poor sleep, irritability and weight loss. As Christchurch-based Rowe admits: “I was in effect speeding towards a very large brick wall.”
She smashed into the wall one long weekend after “robust” discussions with a colleague about work responsibilities, finding herself unable to function and crying for hours.
The breakdown led to a diagnosis of clinical depression that would change the direction of Rowe’s life. It brought her stellar career as a lawyer to a juddering halt and kickstarted a quest to make mental wellbeing a core element of the legal profession.
She said lawyers struggling with mental health issues can face silence, stigma and structural barriers in the workplace, where an old-fashioned, suck-it-up attitude often prevails.
“I’d describe the conversation as kind of ‘in the room’, but we’ve probably got a way to go. That’s the polite way of putting it,” Rowe says when asked for her assessment of how the profession deals with mental wellbeing.
“We’re starting to have the conversations and normalise them. And I think the next stage is ‘well, what can we do that’s effective?’”
‘People had no idea’
For Rowe, who is researching the way law firms manage mental health risks as part of her PhD studies at the University of Canterbury, sharing her own story has been a way of encouraging other lawyers to speak up.
When diagnosed with depression, and during her earlier rehabilitation from the skiing concussion, she felt a need to continue working as the conditions were “invisible” illnesses, lacking the physical symptoms of something like a broken leg.
There was also the fear, particularly for a woman, of being seen as weak. “Most people I worked with had no idea,” she said. “With depression, you present as if there’s absolutely nothing wrong.
“People have a mental picture that you’re crouched in the corner, rocking, wearing grey tracksuit pants or something, when actually you’re just presenting and going to work like normal.”
Rowe sought help and tried various strategies to cope at work without success, eventually receiving professional advice to take a year off.
“I let my psychiatrists and psychologists talk to one another, and they said ‘you need to stop, you need to stop next week, and we want you to stop for a long period of time’.”
She said taking a year away from the law was the hardest decision of her life. Being a lawyer was central to her identity, a role that Rowe admits she at times prioritised over others in her life such as mother, partner and friend.
After 12 months’ absence from Buddle Findlay, where she had worked for almost 30 years, Rowe tried to ease back into work on a part-time basis, only to find old demons resurfaced.
The firm’s management was supportive throughout her struggles, she says. It wasn’t one law firm that was the problem – it was the culture and structure of the legal profession as a whole.
Profession in crisis
After reluctantly accepting she could no longer be a lawyer, Rowe said she turned her attention to research, in part inspired by a study that the charity Life Squared Trust carried out, which found a third of New Zealand lawyers and law students suffer psychological distress.
Rowe said the study “clearly showed our profession is in a mental health crisis”, a belief that was reinforced by the overwhelming response when she posted on social media platform LinkedIn about what she had gone through.
“It had the most amazing reaction,” she said. “More than 800 people liked or commented, and I got all these DMs from lawyers whom I didn’t know, telling me about their own stories and saying thank you for putting your hand up and saying that you’ve experienced it.”
Rowe says her willingness to expose her own vulnerabilities and show that a senior lawyer at partner level can struggle to cope meant others in the profession were more willing to be open with her about their own issues.
Her background as a leader in a big law firm has also given her hard-edged insights into what mental health strategies are effective in a legal workplace.
She talks of “well-washing”, a similar concept to greenwashing but involving wellbeing initiatives that tick boxes but have no real prospect of making a difference in a law-firm environment.
“I know the structural issues within the profession, the organisational and economic realities that drive decision-making in law firms,” she said. “I understand the business pressures, the billing model constraints and the productivity demands.
“I’ve attended many well-meaning training sessions that were not geared to the realities of practice. I understand the difference between interventions that look good on paper and those that might actually work.”
AI offers chance for a reset
Rowe’s doctorate, which is expected to take at least another two years, involves a multi-phase research into mental health in the legal profession.
“I am passionate about using my experience to enact change that protects future lawyers,” she said. “My goal is that new generations of lawyers don’t face the same isolation at work that I experienced.”
She is still mapping out the contours of the problem, with the ultimate aim of providing a blueprint to help the profession take a more proactive approach to risk management.
However she said some stress factors at law firms were already well known, including billable hours, budgets and poor leadership.
Another is the culture within the profession, with Rowe saying non-lawyers are often genuinely shocked when she describes the conditions and expectations placed on lawyers.
Billable hours, and the related topic of budgets, are changing because of artificial intelligence (AI) –“that’s a whole issue in itself,” says Rowe.
Some law firms are already ditching the billable hour and Rowe said the emergence of the technology offered a chance to reset cultural practices in the profession.
“If we’re going to take away billable hours, I think it’s an opportunity to start factoring in some behavioural measures that are not just focused on financial output,” she said.
“For example, if you’ve made partner, you shouldn’t just be producing excellent financial output. You’ve also got good leadership policies and are doing what’s needed to train staff.”
Rowe is asking senior law firm representatives with knowledge of their organisation’s health and safety practices to fill out a 30-minute questionnaire.
“Participation is confidential, and an organisation’s name is not recorded or reported. No person reading the research will be able to identify the respondent, their organisation or the risk management practices their organisation uses,” she said.
The questionnaire and an information sheet about the research can be found here. It will be open to responses until October 15.
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