What’s the Buzz? The Official HiveRisk Podcast – Personal Finance to Professional Risk: A Compliance Perspective (With Carla Hoppe)

Transcript

Kate Burt: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this session of What’s the Buzz? Our HiveRisk official podcast.

I’m delighted to be joined by Carla Hoppe today from Wealthbrite, who will be talking to us all about personal finance and how that impacts professional judgment and all the good work that Wealthbrite are doing in this area.

We’ve known each other for a little while now. Carla, high-risk and Wealthbrite have known each other. We’ve met a few times. We’ve been involved in a few of your roundtables, and also we were with you for your launch of your financial well-being report for the profession last year. Eloise and I went to that, which was an incredible, incredible event there. I’d love to start, Carla, if you could introduce yourself and a little bit about Wealthbrite and what you’re doing at the moment in this area.

Carla Hoppe: Sure, thanks so much Kate, and great to be here today and talking with all the buzz listeners.

So as you said, my name’s Carla. I’m the founder of Wealthbrite. I guess, in a nutshell, what does Wealthbrite do? Well, we’re an independent financial education business, and we work with the UK legal sector. Actually, it’s not just the UK anymore, but very much focused on supporting people in the legal profession to build financial capability and confidence. The reason we do that is because we know that there is a huge gap in financial literacy.

And whilst I think it’s often thought about the personal finances, you know, people, I’ve heard people say it’s personal for a reason. Yeah, absolutely. It’s part of our personal lives, but actually, in a regulated profession, our behaviours, our actions, our choices that we make with our finances have an impact, not just in terms of how we show up at the workplace, how we advocate for ourselves, but also in some of those decisions that could have much more meaningful and sometimes more serious consequences on our professional contact as well.

Kate: Carla, if you could explain about your financial report, what was that launch event last year, and tell us a little bit about that.

Carla: Yeah, absolutely. So, for the last three years, we’ve been conducting a sort of annual research asking people who are working in the profession to tell us how they’re feeling and dealing with money. So, really getting the perspective from the individual. And I guess why I wanted to start doing this was twofold.

I think, one, to rebut the proposition that most people have, which is if you work in law, you are paid well, you don’t have money problems. Okay? So, I wanted to say, well, is that true?

And I guess, you know, also to invite the profession to think beyond that kind of very, I guess, linear mindset and go into, well, what does it mean to have positive financial wellbeing? And I guess, you know, what you heard at our event last November was the release of our 2025 results. We shared data, not just about what was going on that year, but also our three-year trending data. And I guess, in summary, some of the highlights that people might most be interested in hearing over the last three years, financial stress in the legal profession has been rising rapidly.

And we see the percentage of those who profess to worry about money weekly and monthly has gone up significantly. So, we now have about two and four who profess to worry about money on that basis. It’s a significant proportion of the sector.

Kate: And it’s something that’s not spoken about, isn’t it?

Because often, and much more than there was in the past, we now talk more openly about the stress that comes with being a lawyer and being in legal practice. That’s almost, it’s not even taboo to talk about that now. But the financial stress, that’s a new conversation.

Carla: Absolutely. And I guess, you know, exactly to that point, part of the reason that we do this research, that we then host these events, that we bring community together to talk about it, is to break the money to do.

Because I think something I’m very aware of, so I’ve actually been asking this question in polls for the last, about 18 months. Question goes like this: Complete the following sentence.

People in law struggle to talk openly about money because what?

And basically, what we’ve seen in people’s responses is quite repeated patterns. And the patterns are fear of judgment. It’s not the done thing. It’s assumed we all know.

Salary secrecy means it’s not okay. You know, it’s embarrassing.

Kate: So that that links into the same thing. Is that notion when we were growing up, and particularly myself, when I decided to be a lawyer, when I was 13, 14, you just assume, well, there’s loads of money in that.

Carla: Yeah.

Kate: And so I’m a lawyer. So if I’m a solicitor, or I’m in a, you know, and even for those that aren’t actual solicitors or lawyers, but you’re in a decent profession, you’re in a decent job, you think if you work in a law firm or in the legal sector, money shouldn’t be a problem because that’s, it’s known to be a rich industry. That we’ve, we learned very quickly as solicitors that that is a fallacy.

Carla: But in green, who knows? Yeah. I think you bring up something very interesting. So I kind of want, there’s two things I want to say about what you’ve just said, because I think it’s really important.

I think first off, I think what we have uncovered is yes to your question earlier, there’s a huge amount of shame in the profession about not knowing, not being an expert in everything, right? We are a profession of perfectionists. We prize excellence and expertise, and it is made, oftentimes people are made to feel like it’s, it is shameful if you don’t know something.

Kate: You don’t want to show weakness in any area.

