While lawyers’ mental wellbeing has long been sidelined and kept behind closed doors, Tammi McDermott has warned the profession that prioritising it can no longer wait – and the only way forward is to put people before billable hours, or risk losing the profession itself.
Speaking on a recent episode of The Protégé Podcast, Tammi McDermott, founder of Lawnch and a board member of the mental health charity LIVIN, urged the legal profession to stop treating mental health as a hidden issue and take bold, immediate action to support wellbeing – stressing that it can no longer be postponed.
In the same episode, she stressed that mental health literacy has become an essential skill for young lawyers as the pressures of a legal career continue to take a devastating toll on wellbeing.
Even as discussions about mental health in the legal profession become more open, and law societies launch initiatives to support wellbeing, McDermott warned that too often, it remains a hidden issue, kept behind closed doors when it should be at the forefront of action.
“I still feel as though it’s a push to the side, locked away [from] conversation. Law societies are taking steps to address it. But in my experience, they’re not taking enough of a step to encourage conversations,” she said.
McDermott also criticised law firms for reducing wellbeing initiatives to surface-level gestures, stressing that while these steps are well-intentioned, they are far from sufficient.
“Owners of law firms think that by having someone who’s gone and undertaken a mental health certificate, so that they can say they’re a mental health first aid worker [is enough]; that’s not enough,” she said.
One of the key barriers McDermott highlighted is the profession’s entrenched reliance on billable hours and relentless client pressures, which dominate daily life and leave little room for prioritising mental wellbeing.
“It’s still something that’s pushed aside, not spoken about, because in fairness to the profession, to address it would mean taking time out from attending to client needs, which we don’t have a lot of capacity to do,” she said.
“You have to actively carve out time and prioritise it, and if you aren’t prioritising it, it won’t happen.”
For McDermott, the only way to tackle the profession’s mental health crisis is to fundamentally reorder priorities – placing the wellbeing of lawyers and employees above billable hours, client demands, and revenue targets.
“The only way that you can progress is to prioritise employees above clients and billable hours. That is the only way to prioritise mental wellbeing,” she said.
“Until such time employees are put first and above client needs and above billable hours, above the dollars, we will not be able to create an environment and a profession where we can reduce that 97 per cent statistic. It’s the only way to do it.”
By truly embracing a people-first culture, McDermott emphasised, firms not only build a stronger, more human workplace but also inspire client trust and drive lasting success.
“If you prioritise your staff, then you will have an environment where clients end up ultimately coming first, and you’ll ultimately end up in an environment where the dollars will come through as well,” she said.
“But if we don’t prioritise our staff, what are we selling? We’re selling time. If we aren’t prioritising our staff, we won’t have a profession. Even from the human being element, we need to care for one another, part of being part of a community.
“We all need to take care of each other. So take care of your team, take care of yourself, prioritise your wellbeing as well.”
One of the simplest ways to embed this culture, McDermott urged, is for leaders to open the door to conversations about mental health – creating a space where staff feel safe to speak up when they need to, even if they don’t step through immediately.
“The easiest way to do it is to start having conversations with your team, with your staff, and start encouraging the conversations. You can only open up the door. If people choose to walk through it, then they can,” she said.
“But if you open the door, it enables them to walk through it when they need to. So even if they don’t start responding to your conversation openers at the outset, you’ve created an opportunity for them to speak to you about it when they need to, and we need to be able to open those doors to start the conversations.”
