As the lawyers around me grapple with technological challenge, poor internet connectivity and children running around their phone court appearances, there’s one overwhelming change that this pandemic has brought to our profession that I am hoping is here to stay: let’s call it collective and professional humanity.

Let’s be honest… the legal profession has been long associated with all sorts of things, and while kindness, empathy and compassion might have made the list of “desirable skills” for a lawyer in 2020, I am not sure they were at the top!

The biggest change I have seen in our industry in my 20 years has happened in the space of a few weeks and it isn’t the computers on living room tables. It is the simple way I am seeing and hearing my colleagues – usually “opponents” – drop the pretence and ask of each other ‘How are you?’ and actually pause to hear the answer. 

There is a humanness to our way of work right now that could hold the answer to really starting to solve the challenges that I call “lawyer unhappiness” for the future.

For two decades now we have seen the research that reminds us that the rates of psychological ill-health in law are too high. The causes of that stress are many but at the core, we can drill it down to a few simple things – a culture of overwork, high pressure, the personality type law attracts and the elephant in the room “the other lawyer”! 

One of the biggest drivers of psychological ill-health in law is us – lawyers – and how we act, react and respond to and with each other.

For years I have heard the many reasons why flexible work, online solutions and remote work just couldn’t cut it in law and yet in the space of a week all of those challenges were fast overcome when our livelihoods (or some might say the bottom line) suddenly really mattered.

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And while I am counting the days until I can turn up at work again and talk, in person, with real-life people who are not on my computer screen, what I do hope “sticks” from this time is the way lawyers are approaching their work with their clients and each other.

And so, in part I want to say thank you to this thing called COVID-19 and the pandemic it has caused. As in the space of just a few weeks it has up-ended our world, but in doing so I have seen more kindness, compassion and empathy within our profession than ever before and that can only be a good thing for our future.

When you pick up the phone or jump on that call today, listen and smile at the chat and banter and imagine a world where that might stay and we remain people first and lawyers second even when we return to “normal”.

Clarissa Rayward is the director of Brisbane Family Law Centre.

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