“If [graduates] don’t like being a lawyer they could try running a small business,” Mr Roskam wrote. “Even if young lawyers think they should be earning more for their time, at least they’re still getting paid. No one is forcing you to be a lawyer.”

“Not all of the grievances of young lawyers are unfounded. Low pay as a graduate employee comes with the territory and applies in many other kinds of employment, not just the law. The same applies to working long hours. But there is a point where the expectations that young lawyers might have about work hours turn into demands that are manifestly unreasonable.”

With respect to Mr Roskam (whom I have never met), this is an extraordinarily bad take.

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There’s not a single graduate lawyer in the country – or lawyer of any age, for that matter – who doesn’t accept that, by virtue of their chosen profession, they will have to work hard. Having to stay late here and there, particularly when trying to close a large matter, is part and parcel of modern legal practice.

But the voluminous workload often, if not always, expected of junior professionals is demonstrably deleterious upon holistic wellbeing. Psychological distress, anxiety, depression, suicide ideation and other related ailments affect lawyers at higher rates than most if not all other professional services strands.

Such statistics are not a regrettable by-product of a laborious vocational path. They’re a travesty, and a plague upon the house of law.

To pass off the need to work long hours not only naively ignores the shocking impact of such a load, but also fails to consider how and where a balance can be struck whereby firms can better accommodate staff needs without short-changing clients.

Mr Roskam cites the Hayne royal commission, and the rigours forced upon private practice lawyers whose firms were contracted for those public hearings. Not unreasonably, firms were required to turn around work in very narrow timeframes, so that the federal inquiry could continue its work.

“If a royal commission wants all the documents relating to a particular transaction to be delivered to it within 24 or 48 hours, no bank or law firm representing that bank can say they can’t comply because their staff have gone home to sleep,” he wrote.

This is true. But there are a plethora of options available to firms engaged with royal commissions outside of simply working their existing staff members to the bone. They can, for example, bring across practitioners from other teams to assist, hire short-term contractors or outsource work via NewLaw facilitators such as LOD. Burning out existing staff is far from the only option.

Having spoken to and with many dozens of law firms across the country, I can say there are almost no practices in Australia that do not appreciate that, in an evolving legal marketplace, staff wellbeing and satisfaction are non-negotiable.

The next generation of lawyers that will influence the profession is exceedingly aware that, if they are not happy in their current roles, they have myriad avenues available to them, whether it be in-house, boutique firms, policy, research, academia or leaving altogether. What’s more, they’re not afraid to pull that trigger.

As a result, there isn’t just a moral imperative to better look after staff – there’s a fiscal one, too.

I didn’t disagree with everything Mr Roskam posited, however.

He wrote: “Ultimately, it must be up to law firms themselves to decide what is and isn’t an appropriate workload for their staff. Furthermore, it should never be forgotten that firms have a responsibility not only to their employees, but also to their clients.”

Without question, each law firm needs to be responsible for the effective management of staff. Regulatory impositions such as those handed down by FWC are, I would imagine, intended as a wake-up call to firms whose methods have prompted the requirement to record overtime.

Moreover, there is an element of individual responsibility that each lawyer must assume in determining how best to stay on top of their own holistic wellbeing, given that what works for one person may not work for another.

But the FWC requirements are in place simply because firms haven’t done enough. We have come a long way in raising awareness of mental health issues, but we still have a long way to go.

Regulation may not be the long-term answer. But until there’s substantive changes in how junior lawyers are managed, maybe it’s what’s needed.

Law will likely always be a challenging vocation that sometimes requires longer hours than other jobs. But we should never simply accept that being a lawyer means working all hours of the night with disproportionate compensation – particularly when so many are confronting severe emotional and psychological consequences as a result.