Carla: Yeah. I think that is amplified for certain populations, particularly those who come from a socially mobile background who may already feel quite different in the workplace and particularly different as regards their financial lived experiences, to then operate in a profession where there is still a huge perception of wealth, regardless of reality. And we see this kind of really impacting, not just in terms of how people, the readiness to talk about money, to be money curious, to seek out help at the right time, but we also see it really directly impacting people’s behaviours.

So 69% of the people in the profession tell us they feel pressure to spend beyond their means to keep up with a lifestyle in law. And the correlation between those people and the people which we have one in five turning to credit at the end of the month, not because they’re tapping for the Amex points, but because they have run out of money to pay for bills and essentials. So you’re talking common bills and food. So I think what I observe is that there is a culture which glorifies wealth, the perception of wealth, a culture that glorifies almost like ‘fake it till you make it’ kind of attitudes around some of this stuff, and then perpetuates a way of behaving that says, if you work in this profession, regardless of role, it’s a status symbol.

And of course, I actually don’t necessarily disagree with the notion that you should feel proud to work in the profession. When I joined the profession, I think, absolutely, don’t get me wrong. Two reasons I joined. I want to do really good, interesting work. I also wanted to make some money.

Kate: You know, and I think it can feel like a an extreme things to say out loud, still, to say quite to make some money. That’s a bit uncouth. Well, it’s funny.

Carla: I do agree with that. I agree that there are a lot of people who recoil whenever I say those words. But I think that my position or my challenge to people was like, be honest with yourself. Be honest with yourself about why, particularly if we think about broadening access to the profession, inviting a much more diverse range of people who haven’t historically been in the profession, and the profession is still very by and large a privileged profession.

But I think it’s a sort of, you know, I think it’s funny because actually, people do sort of feel uncomfortable saying that, oh, well, we’re here to make money. But the reality of it, law is a business, right? And if we think about it in the business finance sense, we’re not embarrassed or ashamed to say we want to be out there making money. Of course, we want to do good and have impact in the world and be part of what it means to uphold the rule of law.

Absolutely. But let, I mean, you don’t see people splashing their results all over the press for nothing. They do that because they are proud of what they have achieved.

Kate: In terms of the business success. What is that we mean in terms of?

Carla: Yeah. And so it must follow from that, that we are also inviting our people to enjoy some of that success. And I suppose- Are you proud of that? Yeah. I suppose what’s interesting to me, and it comes back to what you said, which is, I think the reality is that those who are able to enjoy the excesses of success are actually a very small minority of the profession. And I think what often gets mixed, sorry, in a lot of these press headlines about big numbers, lateral hires on three-year golden handshake deals, that blow your mind, or MQ salaries yet again in the press today, going up with the US law firms. I think what becomes, then what happens is people associate and assume everybody’s on that kind of money. And actually we know in our data, average salaries are actually somewhere more around 60 to 80,000 pound mark.

And that therefore means law is not immune to the problem. Law is not immune as a sector from all of the normal, everyday financial questions, struggles, and worries that everybody else in the rest of the country has. And I think sometimes the frustration I have with our obsession around this status symbol and the showing off of wealth in the profession, which still is very persistent. And you might only have to go and look on Instagram to see

I’m not on Instagram, so my lens is only LinkedIn. Well, if you did look on their Instagram and TikTok, what we are telling future lawyers that the lifestyle that you buy in law is shiny office buildings, you know, a certain way of looking, a certain type of place you go to those are some, the car you drive. Is that that sort of like a business card these days? Absolutely.

Kate: The thing to say isn’t it? Is that the sort of salesman and it used to be the salesman didn’t it? You drive the nice car and that’s your business card, isn’t it?

Carla: Well, that kind of old fashioned.

I was back in Northern Ireland recently, it’s funny you say that. And I was talking to a bunch of the junior lawyers there and a lot of them, I mean, you talk about disparity of incomes and the breadth of church that we have in the profession.

There’s a saying in Northern Ireland that people have, which is they’re on a 755 contract. 755? No, no, I’m going to get that wrong there. I have to look, I have to get the numbers. Now I’m doubting myself. But anyway, the point is that it’s compare and contrast. They’re on an hourly rate as apprentices in Northern Ireland, which is a fraction of the kind of money that’s made in in London, right? I think it is 755. Anyway, I was talking to some of the juniors and they were saying, oh yeah, well, we’re qualifying. And I said, okay, so what does qualification mean for you? And they said, well, the first thing people ask you is what car are you getting? Really? Because that’s how you demonstrate promotion and success.

Kate: When I was, I’m sorry to digress, but I do like throwing little stories in here, but when I was a young solicitor, I had, I think I had one child at the time, I had a baby and I was driving around in my Skoda Fabia, which was my first car. And in fact, the window was taped up, because I’d driven around France and in the window that had gone down and I was driving to a top 50 law firm as a senior solicitor.

And I actually took a client, it was an insurance company out in my Skoda Fabia to a site inspection because it was a personal injury and it was an accident at work. And when I came back, my line manager said, you didn’t take them out in that car. I said, well, yeah, I did.

