The Forgotten Requirement: Happiness

This won’t be a shock to any of you, but law is a stressful profession. It’s also a profession disproportionately susceptible to depression and substance abuse. The American Addiction Center (AAC) reports that while depression affects 6.7% of the American population, about 45% of lawyers experience depression during the course of their careers. Pause for a second and think about that – it’s a truly grotesque number. Almost half of all the lawyers in the United States will suffer depression during their careers. Of these, about 12% admit to having had suicidal thoughts.

Depression and addiction are often linked, and in a study earlier this year 21% of attorneys reported that they suffered from alcohol addiction, and another 9% from addiction to prescription drugs. The problem is not localized to the United States. In 2016, one in five lawyers in Britain reported that their alcohol or drug use was problematic. Studies show that in Canada, the rate of alcohol addiction in lawyers is between 15% and 24%. A 2009 study in Australia revealed that 60% of respondents, who were lawyers and law students, had moderate to high levels of psychological distress. In a later study in 2014, 32% of lawyer respondents were found to engage in problematic alcohol consumption.

These high levels of substance abuse and mental health issues should be of concern to law firms around the world. The adage that a happy workforce is a productive workforce is not an old wives’ tale; a study by the Social Market Foundation found that happy employees are up to 20% more productive than unhappy employees. Forbes has reported that company valuations and stock prices are also affected by happiness – companies that are regarded as good places to work are valued significantly higher than those that are not.

And it’s not an accident that statistics for substance abuse and depression are worse in legal environments. Many lawyers suffering from these issues directly associate them with the lifestyle inherent to the practice of law. In the United States, 75% of the lawyers who reported having a substance abuse issue could trace the problem back to law school. The AAC has commented that tight deadlines and a heavy workload make those in the legal profession more prone to substance abuse than the general population. A study by the University of New South Wales in Australia found that a culture of over-work contributed to the problem, with lawyers frequently spending more than 12 hours a day at work – almost double the national average. Lawyers tend to score higher in pessimistic thinking, perfectionism and skepticism, qualities that can make you a better lawyer but are also highly correlated with depression. In other words, even before a lawyer enters the profession, the very qualities that are likely to make them successful are those that also predispose them to depression.

And I’m sure we can all think of other reasons the statistics for depression and substance abuse are disproportionately high amongst lawyers. Billing in six minute increments is a process that is fundamentally reductive to one’s sense of humanity.

Given these numbers, one would think that any action taken in a law firm to promote happiness and well-being would be celebrated - and indeed many firms have responded to the statistics by implementing wellness programs and offering employee counselling programs. But programs such as these are no more than mere lip service if the fundamental processes involved in practicing law are not evaluated through the same lens.

Legal technology, or any technology for that matter, has the power to make life better for people who use it. Yet when we look at bringing in new technology to law firms, even technology that is aimed at reducing the time it takes to do something, we rarely consider whether it will make people’s lives better. We talk about efficiency gains, but we discuss those in terms of freeing up low-value or non-billable time so that associates can instead spend that time on higher value work – in other words, we continue to view the associate as a worker in a money factory, looking at how their time might be better spent to improve profit margins.

At a time when there are tools available that genuinely have the ability to improve the lifestyle of people already prone to mental illness, we should be including in our product requirements the question of whether a tool has the potential to restore balance and bring happiness. In addition to technical functionality and efficiency gains, we should be rating tools on their ability to decrease stress levels. We should be asking whether this new technology will measurably contribute to our lawyers’ happiness and well-being so that they stay well, have more balance in their lives, and are thus more productive, more engaged employees, who are likely to stay and contribute positively to the culture (and revenue!) of the firm.

Anand Upadhye, VP of business development for Casetext (an AI-driven research platform that recently launched a tool called Compose, to automate the brief-writing process) is no stranger to this kind of thinking. “Too often, technology is framed in a coldly metrics-based way – ‘use this tool and increase realization rates and efficiency’, or ‘use this tool and avoid X number of errors per Y amount of time billed,’” Anand says. “What the discussion around this topic misses is the core human element: either technology can eliminate drudgery and increase time spent on creative, interpretive activities, or it can’t.”

