Within the legal industry, staff wellbeing is no longer just an HR initiative – it’s a strategic priority that impacts every facet of each firm. While HR traditionally leads efforts to improve mental health and wellbeing, risk management teams also have a critical role to play.
When these two functions collaborate, the benefits extend far beyond happier employees; firms can reduce operational and compliance risks, strengthen resilience, and unlock measurable financial and productivity gains.
By working together, HR and risk management can create a culture where wellbeing is embedded into business strategy, delivering value across the organisation.
Here’s why this partnership matters – and how HR teams can lead the way.
Wellbeing risks go beyond HR’s traditional scope
HR teams often focus on people-related risks such as employee behaviour, management practices, and hiring policies. But poor mental health can trigger various risks that ripple across the business, including:
Operational – employees experiencing mental health issues may have reduced cognitive function, leading to increased errors, accidents, or poor decision-making, all of which directly affect operational efficiency.
Legal and compliance – mental health-related problems can give rise to legal liabilities, such as workplace discrimination claims, disability accommodations, or failure to provide a safe working environment. A failure in this area could lead to costly penalties or lawsuits.
Reputational – if mental health problems go unaddressed, they can lead to employee dissatisfaction and burnout, which may negatively affect business reputation.
Financial – there is also the potential for increased healthcare costs, absenteeism, and turnover, which result in financial losses. Additionally, from an insurance perspective, the increased risk of claims arising from operational, compliance, or reputational failures may increase premiums.
By collaborating with risk teams, HR can help identify these broader exposures and implement proactive measures to mitigate them.
HR as a strategic partner in risk prevention
Risk management is about prevention, not reaction. HR is uniquely positioned to influence the people-related factors that underpin many business risks. Through early interventions, such as stress management programmes, flexible working policies, and workload reviews, HR can reduce the likelihood of costly incidents.
LawCare’s Life in the Law 2025 report (opens a new window)included the following five key recommendations to implement practices that protect, promote and enhance mental health and wellbeing in legal workplaces that both HR and risk teams can put into practice:
Actively manage workloads – excessive work intensity harms wellbeing and mental health so leaders must tackle root causes by managing workloads, rethinking targets and incentives and challenging the culture of long hours.
Prioritise and value managing people – legal workplaces should give people managers enough time, targeted training and ongoing support and recognise management as a critical skill. Senior lawyers should not be assumed to be good managers without proper development.
Embed hybrid and flexible working options – these ways of working support wellbeing and inclusion. To work well they must be designed with care, balancing benefits with challenges (like isolation) and shaped through open dialogue and collaboration.
Evaluate programmes and activities that support mental health and wellbeing at work – legal workplaces should regularly assess whether their mental health and wellbeing programmes are working, analyse and learn from the results and make any necessary improvements and adjustments.
Legal education and training – in-house training should equip people joining the sector with the skills and knowledge they need for a sustainable legal career. These actions don’t just improve employee experience - they strengthen operational resilience and reduce exposure to legal and financial risk.
Collaboration creates data-driven insights and measurable impact
When HR and risk teams share data, they can quantify the link between wellbeing and risk outcomes. This can help to measure the financial and operational risks posed from ignoring mental health. For example, this can include:
Gathering data-driven insights into how mental health issues have correlated with past claims, operational disruptions, or regulatory penalties.
Measuring absenteeism, employee engagement, or error rates pre and post implementation of wellbeing programmes. In doing so, they can demonstrate the financial value of benefits, proving their worth beyond employee satisfaction.
Provide employee engagement and wellbeing trends to help identify emerging sources of risk and pre-empt legal claims relating to mental health discrimination or inadequate workplace adjustments for stress.
HR can also facilitate the delivery of training and supervision programmes to help employees identify and combat wellbeing risks.
This evidence helps demonstrate the business case for investment in wellbeing – not just as a ‘nice to have’, but as a driver of risk reduction and financial performance. Together, these functions can design targeted interventions that deliver measurable value.
Improved decision-making through alignment
By collaborating with risk management, HR teams can ensure their decisions align with risk management strategies. This includes:
Prioritising high-risk areas – analyse all available claims data or operational incidents to identify areas where mental health support could mitigate the greatest risks to a business, such as stressful job roles that might lead to burnout or errors.
Tailoring employee benefits to risk – highlight where specific benefits, such as access to mental health professionals or resilience training, could address systemic risks that are common across the relevant profession, such as presenteeism or performance failures due to stress.
By partnering and aligning HR initiatives with risk intelligence, firms can create a safer, healthier, and more productive workforce - while reducing exposure to operational, legal, and reputational threats. The result? A workforce that thrives, a business that performs, and a risk profile that’s stronger than ever.
Want to learn more?
Join us at our 2025 UK Benefit Forum (opens a new window) where we will explore harnessing data to shape better decision-making, using thoughtful design to bring benefits programmes to life and executing meaningful delivery to ensure lasting impact.
Alternatively, visit our People Solutions (opens a new window)page for further insights, or reach out to a member of our team.
