Advancing technology can impact the mental wellbeing of legal professionals.
Modernisation is something that we are all experiencing in everything that we do. The technology we use is advancing every day, our usual processes are changing constantly. In the field of law, science and technology are aiding the collection of evidence and making cases more and more complex. This means that court processes are different and there’s a vast increase in paperwork along with it, placing even more pressure and stresses upon barristers.
As the workload from the modernisation of technology and updated laws and processes rises, the mental health of barristers is rapidly declining. This can’t continue otherwise the mental health will be too low, along with the standard of their incredibly important work.
One of the country’s top KCs shares the impacts of modern technology on life in law:
“The pressure and demands on criminal barristers now bear little resemblance to how it was when I began my career in the 1990s. There have been massive increases in the volume of evidence in cases; this has been caused by the huge changes that have occurred in technology over the last 30 years. Although it has been largely beneficial to everyday life, it has created masses of categories of evidence that did not exist when I began my career. At the same time, the time available to prepare for trials has often decreased. Cases back then were easier to prepare for and there was much more time between cases.”
There’s a shortage of barristers in the UK, and numbers continue to decline, which means that the increased workload is almost impossible to keep up with unless they work incredibly long hours each week. It has created a vicious cycle that is detrimental to their mental health.
At UKIM we specialise in providing innovative and modern wellbeing solutions to help barristers and those in the legal sector deal with the intensity of their careers. Modernisation has changed the legal field and workloads, but it has also changed the wellbeing industry for the better. At UKIM Occupational Health and Wellbeing, we have the modern solutions and tools to provide bespoke support for barristers and legal professionals.
