The Telegraph Article: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/15/young-lawyers-shunning-180000-salaries-easier-life
Here I share the experiences I had as a lawyer with The Telegraph.
Gen Z and millennial solicitors are forgoing big pay packets to prioritise work-life balance.
In her 20s, Melissa Layton worked as a corporate lawyer at Fieldfisher, a City firm that pays newly qualified solicitors £95,000 a year. The job required long hours in the office and midnight finishes were not unusual.
Now 34, Layton has given up on her law career and runs her own wellness start-up, Numinity. The business specialises in “transformative events” including ecstatic dance classes; “extended orgasm” workshops; and psychedelic ceremonies using ayahuasca, a plant-based psychedelic that is illegal in the UK, and bufo, a substance extracted from the poisonous secretions of toads.
“My first impression as a trainee, looking at the partners, was that even the people at the top are under palpable stress,” Layton says of her law career. “It was like looking into the future and seeing where I was going to be in several years’ time.
“The more I looked within myself the more I realised that I’m not sure I do want to be a lawyer,” she adds, speaking from Peru where she is currently in the jungle running an ayahuasca retreat.
Layton is just one of a growing number of young lawyers who have left the profession early in search of an easier life. They are quitting despite the huge salaries on offer. Major City law firms such as Paul Weiss and Gibson Dunn offer newly qualified solicitors starting salaries of up to £180,000 a year, plus bonuses that have potential to add thousands to their pay packets.
For the riches offered, young lawyers are expected to devote much of their lives to the firm. Long hours, weekend work and being on-call even when “off,” is common.
“A lot of people talk about weeks where you work 80 billable hours. You don’t really know what that’s like until you’ve done it and it’s pretty brutal,” says a former solicitor in his 20s who used to work at Slaughter & May, a law firm in London’s prestigious “magic circle”.
A recent influx of hyper-profitable US firms to the UK has made the demands placed on young lawyers even more intense. These firms have even higher expectations than their magic circle counterparts, with many newly-qualified lawyers expected to be on-call for both UK and US hours.
“Being a top lawyer is beyond demanding, it’s constant,” says Christopher Clark, a legal recruiter at Definitum Search. “Gen Z are far more aware of the personal impact and money alone isn’t enough for some to stick it out.”
Law has always been a demanding profession. But whereas previous generations were likely to stick it out until their 40s or 50s to build up their wealth before seeking an easier life, newly-qualified lawyers today are increasingly throwing in the towel in their 20s and 30s.
“Younger generations are more willing to walk away when they feel something isn’t the right fit, without the fear or stigma that may have held previous generations back,” says Qarrar Somji, a partner at Witan Solicitors.
While many of those quitting claim they are doing so because of the unreasonable demands placed on them by bosses, some may question the attitude of the younger generation.
Gibson Dunn, one of the City’s top paying law firms, last month posted a job listing for a “support lawyer” on its M&A team that suggested its Gen Z staff need extra “hand-holding” because of lockdown.
More broadly, younger generations have been accused of avoiding hard work, refusing to come to the office and being unable to accept criticism.
Maximilian Campbell, an ex-City lawyer who now works as a recruiter for law firms in New York, says “resilience” is needed in the legal sector, “as with most demanding professions.”
Resilience is a quality some would argue is in short supply among Gen Z and millennial workers. Research by King’s College London last year found three in five people thought youth mental health problems were linked to a lack of resilience.
Both Sir Tony Blair, the former prime minister, and Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, have suggested that a rise in self-diagnosed mental health problems may be linked to younger people struggling with normal levels of stress.
Sir Tony said in January: “Life has its ups and downs and everybody experiences those. And you’ve got to be careful of encouraging people to think they’ve got some sort of condition other than simply confronting the challenges of life.”
Some former lawyers can empathise with the younger generations’ struggles. Emilia Yau worked for more than a decade as a corporate lawyer in London, Edinburgh and Sydney before leaving her job to start a psychotherapy practice. She now specialises in counselling for lawyers.
“If you’re going to work and feeling stressed, there’s only so long you can live with that for,” she says of younger people.
Yau’s career was taxing on her.
“It was very demanding. It lends itself to perfectionism. You end up paranoid about sending out an email. It’s very difficult, once you’re in there, to see anything else. You’re working hard, you’re not taking breaks. It ramps up into this snowball effect.”
Yau realised she had to get out when her six-year-old son said the family’s au pair was more like his “mummy” than she was.
It is not just the work-life balance that is putting young people off law, however. The situation is made worse by the high taxes and soaring property prices that have eroded the value of the six-figure pay packets.
One Gen Z former lawyer says: “Working as a lawyer in London is just not that glamorous. The money you earn is enough to let you go out to nice restaurants and live a nice life, but as a newly qualified solicitor you’re still treading water.”
An ex-lawyer at Travers Smith in his 20s says the high tax rates lumped on top earners left some of his colleagues dreading bonus day because of the amounts of money they would be paying back to HMRC.
For Layton, life at Fieldfisher often meant turning up “very late” to social events. “Now I’m always the first to arrive.”
“There are other ways of living life, that was the realisation,” Layton says. “It’s feeling free and spending time with the people that matter to me.”
