This past Easter weekend, senior lawyers took a break from the endless meetings, the constant torrent of e-mails and the never-ending demands from clients in order to spend precious time with their families. But how many managed to resist peeking at their BlackBerry or firing up their laptop while they were doing so?

Much has been said about the importance of a “work-life balance”, but how far has the profession come in actually achieving it? Last month, The Times reported on the establishment of a helpline for stressed judges, who are finding themselves increasingly isolated and struggling to cope. The arduous working hours of associates at leading City firms has been exhaustively reported. But what of senior lawyers, the partners and silks – are they finding working in the law more stressful?

We asked The Times Law Panel for its views and the consensus was yes, life at the top end of the profession is becoming harder. “I suspect that talk of a work-life balance is much exaggerated," says Lee Ranson, a real estate partner at Eversheds. "One only has to look at the expectations on senior lawyers in billing, work winning and people management to see that the stresses are very real.”

The industry has become more competitive, with every partner move and deal scrutinised by a ferocious legal press. There is increasing pressure to achieve prominence in awards and legal directories. Lateral hires among big firms are common and partnership is no longer guaranteed for life, leaving many partners feeling they have to watch their backs. “Partners find themselves ‘de-equitised’ when their earnings fall, when the firm’s expectations rise or, in some cases, when the management wish to increase their headline profit-per-equity-partner statistic,” says Bertie Leigh, a partner at Hempsons.

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Clients are increasingly global, operating across time zones with little regard for British working hours, weekends or holidays. Eager to drive down costs, they are at the same time less loyal and more demanding. Senior lawyers feel this pressure acutely. “Although we are a profession, we are a service industry and clients’ expectations continuously increase,” says Mark Rawlinson, a corporate partner at Freshfields. “Today’s high performance is tomorrow’s norm.”

Companies are becoming more acquisitive and deals more complex; society is becoming increasingly litigious; and the amount of actual law to keep on top of has piled up. Advocates complain that the number of written submissions expected during cases has risen, with so-called “skeleton arguments” becoming rather more “fleshy” than they used to. Chris Jeans, QC, an employment barrister at 11KBW, says: “At the end of a long hearing you effectively produce a book about the case.”

A sense of despair emanates particularly from lawyers in publicly funded fields such as crime. Their work already carries with it stresses greater than in many jobs – the emotional turmoil of comforting the relatives of a client sent to prison, the trauma of looking over evidential photographs of dead bodies – but the imminent legal aid reforms and a justice system frayed at its seams leaves many practitioners feeling financially squeezed and undervalued.

Kirsty Brimelow, a criminal barrister at 187 Fleet Street Chambers, points out that barristers in her position can sometimes go months without being paid. “I think the public still has a distorted view of barristers being posh old Etonians who hang out in their private clubs in the evening,” Brimelow says. “Scratch the surface and there is a huge amount of stress which should be acknowledged and treated seriously.”

Pressures on women at the top of the profession generally are still enormous, says Katherine Gieve, a family law partner at Bindmans. For all the talk of work-life balance, law firms have yet to come up with a convincing solution to the challenge of flexible working hours for women with families. Instead, it relies on the extraordinary adaptability and efficiency of those women who do manage to cope. “Women still continue to take major responsibility for children and also for ageing parents and so the life aspect of the work-life balance has a lot of work in it,” Gieve says. “The edge of the day is particularly difficult, knowing the work commitments have to be completed and yet there are other demands elsewhere.”

Perhaps the greatest impact on the working lives of senior lawyers has been brought by advances in technology. Mobile phones, e-mail and BlackBerrys promised to allow people greater flexibility in working hours and location, but the trade-off has been that clients now expect their advisers to be in contact at all times. “Who ever said that computerisation would make us all part-timers was badly wrong,” says Jeans.

Edward Cooper, head of employment at Russell Jones & Walker, was on holiday but could not resist replying to questions via his BlackBerry. “Better technology has led to increased convenience,” Cooper says, “but also clients expecting much quicker turnaround. One leads to greater quality of life, the other leads to greater stress as the demands increase – and technology does not shorten reading or thinking time.”

In the days before e-mail and even faxes, lawyers communicated with clients via post or telex, which carried with it a certain time delay, an inbuilt buffer. Now, clients expect a response almost immediately. “There’s an expectation with e-mail that once you’ve pressed send, [the lawyer] is there to receive it,” says Peter Nias, head of tax at McDermott Will & Emery.

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