I didn’t even get there. But the pressure, I then upgraded to a Nissan Qashqai at the time, which was significantly more money at that time. But I felt the pressure and I was thinking, well, are you going to pay for that car for me? And they weren’t going to pay for that car. But interestingly, I stayed with that same Nissan Qashqai for the next 12 years and paid it off.

And so I’m like, but then that needed upgrading as well. So I’m now in a pollster. But it was that I knew as a professional, I knew I was being looked at less favourably. And there was an embarrassment around I’m representing the firm and I’ve got this Skoda Fabia with taped up windows. But so I put myself in additional financial strain, because I actually love that, that Fabia. But it was, and I think at the time, it was another £350 a month on for this car, which was at that time, nearly as much as my mortgage, and we’re talking some years ago. But that just shows you in action that I put myself in a worse financial position because of the expectation to drive a better car.

Carla: Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, what you’ve just described there is kind of what we observe all the time in the profession. And as I said, it has been unfortunately, the last three years of our data and our research has showed that things aren’t particularly improving.

Carla: We, you know, I think we’re dealing with a few different things here. First of all, we’re dealing with the reality that people are not taught financial education. We’re not taught it in school. We’re not taught at university. We’re not taught in law school. We walk through the doors of any given career choice. And we are faced with the reality of having to manage our money as adults for the first time. And I think what’s interesting again is that, okay, so you’ve got that piece, then you’ve got the economic real world that we’re living in right now where affordability is becoming a bigger and bigger issue for people.

And I think it’s fair to say the financial pressure that the country as a whole has been feeling has been through a number of peaks and troughs in the last three years, but a consistent rise.

And then you put it into the perspective of like, okay, well, those two things are true for everyone. What is it that’s going on in the profession of law that makes this, you know, a really important feature that is deserving of attention of leaders and people in the risk and compliance function. And that’s where it comes back to professional standards.

Kate: Because that’s it. So what makes this a boardroom issue? What makes this a part? You know, we can say that, you know, of course, this is a good thing generally for humanity that this is looked at, but actually what makes this a board level conversation? What makes this a risk conversation? What makes this a compliance conversation?

Carla: Yeah, absolutely. And it is the point about professional standards. And I think it’s generally not always well appreciated that, of course, how you behave in your personal finances has an implication on your vulnerability, pressure, the erosion of our otherwise upstanding integrity.

And that’s not because we’re all here like little like apples that are slowly rotting over time. It’s just that we are humans who are subject to the same, you know, we all have moments in our life where we go through challenging times. I think what’s interesting to me is that there are things that can happen in the course of an individual’s life where financial worries, pressure can be really severely amplified. And I think I have a, you know, I, in fact, you joined us at these roundtables last year, right? We hosted a series of compliance leaders. And because we wanted to show them our data and say, we think this is something you need to be aware of, because our indicators of risk, I call them, show me that I have a group of people who have very low confidence are not encouraged to talk openly about their questions or their concerns.

Fear retribution, if they seek out help for financial problems, because if the link through to could you get struck off if something goes wrong, but actually are under, but are demonstrating patterns of behaviour that indicate growing problem debt and a significant degree of vulnerability to shock.

Because we have a low, a low buffer of financial safety net amongst legal professionals, a high reliance on credit, and an unwillingness to put our hands up and say I need help at the right time. And so that put together for me is something that I say, okay, well, this now no longer should solely sit within the realm of the people team. Because of course, the people team are normally the ones who lead the charge when it comes to development of our people, building professional competency skills, of which financial literacy is one.

Thinking about supporting the wellbeing of our people, that tends to be their bailiwick. But actually, my kind of called action has been like this has the potential to escalate. And actually our work and our research over the last year has shown that of course, there are moments in the professional cycle where we hear news about somebody’s put their hands on the kitty.

I have to be honest, those are getting fewer and fewer, because of course, controls are better and as they should be. But I think people sometimes dismiss therefore that, oh, well, that’s not happening. So financial problems, not really a big issue, not a current cost or the reputational damage or risk potential is low.

Our kind of work in the sector talking to people in these spaces tells a different story. It tells the story that actually firms are already outlying cost associated with financial problems, costs like advances on wages, which have been going up across the sector.

Kate: That’s something that’s not spoken about. Could you give us some more? So where is that happening? How is that happening? And I appreciate the reports are clearly obviously anonymous. But what to give us a little bit of a flavor?

Carla: Confidentially, because of confidence, I’ve had a number of confidential conversations with members of heads of people across firms of all different sizes, across the full spectrum of the UK. So this is not a small firm issue, not a sole practitioner issue.

This is happening across our larger, medium and big firms.

