The mental health and wellbeing of legal professionals is important. The Introduction to this volume highlights the personal, ethical, economic and societal costs of ignoring or dismissing their relevance and significance. These range from individual suffering to impaired client service and care; from the financial cost of high attrition rates within law firms, to the damage wrought upon the concept of the rule of law. Issues of mental health and wellbeing intersect and influence many other aspects of the legal profession, its role and its work. The international evidence on lawyer mental health and wellbeing, together with the findings of the focus groups, all indicate that a sizeable number of individuals within the legal profession are experiencing compromised mental health and low levels of overall wellbeing. Therefore, there is an urgent need to address the causes and consequences of this by formulating a manifesto for change for the profession.

To be able to address these causes and consequences, it is necessary to begin to unpack and explore several apparent tensions within the field. First, there is the need to formulate a definition of wellbeing itself. As Chapter One explains, the term itself is contested and arguably somewhat nebulous, with the hedonic and eudaemonic traditions often being contrasted and/or dichotomized. The role of emotional intelligence or literacy (or, as the authors prefer to call it, emotional competence) has also been acknowledged, at best, only partially. For many participants in the focus groups, the emphasis appeared to be on managing to ‘cope’, however the authors argue that the ability to move beyond simply coping and to flourish and thrive (Baron, 2007) should, at the least, be an aspiration when considering the way forward for those practising law. Second, there is the need to strike a balance between promoting individual resilience and self-care, while acknowledging and tackling the wider cultural and structural issues which impact on mental health and wellbeing. Third, there is the question of how to reconcile the ‘wellness turn’ in both society and the legal profession (Collier, 2019) with the stigma that many of the focus group participants still perceive as being present within the practice of law. These themes effectively underlie both the discussions in each individual chapter and the potential solutions discussed later.