UPDATE FROM LAWCARE

Dear Member

Mary Jackson would like to update you on LawCare news and activities over the summer so far.

New chair
Last month we welcomed our new Chair, Andrew Caplen,  who takes over from Bronwen Still. Andrew is a former President of the Law Society of England and Wales.

Trustee recruitment
We are currently recruiting for 4 new Trustees, to take up their roles in January 2020. The information about how to apply is here trustee recruitment   It would be a great help to us if you could share this in your networks and consider whether you or anyone in your organisation may be interested in applying.

LawCare research
In October we are launching cross-profession and cross-jurisdiction research on mental health and wellbeing, we are doing this in collaboration with the University of Sheffield. There will be some further communication about this next month as we will be asking for your support in promoting the research, but we wanted to let you know that this is in the pipeline.

Some new resources
Our new podcast series The Legal Mind has launched, the first two are on sleep and digital wellbeing, have a listen and please share. We will be releasing a new podcast each month.
We have also launched sleep tips  and time management tips .

Fit for Law resources
We have developed some social media graphics to use for promoting our online course in emotional competency and professional resilience. Please feel free to use these.

Covid hub
We continue to add new resources to our Covid hub, including a webinar our former Chair Brownen Still took part in about mental health and regulation and webinar we ran with the SBA – The Solicitors Charity and the Solicitors Assistance Scheme about the support available for sole practitioners  and small firms in England and Wales.  All our open access webinars are listed on our website events page .  If you are interested in a collaborative webinar for your members about mental health, or would like a LawCare representative to take part in a webinar you are planning,  please get in touch. About 40% of our support contacts continue to have a covid element, we are seeing a shift in the concerns being raised –  the most common reason for reaching out to us, is worsening of existing mental health conditions, followed by concerns about not being allowed to work from home/worried about going back to the office, with concerns about finances being the third. We are currently working on new resources about redundancy and moving on from the law in anticipation of this being a real concern in the autumn.

If you have any queries please do not hesitate to get in touch and do remember we are here as a resource and if we can support any of your work around mental health please do get in touch.

Best wishes

Mary B. Jackson
Co-ordinator
Lawcare