Feeling good in the legal profession

We’re thrilled to announce that Hughes & Lewis Legal has again been recognised as a Leading Queensland Worker’s Compensation Firm (Defendant) in this year’s Doyles Guide. 

Thank you to all of our supporters who took the time to nominate us and to our whole team for all their great work!

Of course everyone likes to be recognised for their work but as lawyers we tend to be our own harshest critics - so we’re particularly needy in this regard! It’s not generally known in the wider community but the legal profession is one whose members seem to have an unusually high incidence of mental health problems.

3 women and 3 men smiling and standing

Depression, anxiety and burnout are incredibly common and they don’t discriminate – not even our best and brightest, most respected and experienced senior lawyers are immune. As a result, we lose a steady trickle of good people from our ranks every year.

So why of all people are lawyers hit so hard by mental health issues? There’s no doubt a lawyer joke in there somewhere about whether being a lawyer drives you crazy or whether you have to be crazy to be a lawyer in the first place.. but in all seriousness, there’s a bit more to it than that.

I actually think it’s a combination of things:

  • There’s a lot of conflict in the job, especially in the litigation field – we essentially fight other people’s battles for them every day and sometimes those battles can get very personal

  • We spend a lot of time with clients who are in a bad place, and as humans (yes, we actually are!) it’s hard not to share their suffering

  • No matter how skilled we are at our jobs or how hard we try, we still feel personally responsible on those occasions when we don’t get the result that we feel our clients deserve

  • No system is perfect so we inevitably see injustices happen occasionally – just because we’re a part of the system doesn’t mean we have the power to fix every part of it

  • As a rule, we lawyers are typically competitive, perfectionist (OK, maybe just a little bit insecure?) types who don’t cope very well with people finding out we’re not perfect after all!

Now I’m under no illusions about how much sympathy people might have for lawyers, but the thing to remember is that a lawyer who is struggling with mental health issues may well make a serious mistake that costs their client dearly.

We need to do everything we can to prevent that and I’m happy to say the Queensland Law Society is doing sterling work in this area. 

There is now so much more support freely available for lawyers who are struggling, which means fewer mistakes being made and frankly, clients being better served. So much more sensible than back in the bad old days when we all just lived in denial about mental health.

So you’ll see our whole team has just come back from the Society’s Annual Mental Health Breakfast for 2025. 

We went in 2024 and we’ll be back in 2026 – we’re determined to keep looking after our mental health so we can keep looking after our clients for a lot longer yet!

About the author

Jason Lewis is a Director of Hughes and Lewis Legal

Contact
jason@hughesandlewis.com.au

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