I say to people, have you got any evidence of people struggling with their finances and any evidence of financial stress amongst your people? And they’ll go, I don’t think so. Have you ever had anybody ask you for an advance on wages? I said, oh, yes, we have. Oh, yes. And actually, we’ve had some people ask it a number of times, coming back for repeated requests.

So I think this is something that is not being talked about at all. And I get it, because from a firm’s perspective, of course, you want to try and help that individual get through whatever short term, hopefully, it’s a short term crisis that they’re dealing with. But I think what’s worrying to me is that there’s that kind of thing. I’ve had numerous reports from people about instances where an individual has had an event such as a burglary, a flooding event in their home, or some other kind of catastrophic incident. And they have not had any insurance on their home or their contents. And they’ve been unable to afford to set themselves up in a new place. And guess what? They have come to their firm to ask for a loan. I have had individuals who are trying to leave abusive relationships, who are wanting to get out of those situations, but do not have the funds who have, at a moment of last resort, asked their employer for a loan to help them get out of a difficult situation.

There’s a whole category, people going through a major divorce, families where one partner was made redundant, but they had a mortgage that they could no longer afford. So these are like very human things that happen.

Kate: Right. And we were talking about that before we went live, weren’t we? We were talking about this professional stress and there’s a home stress or personal stress. It’s just one stress, you’ve got one life with lots of stressors. And it’s looking at the holistic picture on the stress on that person, whether that’s workload or whether that’s financial stress or other. And then how does that feed into problems in the workplace on the compliance front and those judgment calls that are skewed because of the whole boiling pot that is a personal situation?

Carla: So absolutely. So like, you know, maybe you might sit there thinking, well, all of those incidents sound like one-off events, right? And they might be in any given firm, but they are telling, I think, of a temperature of a rising temperature of financial stress. And I think what’s interesting is two things. One, people teams aren’t necessarily telling risk teams about these things. The risk doesn’t even know this is happening because perhaps they might think differently about the issue if they knew, or if they were monitoring how many times it had happened and over what period of time. Second thing is I find very few firms are actively asking their people for information, which would maybe indicate degrees of financial stress in their systems as part of a, exactly as you described it, an exercise of understanding how can we support high performing teams. So whatever I mean by that. For me, if you’re creating a hot house of like super incredible high performing team members, one of the things you want to look to do is of course, make sure they gel as a team and are all on the same page about the mission and the values of what you’re fighting for.

But in order to sustain a high level of performance, you want to be able to remove as many of the barriers or pressures that can otherwise get in the way of high performance. And that’s why we often look at like, okay, what are the workplace practices that are going to keep our people up for as long as possible? We want to make it as easy as possible for them. Don’t want to get hungry. We’ve got a cafeteria, a good tired. We might have a bed. You got a meditation room.

Kate: Yeah, we got one of those too, but we don’t often think institutionalized in this bubble that you are there for you live in the firm now. There’s nothing outside the firm. Your needs are met.

Carla: It is on the one hand, but that’s also part of why those things exist. It’s to help people continue to perform at a high level of output for as long as possible. I mean, when you look at what athletes do in this space, you know, Olympic athletes spend an enormous amount of time on their psychology and looking at how can they maintain a really positive mental space in order to maintain really high performance outputs.

And I think if you thought of a high performing legal sector as akin to an Olympic athlete, we’d ask ourselves, well, are we doing those same things when it comes to the psychology of how the profession works? I think, you know, it’s well recognized in the sector that there’s still room for improvement when it comes to supporting the mental health of our workforce.

I think what’s often missed in all of that equation is, well, how do finances feature as a sort of undercurrent of our experience? Because of course, money is the single greatest driver of stress and anxiety in working adults in the UK.

Kate: How does that just to give some flavor to that? So sort of broad to say financial pressure, but what is that? What’s keeping people awake at night? What is the like, specifically, is it meeting mortgage payments? Is it servicing credit card debt? Is it what are you seeing from your research? Yeah.

Carla: So our research, we should specifically, we see people struggling to keep up or already behind with bills. Again, red flag for any risk and compliance people, because you will know that the financial conduct rules, specifically under the SRA, speak to missed payments as evidence of financial misconduct. We have evidence of people already behind and already behind from day one, all the way through up to the partner grade. So we still have it happening there.

Kate: Talking at the partner grade and the ownership level, and this is where we see it sort of at the highest levels at risk in risk and compliance in the most extreme, is where perhaps, and this is not just personal finances, but business finances, is where client account is dipped into to pay payroll or suppliers.

And that, I mean, we are in very, very, very dangerous territory when it’s got that far. And particularly with small firms where the owner, it shouldn’t be a blend of personal and business finance, but it can become that. And that, we’re on a slippery slope when we get to that situation. Very difficult to count off.

Carla: I think if you look at some of what, so we do a lot of work alongside the solicitor’s charity, and they are often supporting people going through an investigation with the regulator if their finances have gotten to that stage. The biggest issue that they are seeing repeatedly is problem debt.

