Safety of the legal profession
President's Message - June 2026
25 June 2026
The legal profession is, at its core, a vocation of service. We are there for people at their most vulnerable, we defend the rule of law, advocate for policies and laws that serve the public good, and work to make justice accessible to all.
We strive to meet these obligations often at great personal cost — financial, psychological, and physical.
One of the priorities for my term as President of the Law Council is the health and wellbeing of our profession.
As a profession we face risks associated with the trauma we are exposed to as part of our jobs, high levels of stress and workload, and a related heavy toll on our mental health.
These are challenges internal to our profession, and while progress is being made, it is not enough — and there are also threats from without.
In some instances, those opposed to a client, or to the outcome the justice system may deliver, come to see the lawyer as the enemy.
At the recent International Bar Association Annual Bar Leaders’ Conference in Prague, the safety and resilience of the legal profession emerged as a recurring and pressing concern for legal professional associations around the world.
From shocking accounts of physical threats and attacks against lawyers, to growing recognition of psychosocial risks in our work and our workplaces, to a digital environment that exposes practitioners to heightened aggression, scrutiny and stress, there is an acute awareness that pressures on lawyers are increasing and evolving.
In 2024, the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) found over 57% of lawyers have been the victims of threatening behaviour or aggression at least once in the last two or three years.
Beyond physical threats, a related and growing concern is the exposure of individual lawyers to public identification, scrutiny and hostility through social media, livestreaming and the 24-hour news cycle. Lawyers who act in high-profile or contentious matters, or who take public positions in advocacy roles, can find themselves named, filmed and targeted online in ways that were simply not possible a generation ago. The risks are not only reputational — they extend to physical safety and significant psychological harm. As the boundaries between courtroom and public forum continue to blur, the profession must grapple with a form of exposure that our existing frameworks were not designed to address.
Last year the Council of Europe adopted the first binding treaty protecting rights of lawyers. The Convention for the Protection of the Profession of Lawyer aims to ensure lawyers can carry out their work without fear of harassment, retaliation or improper interference.
Australia is not a party to that Convention, but we are certainly not immune to the dangers it was designed to address.
The sources of risk are varied and, at times, unpredictable — and they are not confined to criminal or high-profile litigation.
At the Australian Legal Convention last year, Chief Justice Gageler AC spoke of judges facing threats of physical harm — a sobering reflection from the head of our highest court. It is a reminder, too, that the threat of violence against those who administer and participate in our justice system is not new. The campaign of violence targeting Family Court judges and their families in the early 1980s — including the murder of Justice David Opas — stand as a permanent and devastating marker of what is at stake when hostility toward the law is allowed to become something worse.
What has become increasingly clear is that the profession cannot simply absorb these pressures — it must actively build the structures, supports and solidarity needed to withstand them.
The Law Council remains committed to supporting the profession through this — providing mental health, digital security and resilience resources in partnership with our constituent bodies, and gauging emerging risks as they evolve. We are equally committed to improving public understanding of the profession's essential contribution to our democracy and the rule of law, and to challenging rhetoric that unjustly denigrates lawyers or, more gravely, normalises hostility toward us.
Tania Wolff
Law Council of Australia President
Last Updated on 02/07/2026