3 Big Things CEO Sean Versteegh outlines three steps NZ firms can take to improve men's mental health
For Men’s Health Week, 15 to 21 June, the question for NZ law firms is not whether male mental health is a problem in legal practice. The numbers and the lived experience say it is. The question is what a firm can do this year, with the people currently on the floor.
A scene we see often in NZ law firms. It is three weeks before a major deadline. A senior associate is doing 14-hour days, has not slept properly in a fortnight, is short with the juniors, has stopped returning his partner’s calls. He has not noticed any of this. The firm has an EAP. He will not be calling it. By the time someone notices, the missed deadline, the lost client, the resignation, or worse, has already happened.
The shape of the profession is part of the picture. Women now make up 57% of NZ lawyers overall, but men still hold around two-thirds of equity partner roles. The work runs to long hours and tight deadlines. Anecdotally, the cultural setup in many firms makes asking for help a costly move, with confidentiality concerns about being seen at the EAP particularly real for senior lawyers worried about partnership perception. We hear this often enough that it is worth naming.
More than 1 in 3 NZ lawyers are experiencing psychological distress, with 25% in the severe range (Jarden, 2024). Recent NZ research on the profession (Clarke et al., 2026) found that men often describe staying despite wanting to leave, feeling trapped as primary earners and under social pressure not to quit. So in many firms male distress shows up as grinding on rather than walking out, which is exactly why it goes unseen.
The lawyer in your firm who has not asked for help is not necessarily fine. He is invisible to the system you have set up.
There is also a regulatory frame worth knowing. NZ law firms are PCBUs under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, and WorkSafe’s 2025 psychosocial guidance applies to them in the same way it applies to other employers. Psychosocial harm at work, including the workload and confidentiality patterns described above, sits inside the partnership’s primary duty of care. The exposure is not theoretical.
Three things we see making the biggest difference in NZ law firms.
The first is taking overcommitment seriously as a workload design issue. There will be times when the work calls for long hours, particularly around major deadlines, and that is part of legal practice. The concern is the pattern that does not let up. When the long-hours, always-on mode becomes the norm rather than the exception, it is the single strongest predictor of male lawyers leaving the profession internationally. NZ research on the profession makes the structural point directly: the billable-units model is not a neutral metric but a driver of the pattern, rewarding the longest hours and penalising anyone working part-time or carrying care responsibilities (Clarke et al., 2026). Review billable-hours norms in your firm, watch for the lawyers who are billing harder and remembering less, and treat it as a design failure rather than a personal trait. This is the lever most firms have not yet pulled, and it sits upstream of everything else.
The second is what senior leaders are willing to do publicly. When a managing partner says, openly, “I see a coach every month”, and means it, the help-seeking norm in the firm shifts within months. Partners often resist this on the grounds of being seen as the firm’s weak link. In practice, the partners who do it set the standard rather than expose themselves to it. The cost of being seen using support drops. The signal travels faster than any wellness comms can. The same is true of an honest partner-level conversation that names the toll the work is taking, rather than the standard “we look after our people” line that everyone has learned to discount.
The third is making the support genuinely personal and confidential. Most law firms hand staff a brochure, an 0800 number, and maybe an EAP provider. A lot of men, in law more than most sectors, hand the brochure back. What they will use is a named clinician outside the firm’s HR chain, with confidentiality designed in rather than promised. Replacing the brochure with a real clinician you can name and book directly, with no record sitting inside the firm, closes a meaningful part of the gap.
For Men’s Health Week we are running a free 45-minute webinar, Men’s Health Week: Why Good Lawyers Leave and How to Keep Them, presented by clinical psychologist Chris Scott, co-CEO of 3 Big Things. It is on Tuesday 16 June, 12:00 to 12:45, open to anyone working in the legal sector. Register here: register for the webinar.
Men’s Health Week will pass quickly. The men in your firm who would most benefit will not be the ones asking for help. They will be the ones whose sleep has gone, who are short with the juniors, who are billing more and remembering less. The system that catches them is the one designed to.
Sean Versteegh is a registered clinical psychologist and co-CEO of 3 Big Things
