Employee benefits for law firms

Five things worth having a position on.

• Work design and workload. Chargeable hours targets are a workload structure, and workload is the first of the six areas the regulator names. A firm that has never looked at them in those terms has not looked at the biggest one. Covered in the psychosocial risk checker.
• Benefit provision and communication. Partners, associates, trainees and business services need different things and are usually sent the same benefits email. Take-up figures by population are more useful here than an overall number. Covered in the employee benefits guide.
• Absence and return to work. Short absences are often absorbed rather than recorded in professional firms, which makes a real absence pattern hard to see and a return to work harder to support. Covered in return to work plans.
• Access to the support that already exists. Confidentiality matters more than usual where people are worried about how a disclosure will read to a partner. Worth knowing what the route is and who does and does not see it. Covered in the employee assistance programme guide.
• Evidence and governance. The duty applies from the first employee. Only the written record threshold starts at five. Covered in the employer duty of care guide.

The previous version of this page carried an absence figure taken from Professional, Scientific and Technical Activities and presented it as evidence about law firms. That classification does not describe legal services, the difference from the all-industry figure was not statistically significant, and the same figure was doing duty on our professional services page. It has been removed rather than reworded.

We are not going to show you an industry absence rate here. The obvious move would be to take the national figure for the nearest official industry classification and present it as this sector's number, and the reason we have not is that the classification is usually wrong for the sector as people understand it, and the difference from the all-industry figure is often not statistically significant anyway. A headline figure that has to be qualified into nothing in the next sentence is worse than no figure.

The national picture is genuinely useful, and it is published properly on UK sickness absence rates, with the definitions, the low-sample flags, and the reasons it describes a population and not your organisation.

The guides these questions lead into, in the order most employers need them. The employee benefits guide covers what each arrangement is, what it does not automatically include, and what to ask before buying or renewing. The employer duty of care guide covers what is actually required of you, including the written record threshold at five employees. And the psychosocial risk checker walks the six HSE Management Standards, which is where work design gets looked at properly.

For the national data, and the reasons it is context rather than a benchmark, UK sickness absence rates has the 2025 ONS release broken down eleven ways.

Nothing here describes your firm. Published data has no view on your workload, your culture or how your people would answer if asked.

It also cannot tell you whether the cover you hold suits the people you now employ. Firms change shape faster than their benefits do, and that gap only shows up when somebody looks.