Kate: When you said the problem debt as in the personal debt or the business?

Carla: Personal debts.

So personal debts that become out of control and that impacting them and then ultimately getting to a situation where they’re unable to sort of keep up work. I will say this, in our data last year, we asked people who were demonstrating high degrees of financial stress, so worrying about it weekly or monthly.

How was it impacting your performance at work? Those in that category were twice as likely to say that they were struggling with active decision making on the job.

Kate: So, That is the crux of it, isn’t it? When it comes to compliance risk, your decision making your judgment. Yes.

Carla: That’s fundamental. Twice as likely to say I’m struggling to keep up with making decisions on the job. I think why that’s so important is I’ve separately been talking to a lot of the professional indemnity insurers.

And what they are looking at is, and again, I think it’s really important for people to kind of like, this is not causation data. I’m talking about a coincidence, a correlation of events that I think deserve attention. The last three years, our financial stress data has been rising. People in that financial stress category are twice as likely to say they’re struggling to make decisions on the job. The last three years, the number of claims in the space of mistake, matter mishandling or error has been increasing. The last three years in our geopolitical and economic climate have been some of the hardest three years people in this country have gone through.

So, I think it’s kind of important for people to think, I often have this conversation and what happens is when I speak to people in the risk and compliance space particularly, and I share with them this notion that like, of course, there’s a pressure versus performance play here, right? And actually there’s a sort of bell shaped curve that is often used to describe the sort of perfect pressure versus performance outputs and peak performance happens just before…

Kate: … You reach the top. I’ve seen that curve. It’s a very powerful curve. Yeah.

Carla: But what happens is, so we want a degree of pressure in our systems, but when pressure gets too high and you flip over the other end of that hill, you enter what is known as the zone of delusion where you think you’re doubling down on efforts to try and maintain the same level of output, but it’s not happening. And I think what’s interesting for me is that so many times that I share our data, I share what’s going on for people, real people in the profession, I get messages after from folks privately get in touch with me say, “I’ve never thought about how people’s personal finances can show up and impact them at work.”

And I think sometimes I’m a bit shocked by that because I think the current economy, the disconnect with the current economy, but I think actually it’s not a willful ignorance. It’s actually a reflection of this culture of shame that exists in the profession around this topic.

Kate: When we look at stress generally, whether that’s financial or wherever, and I think most people that are in a professional career, myself included, we can recognize times in our career history where we’ve been so stressed, so, so stressed. I think I defy anyone to put their hand up in the legal profession and say, “I’ve never felt that.” We all have felt that.

And what happens when you’re in that very, very stressful situation, judgment goes out the window and you catastrophize and you don’t want to answer emails too quickly because you’re so stressed that what you’re putting out there isn’t rooted in any reality. And that’s the danger zone, isn’t it? No matter where that stress is coming from, if it’s financial or otherwise, if you’ve got an individual who’s in this fear mode and catastrophizing, they’re going to make mistakes. They’re going to… The classic one, isn’t it, is backdating letters about… Oh, yeah. …interclients. There was one, I remember when I first got into risk and compliance and I was lecturing on exactly this topic, actually not financial, but related to stress. And there’s a particular judgment out there, quite a few years old now, where a claimant solicitor had lied to a client that they had won their case. They hadn’t, it hadn’t been progressed and had mocked up judgments to say, “Yes, you’ve won this amount of money and here’s the judgment they’ve complete.” And this was before AI was accessible. And the lengths that the solicitor’s gone through for the deceit, because the pressure is so great, but not only that, and because this is what struck me at the time, is that you’re never going to succeed with that strategy because you haven’t won the case. The client’s never going to get that money. So you’re not in a rational place in making that…

Carla: That’s the zone of delusion.

Kate: You’re absolutely the zone of delusion. Absolutely. Exactly. Irrational. It’s just purely irrational. And that is very, very dangerous.

Carla: And I think that’s what can happen in a financial context as well. Because, I mean, there should be the number of these cases recently, but of partners who have spent the money due to HMRC, spent their tax money, and they end up stealing from their firms.

And so I guess these incidents, I think people sometimes say, “Oh, it wouldn’t happen here. It wouldn’t happen in our firm. We would know about it if there was something going on.”

So I’m yet to see evidence of controls, a structured approach to mitigating financial risk that really goes into the detail that I think would normally need to be had in order to say, “We would know if there’s something going on.” So what do I mean by that? And I’m curious to your perspective on this, Kate, because my approach to thinking about how far should or can an organisation go to mitigate this type of risk, given that it is so very specific and personal. It’s hard to know everything.

At the end of the day, it’s not the job of a company to parent their people. And I recognise all of that, but I do think there are things you can do. So for me, it’s about having a sort of three-pronged approach. And I love to invite people to reflect on where is their organisation currently spending most time. So I think there’s crisis support. This is our systems which are triggered when there is already a problem. So we are now in damage limitation mode. So we might have an upward referral mechanism or an outward referral mechanism, something like somebody’s got a gambling addiction and that’s impacted their performance at work.

