Being “super busy” is seen as “a badge of honour”: how one law firm is challenging around-the-clock culture

We established our firm in April 2020 with the idea that we didn’t have to do things in the way we’d always done them. We wanted to have a culture from the outset that was sustainable, in terms of being a profitable business doing excellent work, but also enabling the people in the firm to live and work in a healthy way. We didn’t want to pay lip service to ‘wellbeing’ – it’s a key part of how the firm operates.

We specialise in public law and human rights. The facts of our cases can be distressing. As well as this, we’re often working with systems that are flawed, which can compound the distress.

Every month, all of the fee earners are invited to attend our monthly reflective practice with a psychologist. That's a forum to share how the work is affecting us, to talk a bit about how we're feeling about it – whether that's casework or the wider business.

This reflective practice came about because we were discussing vicarious trauma in the profession. We developed many of our policies through discussion as a team, noticing examples of good practice elsewhere, and trial and error to some extent.

Vicarious trauma can affect us all. Solicitors don’t tend to receive any formal training to manage the effects of this. Only in the last five years or so have I seen it properly discussed across the profession.

Prior to that, it just wasn’t really talked about. You might have had individual conversations here and there, but only relatively recently has it been taken more seriously. I’ve been fortunate to work with supportive people throughout my career, and we're in a position where we can do something productive to help our clients. But sometimes it feels like the system is broken and we’re constantly fighting against that.

We can work it out

We’ve got the freedom now to do things differently and try things out. Since May 2024, we have adopted a firm-wide nine-day fortnight, for the same pay.

This autumn, we’re continuing this within the second UK pilot of the four-day week, launched by the 4 Day Week Campaign and flexible working experts Timewise.

We haven’t just dropped a working day once a fortnight. It had to go alongside firm-wide shifts in our working practices:

1. focus time is blocked out for four hours a day: we’ve blocked out time twice a day, when we prioritise chargeable work and avoid unnecessary communication. This means that we can do high quality work with less distraction – with a view to supporting an even greater number of clients who need our advice.
2. more consideration around how and when we communicate with each other: this was a massive issue with email, Microsoft Teams, and other channels taking up time and energy. We look at the level of urgency and purpose of each communication to determine the right tool to use. Internally, we try and limit the use of email – taking care over subject-headings and specifying actions and response times.
3. clear requirements for a virtual or face-to-face meeting: we are much stricter about the frequency and purpose of meetings. A lot of us work remotely and so there was potential for meetings to fill up the diary.
4. using technology to streamline or eliminate unproductive tasks and increase focus: we’re using various tools to support us, seeing what works, and asking the team for feedback. The Pomodoro technique is a favourite, to help with focus.

These measures prioritise chargeable work. It’s a team endeavour. Improved efficiencies free up time and energy so everyone can take part in the nine-day fortnight at the same time as giving an excellent service to our clients. We ask how we can support each other to do our most valuable work, rather than how we get the most time out of our employees.

Traditionally, a firm might introduce efficiencies simply to increase profit. There’s a lot of research which suggests that our approach leads to people being more motivated at work and that it results in less sick leave, and better retention of staff. The majority of organisations who took part in the first UK four-day week pilot in 2022 reported that business performance and productivity was maintained. Our aim is for it to benefit the business and benefit our clients.

Trust and flexibility go hand in hand

There have been plenty of times people haven’t taken their allotted fortnightly day off because of business and client needs, so they’ll almost always take it another time. While the business comes first, we trust each other and check in every week to check if people are taking it, and if not, why not.

When we introduced an unlimited annual leave policy, we realised people were taking less than they would have taken had there been a limit. So, we put in a minimum expectation, and we’re flexible over and above that. No-one is taking three months off at a time. We like to have this flexibility so no-one is counting down to their last day if they need a bit more.

We are trying to challenge the long-standing culture in law of extreme busyness and stress as a sign of success. If a lawyer is asked ‘how are you?’ and replies ‘super busy’, it’s seen as a badge of honour. We work hard and we expect to be busy, but this isn’t how we measure success. If we’re regularly getting emails from you late at night, we don’t reward that as the industry has typically done in the past – that’s one of our red flags.

We still have the traditional firm goals – to run a profitable business, ensure we’re compliant and to do excellent work – and we want to flip some of the old ways of working on their head. I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive.

Additional photographs: Jennifer Wright