Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer has found itself at the centre of a media storm over the death of one of its newly-qualified lawyers, Matthew Courtney, who fell to his death at the Tate Modern last Friday (9 February).
The magic circle firm has come in for harsh criticism over the tragedy from a number of daily papers, which have said the lawyer was overworked and stressed.
Courtney joined Freshfields as a trainee in August 2004 and qualified last year into the intellectual property (IP) department. The 27-year-old went to the Tate Modern after work last Friday and was pronounced dead at the scene after falling from a stairwell leading to the seventh floor restaurant.
The police have said that there are no suspicious circumstances surrounding Courtney’s death, although it is understood an investigation is ongoing. It has been claimed that Courtney had recently been in talks with the firm to reduce his workload but Freshfields declined to comment.
A front-page report in the Evening Standard today (14 February) carries the headline "Stressed lawyer plunges to death" while one national paper claims Courtney would have been expected to work 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for weeks on end.
If these hours were sustained, he would be working well over 4,000 hours a year.
One IP partner at a rival magic circle firm commented: “I can’t speak for Freshfields but I wouldn’t think any lawyer is expected to work 16 hours every day. Freshfields is a responsible employer and any periods where someone was working long hours would be balanced by quieter times. I would expect the average number of hours billed by [an IP lawyer] in that situation to be between 1,600 and 1,800 a year.”
Freshfields does not have working hours targets; however it has partners responsible for work allocation, who meet with associates weekly to discuss workload. Partners also meet weekly to review the capacity of all fee earners. It is understood that Courtney was not working significantly more hours than fellow associates at his level.
The firm issued a statement saying: “The partners and staff of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer are deeply saddened by the tragic death of our friend and colleague, Matthew Courtney, on Friday 9 February.
“Matt was a terrific person and a very promising lawyer. His death is a shock to us all, and he will be sadly missed. Our thoughts and sympathies are with his family and friends.”
Talkback: Is the national press being too quick to judge Freshfields? Click here to have your say.
It's about time the public finds out what working as a lawyer is like. Partners expect lawyers to work all hours, have no life outside the office in exchange for the promise of partnership one day...the only thing is that for most of us partnership never comes. It is a scandal that lawyers have to work beyond 6pm for free.
There is no question some grossly irresponsible pieces have been written about the possible cause and tragedy of this young man's death. It is much too soon to point an accusing finger, the sort of thing we almost (but still reluctantly) come to expect from the gutter tabloids...but not respected newspapers, surely?
I believe The Times has published an article commenting on the hours etc worked by the poor chap.
I recently left Frehsfields and agree the [national newspaper] reporting was hysterical and completely innaccurate. The motivation of the reporters was clear from the irrelevant quotation of partner salaries. Freshfields, in my experience, were fair employers though I would say that the poster who thought lawyers working after 6 (on at least 55k p.a.)were doing so for free has failed to grasp what being a professional in a client service industry means.
If IP lawyers are doing 16hrs a day, seven days every week, the corporate lawyers are doing 26 hours a day, eight days a week. That's impressive.
I know lawyers in London that work these sorts of hours. I've done it myself for months on end (in fact on one occassion I was MADE to work three days straight without leaving the office except to go to the loo, and got no time off in lieu at all).
The partners' income is entirely relevant in this, because the partners who make the most money are, generally speaking, at the firms where associates are worked to the bone. The ONLY reason associates are made to work such crazy hours is because partners want their profits to go up.
I think it's sad that lawyers on this thread and some legal journals have been criticising the press for supporting the apparently over worked associate as against the big law firms. Even if 16 hours a day every day is innacurate in this case, it still remains the fact , and is shameful for the profession, that associates are forced to work obscene and most likely ILLEGAL hours.
I think the media perhaps has been a little quick to link the hours this poor guy was working and his death. However, anything that helps to expose partner greed at some of the top firms is fine by me.
One must not diminish the tragedy of the situation. Nor, tempting as it may be, is it possible to make a connection between this young man's tragic end and the type of career he chose.