Kate: Have you found that from your research, is that more rife than we might think it is?

Carla: We did this year was ask people if they would be willing to share if they were reaching for any maladaptive or problem behaviours as a result of financial stress.

And we have had evidence of problem gambling, substance abuse, alcohol abuse, splurge spending with money I don’t actually have. That was a huge one. And then we then did a second question off the back of that. So about 55% of people who responded to our survey said they were reaching for one or more of those maladaptive.

It’s not uncommon. People reach for something that gives them an immediate dopamine hit to make themselves feel better, but then they end up with an even bigger hangover and financial hangover sometimes also at the end of it. We did then ask people, well, is that impacting you and your household negatively when it comes to finances? And actually quite a large proportion, about a third of people said yes.

So the ripple effect of those kind of behaviours is quite profound.

Kate: Particularly with the gambling, and I only know second-hand from people’s lives it’s affected, but particularly with the gambling, there’s so much secrecy around that problem that even within someone’s own house, if it’s happening within their own house, their spouse doesn’t even know about it. So the actual mental load that’s with that gambling addict is you wouldn’t even know until it’s maybe too late.

Carla: Exactly.

So, I think more firms are aligned aware to the kind of model of resources that might be made available if somebody needs that kind of emergency help. So whether that’s our EAP systems, our sector charities that can step in, it’s our regulators who have to be alerted, or our internal referral process that says somebody further up the food chain needs to know that this is a problem that’s happened. I think where I see less evidence of intervention and risk mitigation is in proactive support.

So the degree to which we are training team leaders and managers to spot the signs of financial stress, or have a positive supportive conversation about somebody’s personal finances in the workplace, or creating spaces where people can be encouraged to be money curious, showcasing stories of, you know, you know, I think one of the things that’s been done very well and other aspects of our how we kind of invite people to seek support and community around aspects of our personal life in the office are things like family networks, social mobility networks, you might have our sort of LGBTQ plus networks, all these affinity networks that kind of represent spaces of belonging and inclusion. We don’t have one where money is a topic that is often welcome or supported.

And that makes it quite hard for people to find a supportive place to ask for help at a time before I’ve made I need that, you know, emergency intervention.

Kate: Are you finding with the work you’re doing with law firms and the sector, are you finding that those groups are now being created? Or are we still away from that? Or are you seeing that those kind of clubs being created?

Carla: Actually, I’m not, I’m not necessarily, I’m not necessarily advocating for like a financial network.

I think actually, it’s more about appreciating that this is a conversation that belongs in those other contexts. So, what I am saying positively happening, particularly around our social mobility networks, is a greater desire and willingness to say if you’ve come from a socially mobile background, money is a, it might be a touchy topic for you personally. But actually, you know, if you are ambitious about building wealth, and really making the most of what a promise of a career in law can offer you, which is to do good work and do well financially, you need to upskill yourself. So, we’re going to help you do that by facilitating a conversation about best practice with money, recognizing our limiting mindsets, you know, learning some of these things. And I am seeing a shift in that regard.

Kate: And I love the positive focus there, because we can look at when we’re looking at financial difficulty, it can all be very like, negative and sort of big team energy, which lawyers don’t like, I don’t like. But when you start talking about a club where actually we’re talking about education and even being excited about having systems to bring down debt or increase finance, and then then going into actually, it’d be great to learn about how can I invest and how can I watch my money and bring all of a sudden it shifted it from this like doubt, you know, I’m the victim, I’m in this financial problem to actually, I’m climbing up and I’m measuring how far I’ve come from that and where I want to go, not I’m in this hole. And that’s really energizing, empowering conversation.

Carla: And that’s what the first moment of intervention is actually all about. The first pillar of intervention is education and awareness. It’s about confidence boosting capability building, because the best prevention mechanism and the data is pretty clear on this when you look at like, best practice when it comes to risk mitigation and also interventions in workplace health.

You get five times return on your investment when you invest at the early stage, as opposed to the crisis support.

So if you really want to see long-term shifts in behaviour and driving down the propensity for somebody to pick up bad habits or escalate financial problems, be kind of exposed to the worst of these things, what you want to do is you want to like forearm them with the knowledge of how to avoid those things, right? And that’s where we spend a lot of time and effort and wealth, right? Which is delivering education and getting people excited and delivering it oftentimes for people at the start of their career, because it’s about giving them the rules of thumb that they can learn to live on. But actually there’s also other moments in the life cycle of a professional in law where it makes sense to like have some other conversations, but that’s on qualification because you might double your money overnight. What are you doing with all that good stuff?

It might be for families, right? Family financial planning, people who are taking time off for parental leave or returning to work from parental leave.

