Health benefits for law firms and their partners

What lawyers and partners need from health care

Lawyers need care that respects the shape of their working day. In the Life in the Law 2025 survey of 1,541 people working in law, 78.7% were working beyond their contracted time, and 8.5% estimated they worked 21 or more extra hours a week [1].

The same survey found that 59.1% had poor mental wellbeing, and that 50.0% had experienced anxiety often or more over the previous year [1]. For people with diaries like these, the care that gets used is the care they can reach before work or late in the evening, arranged by someone else.

What the regulator and the profession have found

The Solicitors Regulation Authority reviewed workplace culture in law firms and found that 66% of survey respondents had billable hour targets [2]. Only 30% said their firms did not expect emails and calls to be answered outside office hours [2].

The regulator now expects firms to do everything they reasonably can to look after the wellbeing of those who work in and with the firm, and to keep an eye on individual workloads and capacity [3]. A health membership that people use is one of the clearest ways a firm can show that care in practice.

Official statistics point the same way. In Great Britain, people in professional occupations report work-related stress, depression or anxiety at a rate of 2,730 cases per 100,000 workers, above the 2,040 average for all occupations, and workload is the main cause people give [4].

Why partners need care of their own

Partners carry clients and the firm’s name together, and leaders in every industry report more strain than the people they lead. A global workplace survey found 46% of leaders reporting a lot of stress the previous day, 7 points more than individual contributors [5].

Long hours also carry a measured risk to the heart. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that working 55 hours or more a week, compared with 35 to 40 hours, is linked to a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from ischaemic heart disease [6]. These are population estimates, and a partner’s own measurements, reviewed each year by the same physician, say far more about their own health.

Why confidentiality decides whether care is used

A lawyer’s standing rests on judgement, and many people in the profession hesitate to raise their health at work. In the first Life in the Law study, only 56.5% of those with mental health concerns had spoken about it at work [7].

Care that sits outside the firm’s own systems, arranged by a concierge the lawyer contacts directly, removes that hesitation. The firm sees how the membership is used across the whole firm and never who used it.

Care in the cities where law firms practise

International firms gather their offices in the legal and financial centres, and our 13 cities include most of them. A partner who works between London and New York, or an associate seconded from Paris to Dubai, keeps the same concierge and the same record in each city.

In Singapore and Hong Kong, where teams often take calls with London and New York late into the evening, a doctor can be arranged at an hour that suits the person in that city. For a firm with offices in several of these cities, one membership replaces a different arrangement in each office, and the people team answers one set of questions.

A partner’s health is bound up with the health of the people at home. When a child’s fever at midnight or a parent’s scan is arranged by the same concierge who looks after the partner, less of the working day goes on arranging care, and more of it goes to clients and the firm.

Families covered by the same membership also travel with the partner. A spouse who joins a posting in Dubai or Singapore sees a doctor there on the same terms as at home in London.

A checklist for a law firm choosing health benefits

Ask these questions of any partner you consider, ourselves included.

• Can a partner or associate speak to a doctor the same day, in every city where the firm has an office?
• Can a lawyer reach a psychiatrist or psychologist directly, without going through the firm?
• Does the firm see anonymised reporting only, with small groups left out?
• Are families covered by the same arrangement and the same concierge?
• Does the plan follow secondees and people who move between offices?
• Is there one invoice and one renewal date for the whole firm?

What The Wellness for teams gives a law firm

The Wellness for teams is one membership for the whole firm, with partners and their families included, and it holds inpatient and outpatient care, dental care, diagnostics and health programmes in 13 cities. A concierge arranges everything, and the firm receives one invoice, renewed once a year. Outside the United States it takes the place of national plans at renewal, and in the United States it is the global layer above the medical plan.

The firm sees anonymised reporting only, with small groups left out, under a data processing agreement. Partners can start in one morning and the whole firm within 10 days. Nobody is refused care, and care beyond the plan is billed at the published fee. Our doctors are registered with the General Medical Council, and care is delivered through registered partner clinics and accredited laboratories.