Clarico Reacts: Half of Women in Law Say Their Working Patterns Are Unsustainable

Clarico Reacts is a series where we publish our thoughts on new publications and content relevant to our favourite topic, People at Work. This post looks at new research from the Next 100 Years project, supported by LawCare, RPC and Goodbody Wellness, reported by Irish Legal News, which surveyed over 500 women working in legal services in England and Wales. You can read the full article here.

The headline statistic stopped us in our tracks: half of women in law say their current working pattern is unsustainable for their long-term health. Not their wellbeing in the abstract. Their health. And 67% have considered leaving their job or taking a career break because of it. When we read on, the picture only got starker, 85% had experienced a health or wellbeing issue in the last five years that impacted their work, with stress, burnout and anxiety leading the list.

Though this article focuses on the legal profession, in our experience, this is a profession-shaped example of a much wider problem. We see the same patterns across financial services, consultancy and other high-pressure corporate environments. Long hours, billable targets, an always-on culture and an unspoken expectation that competence means never showing strain. Law happens to measure and publish its own pain more rigorously than most industries which is precisely why this data is so valuable. It gives language and numbers to something many professionals across many sectors feel every day but rarely say out loud.

Below are some of the findings that struck us most at Clarico, and what we think needs to change.

The Model is Flawed, Not the People

The report calls for a review of billable hours models, and we'd go further: the current model in many corporate and professional services environments confuses input with value. Hours logged are treated as a proxy for commitment, when in reality they are often just a proxy for unsustainable working patterns. People are not falling short because they aren't doing enough. They are exhausted because the model itself is asking too much.

This distinction matters enormously, because it changes where responsibility sits. When a talented professional burns out, breaks down, or quietly exits the profession, the easy narrative is that they "couldn't hack it." The real story is usually the opposite they gave everything to a structure that was never built to sustain them, and it cost them their health to find that out.

A Tragedy of Talent

What sits with us most about this research is the scale of loss it points to. Two-thirds of women in this survey have considered leaving their job or taking a career break for health and wellbeing reasons. That is not a footnote. That is a profession haemorrhaging exactly the people it has spent years training, developing and promising a future to.

And the cruelty in this is twofold. Talented people are leaving roles they may have loved, in fields they spent years qualifying for. And many of them are leaving while still believing they personally failed, that they should have coped better, pushed through, been more resilient, when their body had already told them, often quite literally, that it could not continue. Losing talent this way isn't just a tragedy for the individual. It is an enormous, avoidable cost to organisations and to the profession as a whole.

Support That Exists on Paper, But Not in Practice

One of the more sobering parts of the report is that support structures are often already in place, employee assistance programmes, counselling services, mental health first aiders, flexible working policies and yet 43% of women still don't feel they can openly discuss health and wellbeing issues at work without facing negative consequences.

This tells us something important: access to support is not the same as a culture of support. A wellness benefit sitting in a staff handbook does nothing if people are afraid that using it will mark them out as "not coping" or "not committed." As the report's authors put it, good intentions and wellness programmes alone are not enough the underlying architecture of hours, billing models and cultural expectations has to change too.

What Next?

So where does that leave employers, and where does it leave individuals navigating this right now?

For individuals, our message is simple: feeling like you are not doing enough while you are physically and mentally breaking down is not a sign of personal failure. It is a sign that you need a safe space to think, to be honest about what is happening, and to figure out what you actually want, without judgement and without it being filtered through workplace politics. This is exactly the space Clarico's 1:1 coaching creates. Whether you are trying to stay in your current role sustainably, considering a career break, or quietly exploring what life after law (or after any high-pressure corporate role) could look like, coaching gives you somewhere to think clearly before you have to decide anything. You can find out more about our Career Coaching here.

But individual support can only do so much if the environment around people doesn't change too. This is where employers carry real responsibility, and real opportunity. Practical, tailored support, not generic wellness perks, combined with genuine cultural change, is what actually moves the needle. At Clarico, our Workshops are designed specifically to help employers understand, practically and legally, how to support employees through exactly these pressures: sustainable working patterns, health-related leave, return-to-work support and building a culture where raising a struggle isn't treated as a liability.

A few starting points we'd recommend to any employer reading the report and recognising their own organisation in it:

• Audit your model, not just your policies. Review whether your billable hours or output expectations are realistically achievable on a sustainable basis not just on paper, but in practice for the people actually doing the work.

• Train your managers, not just your HR team. Line managers are usually the first point of contact when someone is struggling. If they aren't equipped to respond well, even the best policy will fail at the first hurdle.

• Make support visible and normalised. If people fear consequences for using the support that's available, the support isn't really available. Leadership needs to be seen using and endorsing it.

• Build in structured return-to-work and leave support. Whether after burnout, illness, or family leave, the transition back into a role is a critical, vulnerable moment that deserves proper structure, not a sink-or-swim re-entry.

This research is a wake-up call, but it is also an opportunity. Employers who get ahead of this, who build genuinely sustainable, supportive working cultures rather than reactive wellness add-ons, will be the ones who keep their best people. Clarico partners with both individuals and employers to make that real. If you'd like to talk to us about coaching, or about bringing one of our workshops into your organisation, get in touch via our contact form or at hello@claricocoaching.com.

Read the full Irish Legal News article here.