In any case, what the papers fail to note is that choosing to work at a firm such as Freshfields is just that; an informed choice of money, stimulation and prestige obtained at the cost of long hours, personal costs and fierce competition.
My father was a surgeon and every time he complained about a good night's sleep, a theater or a family outing being ruined by receiving an emergency call, my mother said, "You knew that when you went to medical school."
There are no secrets in the recruiting process. Bright young people know what they are in for at the City and Wall Street firms. Many decide it's for them and many decide it isn't.
It's about time the Health and Safety Executive started looking in to the mental health impact of the long hours culture at City firms (mine included). A prosecution might finally make them take the issue seriously.
It's not possible for anyone to come to any conclusions about the cause of this chap's death. It never will be. I hope for Freshfields' sake that the call received moments before he fell/jumped from the balcony was not work-related. It seems at least clear that this guy was having problems with his workload and, if that was the case, then that would come with certain duties towards an employee, which would include ensuring that he wasn't being called up unexpectedly on a Friday night with further demands on his time.
I think that people in the legal services industry need to get a grip. Firstly, £55k a year in london for a highly intelligent Oxford graduate is not a lot of money. My advice to anyone as gifted with numbers as they are with words should consider banking or private equity. It's half of the hours for multiples of the pay.
Had anyone ever told me that I would be required to work 16 hour days, six days a week (and yes, I have worked those hours, for years at a time, not months, with no break whatsoever) I would not have chosen life at a City law firm. I don't recall that being top of the list of the things that HR had to tell me at the recruitment fares either.
PEP is going up becuase fewer associates are doing more work. That is the bottom line. Added to which, 15 years ago I don't think that you had to have the talent that you now have to have to do the work.
Doing long hours is one thing; doing long hours working on incredibly complicated work on products and structures never even conceived of 15 years ago, without to so much as eating breakfast, is quite another.
I think some partners need to start asking themselves if they could ever have done what is now commonly expected of associates at top firms. While they get rich.
I agree with much of what has been said. But then none of us become corporate lawyers in order to enjoy extensive lie-ins. We do it for the cold, hard cash. That doesn't change the fact that I resent every second I spend in the office outside of my contract hours.
I did a few years of those kind of hours. I did it because it was clear it would get me somewhere, earn me money in the long term and give me a quality of life in later years when I had a family and wanted to take things easy.
I now own my own company, work two hours a day and have a very good lifestyle. I pick up my kids from school, see them off every morning and can take time off whenever I like. In other words, it worked.
On many occassions I questioned whether it was worth it and, when I decided it wasn't and that I'd done enough, I got out. I exercised personal choice from start to finish.
Whatever happened to this young man, tragic as it is, it wasn't Freshfields' fault. There's always an alternative.
It's true that the media storm has involved a lot of inaccuracies. What is also true is that many of us work hours that are physically unsustainable, hours which only end when we quit or get ill. There is no genuine attempt to treat us reasonably by partners - and why would they? They make fortunes off our billing. What's particularly galling is the fact that apart from the younger partners, most of the partners at major law firms in the City didn't work the hours we do when they were associates 10, 15 or 20 years ago.
It's not just that partnership in itself isn't the draw it was - getting to partnership is much harder than it used to be. When it gets to the point that the health - not the lifestyle or work/life balance, but the physical and mental HEALTH - of associates is being damaged, the firms are clearly behaving in an irresponsible way.
This is regardless of any claims about 'informed' choice. The firms will say you'll work hard. They don't say you'll work hard until you crack or get ill but for many thats the reality.
Without wishing to comment on the case of this unfortunate associate, which may or may not be related to his working environment, part of the cause of the long-hours culture that has been brought into focus by these tragic circumstances is that by the time you have made it to partner - male dominated though that role is supposed to be - many partners themselves have been so consistently beasted and overworked that they no longer have the spine, the good sense, or, frankly, the testicles, to tell a client 'no, we can't do a £500m transaction by next week, having just received the instruction - be realistic, be reasonable, be an intelligent human being, or go somewhere else'.
