By Eloise Butterworth · November 2026
Recently I spoke on a panel at a webinar, and one question stopped us in our tracks. It had been submitted anonymously in advance, and it asked how people cope with the personal weight of working in compliance.
It was a short question, but the depth of feeling behind it was unmistakable. It gave everyone on the panel real food for thought, and it has stayed with me since. This blog is my attempt to capture some of that thinking.
Some firms are fortunate enough to have a team of compliance professionals. Others have a solo operator. Others still have a fee earner who takes on the compliance role in addition to the day job of earning fees and looking after clients.
Whatever the structure, the weight is there. Within the compliance community, I think it is broadly accepted how heavy it can be and what impact it can have on your wellbeing. You carry pressure on behalf of the firm, you are often the person who has to raise the unpopular question or push back against someone more senior than you.
The compliance community is good at looking after its own. Between ourselves, we share experiences, sound out difficult decisions and remind each other that we are not alone.
Formal support from firms is less forthcoming. I am not sure managing partners, or senior management more generally, always appreciate the weight that sits with the person holding the compliance role (in fairness, the reverse is also true). It is simply not something that tends to be talked about openly.
Let me be clear that this is not a contest over who carries the most. Fee earners carry the weight of billing targets and managing client expectations. Senior management carry the weight of running the firm and making difficult decisions day to day. Those weights are real.
But the weight felt by compliance officers is of a particular kind. It sits around risk decisions, regulatory compliance and, ultimately, trying to stop the firm ending up before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal or on the front page of the Law Society Gazette or Roll on Friday. That is not something that feels openly acknowledged, and it certainly does not always feel openly supported.
Often, the level of responsibility, and therefore the weight, carried by those in compliance is not commensurate with their voice in the firm or with the pay packet they receive at the end of the month. Many of the risk decisions they have to manage are not decisions they have the seniority to make.
We know from the work done by LawCare, and from the statistics it publishes, that wellbeing in the profession remains a key concern for the sustainability and future of the sector. I think compliance carries a different kind of weight within that picture.
It is the weight of holding personal responsibility and obligation. It is being tasked with very difficult decisions, or being responsible for picking up the pieces of decisions made by others. It is the weight of sometimes nobody else in the business properly understanding the technicalities of what you do. That mental load is not something we are really trained for, and it can feel isolating among colleagues who do not carry it.
In my role as external support for firms, I see this weight, and I have experienced it myself in previous roles. I always found it incredibly difficult to articulate to those around me, partly because of the competitive nature of the legal sector. When you say you are busy, or stressed, or feeling the weight of a particular responsibility, someone around you will always be busier, more stressed or under greater weight.
And that isn’t really the point.
None of this needs a budget or a project plan. The thing that does, I’ve saved for last.
1. Say it out loud (managing partners and senior management). Acknowledge, in a team meeting or a one-to-one, that the compliance role carries a particular weight. It costs nothing and is rarely done. When compliance raises an unpopular point, visible backing from leadership will matter more than any policy.
2. Write it down (compliance officers). Keep a record of what you have raised, what was decided and by whom. It separates your responsibility from decisions taken above you, and it can ease the sense of carrying everything alone. Then use your peer network deliberately, rather than waiting until things feel heavy.
3. Build in a sounding board (firms). Give whoever holds the compliance role a regular place to talk risk decisions through, whether that is a supportive colleague, a mentor or an external adviser. Include compliance in whatever wellbeing initiatives the firm already runs, and point people towards LawCare.
There is one more thing I would add, and it may be the most practical of all. The person holding the compliance role needs sufficient time to actually undertake it properly, and the firm needs to appreciate what is an achievable amount of work, to the required standard, within a set period of time.
A common cause of struggle for compliance professionals is the sheer volume of work and risk they are managing, combined with a failure by firms to properly prioritise their limited time and resource. Too often that prioritising falls to the individual themselves, and it leaves them feeling overwhelmed.
Proper support from management on the allocation of time and on business priorities is an important way for compliance officers to feel supported. If management don’t know what those priorities should be, seek help. Those decisions should be informed by risk exposure, so that the work that matters most gets the time it needs.
Naming the weight is not a bid for sympathy, and it is not a competition. It is information a firm needs if it wants the people holding its risk to feel acknowledged and supported.
