City law firms urged to bring in ‘trigger warnings’

LAW FIRMS should introduce “trigger warnings” to protect lawyers’ mental health when working extreme hours, a senior industry figure has claimed.

Colin Passmore, the chairman of the City of London Law Society and former senior partner of Simmons & Simmons, is calling for action amid heightened scrutiny of mental health in the City. It follows the recent death of Vanessa Ford, a senior partner at Pinsent Masons who, according to a coroner’s inquest, suffered from an “acute mental health crisis”.

Mr Passmore told The Telegraph he has had an “epiphany” since Ms Ford’s death, since recognising that “something very serious” is going on across the City.

At some City firms lawyers are working more than 3,000 hours a year, with some not finishing until 11pm after starting at 9am. Mr Passmore claims this should sound the alarm for management.

He said: “That is a massive amount of work on any basis. That is an amount of work that should send a trigger warning and that person needs to be spoken to and looked after as appropriate. Those sort of hours are massive.” In his own career as a litigator, working for clients such as Barclays Bank,

Mr Passmore claims the most he ever racked up over a year was 2,250 hours.

While accepting that a nine-to-five routine will never work for the legal profession, Mr Passmore insisted “we as responsible leaders must act and must act now” to avoid regulation.

Last month, Pinsent Masons said it was “assessing how we can make appropriate changes that will genuinely make a difference”.