And also the transition to equity partner, that is a huge shift in someone’s personal financial reality. And what’s interesting to me is I’ve been hearing from firms that they are aware of certainly amongst socially mobile candidates of people opting out because of the fear of the unknown of taking on partnership debt and the reaction of equity partnership. Opting out of equity partnership, the fear of taking on partnership debt and the fear of giving up the employment rights like sick pay and holiday pay and maternity and parental leave. And that to me is a crying shame because these are people who’ve been identified as capable.

I think there should never be a situation where somebody doesn’t take up an opportunity that is available to them in their career because of a lack of financial confidence and knowledge.

Kate: That fear, isn’t it? And it’s that fear that’s keeping them, holding them back from their poor potential, which is a travesty, isn’t it?

I think the thing about it is that at the moment, there isn’t really much structure in place. And again, I’ll say at the moment, because I am energised by the firms that I am talking to who are recognising that perhaps there is a place for them as part of their partner pipeline programmes or their future leader development programmes to have a conversation about what does it mean to move to being self-employed? What does it mean for tax? What does it mean for insurance? What does it mean for your pension?

Carla: Because actually, you want your partners to thrive in their new environment and focus solely on the job of building your business. What you don’t want them to do is be distracted by the fact that they were supposed to get in touch with a financial advisor, they haven’t had the getting cold calls and they don’t want to speak to these cold calls people. So guess what? They put it off and they keep putting it off and they keep putting it off and they keep putting off. And then at some point they get to a moment where they go, sugar, I need to have this conversation. I’m glad you said sugar for the purpose of the cake.

And sometimes, and I’ve met these people, they end up leaving the profession incredibly disillusioned because actually maybe they haven’t quite had the experience they’d hoped for or maybe it hasn’t quite worked out how they wanted it. And again, you know, I think sometimes firms have an attitude and I’ve heard this and been told it firsthand by lots of people that people are old enough, ugly enough and paid enough to go sort of like themselves.

Kate: And I think… Short-term thinking that isn’t it? And as a business owner myself, that is you’re kind of cutting your nose off to spite your face because they can figure it out, but it’s not going to help your business if they take you down on the way or you’re not going to get the best out of that person. So also sick pay is sick days. I don’t think we touched on that. Have we, the impact on lost days through sickness, through stress and very short term.

Carla: Yeah. So definitely that we see in our data. So actually, yes. I mean, I think for me, the biggest issue with that attitude is I think it is frankly layered with bias and assumption about the type of person you are dealing with, their background, their upbringing, the types of conversations that might’ve been had in their home environment or the degree to which they have a social network that would lend itself to shaping their knowledge and confidence.

And I do think, you know, perhaps it’s unpopular, but I think if we are really serious in the profession about ensuring that our profession reflects the society we serve, that I think we have to be a little bit more mindful about people’s lived financial experiences and the diversity of those experiences that come with building a profession that really reflects those people that we work with.

Kate: So are you finding firms are opening their doors? They want to talk, they want to learn, like what’s your sort of dip test from the conversations you’re having with firms? Are you boyed, are you excited or are you disappointed?

Carla: I am. I think we’re entering a really interesting phase where I think when we started Wealthbrite, which is like coming up to four years ago, I think people were like, whoa. This woman’s talking about money. What is going on here? Like this is too embarrassing.

I think actually there has been a growing recognition that financial health of your workforce is a key component of having a healthy workforce.

And that that is not just about how much you pay them.

Kate: And this is what I was thinking that the answer isn’t just pay your people more than they can because there’s a more systemic problem here. And the more you pay them, if they’ve got the wrong practices or the wrong bad habits, they’re just going to get themselves in a bigger hole. Yeah, exactly.

Carla: And actually the data is pretty clear on that. There’s of course a point at which more money does help, of course, yes. But there is a tipping point where actually sort of wellbeing plateaus and actually it can often dip. And it happens at an earlier income spec scale than people think. So it’s around about the 100 to the 150 mark where that kind of starts to taper off, which is still obviously extremely high in the profession.

Kate: There’s another problem where if you’re paid too well in a toxic environment, the golden handcuffs aren’t there, you can’t move to a more healthy environment, a different firm, a different profession because you have to.

Carla: I have spoken to a lot of people who talk to me about feeling trapped. And I think that’s something, in fact, I was chatting with the team at Lawcare not that long ago and they were saying that actually, yes, that is one of the things they have heard from people who call their helpline, that actually they’re feeling quite demotivated or depressed or quite isolated because they feel like they kind of can’t escape where they’re at because of the financial situation.

Kate: Particularly, say if you’re the cult in a law firm, employed cult or otherwise, or you’re head of risk and compliance, and there’s a very significant compliance problem that you need to tell the firm about.