Like empathy, I anticipate that firms will shy away from this language because it is seen as “soft,” almost embarrassing when used in a professional context. This is borne out by Ryan Alshak, CEO and founder of Ping (an automated timekeeping solution for lawyers), who says that his company’s core message around giving lawyers agency back over their time is “rarely passed through with the fidelity we want.”

Haley Altman, the General Manager of Transaction Management at Litera Microsystems, left legal practice to start Doxly, a transaction management tool now known as Transact in the Litera suite of products. Although she loved being a lawyer, Altman says she did not love the late nights in the office. Through Doxly, she sought to streamline the transaction process but also improve the attorney experience. “We wanted to free them from the office and give them time back,” says Altman. “I think some of that message does make it to the attorneys after the technology purchase, but not exactly in the way we always intend. Yes, we can save many hours on creating closing books that do not get billed - but it also saves the mental tax on the attorneys .”

The business processes of a law firm, as in other companies, are focused on hard numbers. Messaging about wellness and balance and diversity generally stays siloed in one area of a firm, without being carried through to the way that the firm in fact operates. But in order for the wellness message to be truly transformational, it must be operationalized.

The problem is not that these messages aren’t being developed in the first place. Look at the marketing strategies for many legaltech tools on the market today and you will see frequent examples of human-centered communication. Bernie Toledo, Head of Marketing for ZERØ (an AI powered email management and timekeeping tool), says that one of the company’s core values is empathy. Long before the ZERØ app ends up in the hands of lawyers themselves, Toledo’s team starts by speaking to lawyers in a one-on-one context to understand their needs. On the back of these discussions, the team has created two blog series that deal regularly with issues of mental health and burn-out.

The problem instead lies with the way the message is altered when it hits the law firm environment. Although adoption is cited as one of the most consistent challenges faced by IT, KM and innovation departments, new technology is rarely evaluated, purchased or promoted internally on the basis of wellness. Alshak thinks this is due to the internal division of labor. “In enterprise, the buyer and user are bifurcated. Firms (the buyers) care about the brass tacks – increased revenue, actionable data. Users, on the other hand, care about improving their quality of life.”

But, as Ryan Steadman, the Chief Revenue Officer of ZERØ says, “fundamentally, embracing the right blend of technology should reduce some stress levels and cognitive friction.”

This requirement has never been more important than it is now. Here we all are, during this surreal period of history, having to relate to each other as fellow humans in the midst of a crisis. Every day we are making eye contact with people through close-up video meetings that carry us into the homes of colleagues we previously viewed as remote, perhaps intimidating. It should serve as an opportunity and a wake-up call, to relate to one another properly as human beings rather than worker bees.

Alshak agrees, commenting that “if COVID has taught us anything, it's that time is finite and more precious than ever. How we choose to spend it is how we choose to live our lives. I want to frame tech that helps us choose where to spend time as the most important tech there is.”

For those of you cringing as you read this, remember that employee well-being ties back to the numbers. Talking about happiness in the context of technology is not eliminating the focus on the bottom line - it’s just changing the angle of that focus. Learning now how to interact in a way that genuinely promotes our collective well-being will serve us in the future. It’s a learning we should carry through not just to our teams and our practice groups, but to our clients.

Last weekend, Alshak sent an email message to his remote workforce to remind them of the company’s mission. Six months after Ping was born, his mother’s dormant brain tumor returned “with a vengeance” and he moved home to look after her. It changed Alshak forever. He says: “Life taught me a paradoxical but life-changing lesson through that experience: time is not created equal. When you are aware of the finiteness of time, time becomes more valuable. A minute with her was worth a million minutes doing anything else.” That realization altered the way Ryan viewed Ping. “After she passed, I realized Ping wasn’t about timekeeping or billing models, it was about giving people their time back so they can spend it with the people they love. Because that time matters more than anything else.”

Next time you are evaluating technology that addresses a use case for your attorneys, add one more question to your list of requirements: will this tool improve the lives of my lawyers? If you select a tool that meets business and technical requirements but also fulfills the happiness factor, you may just end up with a more engaged, productive workforce. And if you carry that message through to your users, you may also have greater success driving adoption.

Will this bring happiness?