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Because of that, lawyers are afraid to be out of touch. “There’s a feeling that you have to be somehow omniscient,” Nias says. But he wonders how much this expectation is down to the lawyers themselves. Often they assume the client is demanding a “gold plated, 24/7, Rolls Royce” service, he says, when in fact they are expecting only a Trabant.

Nias himself has sought to integrate disciplines from project management into his dealings with clients, anticipating challenges and obstacles - team members leaving work at four o’clock to pick up their children from school, for example - and attempting to work around them from the outset. He has become ruthless at prioritising the work that comes across his desk. Sometimes it just has to wait - and can wait. “We have to be cleverer and smarter at managing the work," he says.

Nias says the secret to keeping work from taking over your life is to keep the "bad stress" under control. That is, all the tedium and inefficiency of the modern workplace: the waiting around, the office politics, the paperwork that piles up, the meetings that go nowhere. The other stress, the "good stress" - an impending case, say, or a deadline for a deal - is to be embraced. "The good stress is what gets you up in the morning," he says.

“Pressure is part of any senior job,” says Matthew Lohn, head of the public and regulatory group at Field Fisher Waterhouse. “Some people cope with it better than others. The real issue is about responsible employers ensuring people are in the right post.” Lohn should know something about pressure: he began his professional career as a doctor. “I certainly worked a lot harder and the consequences of any mistakes were much graver in a white coat than in a grey suit,” he says.

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File away under ‘S’ for stress

Office culture favours tough people who thrive under pressure; others just suffer

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Tom Cassels, a partner at Baker & McKenzie, also calls for perspective. "I think we need to recognise that our stress is self-inflicted," he says. "Anyone who gets to the top of the profession is likely to be a pretty driven individual who routinely puts him or herself under pressure and probably would do regardless of career choice. Overall, I don't think we can claim to have a stressful life - the work is interesting, the money is good and we generally have terrific job security. I suspect that someone working in a call centre or doing shifts in a supermarket struggling to make ends meet would have a hard time sympathising with a City lawyer stressing over work-life balance."

It falls to individual lawyers, then, to be ruthless about making time for themselves. One panellist, who insisted on remaining nameless, was looking forward to blocking out the demands of the outside world over Easter by donning a pair of ear muffs and clambering aboard his tractor. A millionaire solicitor at the top of his field, puttering serenely around his acreage at five miles an hour without a care in the world - not a bad way to be.

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