Solutions for Law Graduates

More important for the wellbeing and performance of law graduates than the current underpayment crisis the industry is embroiled in, is a holistic approach to their professional education. The issue of ‘am I being paid enough’ is just another of many indications that the industry is riddled with lawyers in it for the wrong reasons. We need lawyers not focused so much on the extrinsic rewards but on understanding which part of the practice of law fulfills their internal desires. Both performance and happiness rely on the latter.

The most common issues that arise from employers in the big law firms are that whilst graduates arrive theoretically apt, they’re severely lacking the practicalities of life and law. Long hours are a reality of legal practice, and if you want to be the at the top of your profession, long hours are a reality of life. To ensure graduates can perform the long hours when needed they need to be educated in self-awareness and not just rewarded with more pay.

We need graduate programmes that provide team members with understanding in what they love about the practice of law; how and when to fulfill other aspects of life to ensure high-performance and long hours when necessary; and guidance to realise that in these moments of pressure and extra effort there are more benefits being developed than that of punching a timecard.

Internal fulfillment

A purpose driven workforce is a powerful workforce and the avenue to ensure purpose in your workplace is to guide your members to find the aspects of their work they love to do. One pathway to uncover these drivers is to find where personal values overlap with the values of the company. Clarity in the ‘why’ of what we do has been shown to improve quality of output by 69%.

Holistic Approach to High-Performance

Another key to increased productivity is by ensuring our graduates understand how to renew and recover. High cognitive performance at work is reliant on spending an appropriate amount of time focused on building physical, emotional and spiritual capacities as well. Even 100+ hour workweeks are possible, so long as there is time to recover. People who focus on recovery as well as output have been seen to improve decision making by 30-40% as well as increase their ability to remain mentally resilient.

Building Mental Resilience

Mental resilience or grit can be developed by exposing ourselves to moments that need them. The gruelling hours that are sometimes needed in those early years of a legal career are fundamental for growing graduates’ mental toughness muscle, and in an industry like law where every graduate is the smartest person in the room, those who have developed and continue to grow their grit are 60% more likely to succeed than their peers.

Graduates need be remunerated fairly for their work, but in discussing the current turmoil of legal graduates pay the more pertinent issue to be addressed is are we educating them in the realities of a life in law. The industry needs programmes that highlights what they love about their practice, how a mix of recovery and gruelling output improves performance, and that exposure to higher-pressure moments provides far more benefits than another zero on the payslip.

Michael Marshall