Part of the cause is simple avarice, whether or not a particular partner has or has not been overworked in quite the way that successful associates in big City outfits now routinely are. The final part is that you have nothing else to do than work, having sacrificed yourself at greed's altar for as long as you (or your former friends) could care to remember, which is why the "alternative" of moving isn't necessarily as real as it is hypothetical. Or the imagination left sufficient to conceive of an alternative way of doing business.
Oh and by the way, all clients out there. Have you ever wondered why it is that a big deal is rarely, if ever, delivered on time? It's because it's not deliverable. In the interim, what we do is send emails to our counterparts at midnight, attaching a document "subject to instructions" - half-finished, in other words, because it wasn't possible to finish it when we said we would.
When our counterparts don't accept the draft as final, because they can't, we cast aspersions about their competence to retain your business as a client. They, for their part, do the same to us. Work is duplicated, and frequently wrong, because no-one knows what the state of an issue is or has had time to properly consider it.
We charge you for all of this waste and duplication because your requirements were unrealistic and we didn't tell you that this was the case.
We keep our associates in the office until further notice and, heavily fatigued, they lose confidence in their judgement and will not sign an issue off and argue it needlessly for days on end.
Anyone who doesn't enjoy this culture, this backbiting, this inefficiency, will not make partner. That is the reality of City law and anyone who says otherwise is ignorant, stupid or both. It is no wonder that sensible, intelligent people get disheartened and extremely stressed.
It was my mother here in Madrid who had read about it and told me that she was happy that I had saved myself before this happened. The unbearable pressure that lawyers have to cope with to satisfy the greed of certain partners may well have an impact on one's physical and mental health.
I resisted for seven years but after two anxiety strokes and subsequent visits to hospital I decided to quit. I think I'm a good lawyer, but that inhuman and inefficient production system does not fit everybody.
I must disagree, respectfully, with those who suggest that individuals who embark on careers at these firms are making an "informed choice".
For my part (and I think that judging from various student websites I have read recently, the same is true to this day) I would say that many of these organisations "seduce" young students into signing up to work for them with promises of exciting, challenging, jet-setting careers with excellent salaries.
By the time that those individuals who have been so seduced by the marketing hype have started their training contracts, they will invariably realise that the work is far from exciting and, moreover, that worked out as a hourly rate, the salary probably isn't that great either.
At that point, they will feel trapped for two reasons. Firstly, anyone who has embarked upon such a career will feel reluctant to admit that they have made what they perceive to be a huge mistake. Secondly, given that these firms offer grants for the Legal Practice Course and, where necessary, the CPE, their trainees - already laden with debt from university days - will think that bailing out will mean that debt being called in and almost certain bankruptcy.
Whilst many then vow to "escape" after a few years, few manage to make the break. The debt problem only gets worse (after nine years of much "retail therapy", and notwithstanding my excellent salaries, I still owed my credit card lenders something in the region of £150,000).
Additionally, the fact that many of these indivdiuals have simply been pushing paper for years, filling in the blanks in standard-form documents, giving advice that has been given a thousand times before and, generally speaking, not using their brains for a long period of time, their insecurity will have reached a heightened state and they will be utterly convinced that they are unable to do anything else for a living.
All the while, of course, some very fortunate individuals at the upper end of the heirarchy are taking home seven-figure salaries but, on the other side of the coin, clients are being short-changed, charged vast hourly rates for what is essentially secretarial work to be done by over-qualified lawyers, and then, not done that well given how fatigued these lawyers are.
The authorities should start investigating the work practices of City firms. These employees have a 40-hour work contract and are working 90 hours a week. Law firms will often make it clear through yearly billing targets that it is expected of them.
Why is this behaviour by these law firms any different from sweat shops? These lawyers are being exploited in exactly the same way. The authorities should pursue these employers exactly the same way they pursue and prosecute sweat shops.
Working Time Regulations. The basic rights and protections that the Regulations provide are:
- a limit of an average of 48 hours a week which a worker can be required to work (although this can be waived - I certainly haven't).
- a right to 11 hours rest a day.
- a right to a day off each week.
When is the Law Society going to do something about the breach of these laws by those who are supposed to be upholding the law? It's shameful.
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