Whether maybe you don’t want to do that because if you lose your position, then what you’re going to do on the financial side, or if you leave, you’re worried about that money. So there’s then that dilemma, what should be a very straightforward decision, whether it’s to report or report your concerns or leave the firm or whichever you want to do. If you’re trapped, you’re stuck in potentially a non-compliant position.

And particularly, if you’re a cult and you’ve got personal responsibility there, that is, and I have met cults in that position. And usually then they have not the power, they’re not an owner, but they’re like, okay, I can’t afford to leave. This is a not-compliant situation. And actually, even if I do report as well, it’s going to come back on me now because I’ve let it go for so long. And they’re completely trapped from all angles, which is frightening.

Carla: It is frightening. I think it speaks to bigger cultural dynamic though, about this kind of owning up to mistakes. And I think that’s a bigger problem. But I suppose what I would encourage people to think about is, I think when we talk about financial risk or personal financial challenges presenting firm level risk,

I think it’s not thinking about this as a, oh God, this is another thing to be done, right? Another job I have to solve. But actually more as a lens through which to regard how people show up and behave and perform in the office and thinking about how some of our behaviors can be influenced by that financial dynamic. And for positive and for negative, I think it’s important to say that it’s not all bad. But I think obviously when we’re speaking about it through the perspective of risk culture, what we’re wanting to focus in on is how do we promote the best ways of working? And that has got to be through teaching people what best looks like, ensuring they know the pitfalls to avoid by raising awareness. But then I think then having some structures in place that are going to alert you to the kind of amplification of risk in your population. And at the moment, I don’t think that those are necessarily happening. I don’t think the structural pieces is necessarily happening.

Kate: One of the things we do at HiveRisk is we do fraud risk reviews. So one of our fraud experts goes out and that’s one of the areas, like what’s the pressure? With the fraud triangle and anyone who doesn’t know what fraud triangle, let’s go back and watch on our fraud webinars.

But there’s that fraud triangle and there’s that pressure you need in the fraud triangle, you need the pressure. So it will test from that financial side of your people, where are the pressures there? And then from that strategies are put in place. But if you’re not doing an exercise like a fraud review, that would never come up. So from your perspective, Carla, if any firms are listening and thinking, well, what you’re saying is great, it makes sense, I want to do it. Where do I even start on a strategic level? How can I, you know, I can’t just bring this whole thing to the board and say, we need to do something when there’s so many priorities. What’s the smart way to get this on the agenda? And then what’s the smart way to start?

Carla: So two things I’ll say to that. And you very kindly let me plug this. So we have a survey that’s open now at the minute. It’s our 2026 legal sector survey. So I spoke before about how we’ve done three years of looking at how individuals are dealing with all of this. This year, we’ve decided to ask organizations to work with us to establish a benchmark of common practice in the space of supporting good financial health in your workforce.

And I suppose the invitation to anyone listening is get involved. This is not about like shining a spotlight on what you’re not doing. But I think what this does do, it’s 15 questions, it shouldn’t take more than 15 to 20 minutes to answer.

And essentially, what it’ll do is it will step you through a logic process of saying, do you ask for this level of, do you ask this information? Do you test for this kind of category of behavior? Who are you talking to internally in your business? And what it will do is it will, well, first of all, it will come to us, it will start to help us establish a benchmark. But what we’ve committed to do for everybody who does this, as long as you give us your details and don’t do it anonymously, is that we will give you back a risk matrix so that you can see where you’re performing well, and where there may be room for improvement in your structural systems around risk mitigation in the space. I think that’s going to be really valuable for somebody sitting in the risk and compliance role, because it will speak in their language about what is going on in their organization. I wouldn’t necessarily say then take that up to your board and put it in front of them and go, here’s the plan. But the fact that there’s the visual there and there’s some strategy behind it or thinking behind it, rather than exactly, as I mentioned before, if you could just take the themes and just put this on the boardroom table, they might nod along, but it’s not going to go anywhere.

This is very data-informed approach to looking at where is measuring risk in your systems currently. The recommendations for most organizations when they’re starting this work is to start by doing the uplifting, confidence-building, community-building work. So it’s about socializing and normalizing the conversation of money.

And very often that means using personal finances as a means of amplifying existing initiatives in your workplace. That might be mental health, because your business is really strongly advocating for supporting and encouraging people to talk about mental health, in which case, let’s talk about the link between money and mental health, because it’s a big component.

Kate: It might be that it’s a module. It’s a module on your existing plans. As you said, it’s not, oh, right, great, we’ve just had all this from the SRA, now we’re having to deal with this as well. But as part of your holistic approach, this could be a module within it and build it within it. Yeah.

Carla: Exactly. It’s not about reinventing the wheel. It’s about recognizing the intersectionality of how our personal finances impact different aspects in the way we work. Build it into your firm-wide events if you do those. A lot of firms do like wellbeing weeks. They might do stuff around social mobility day that’s coming up on the 12th of June. We are supporting businesses a lot at the moment with what we call conversation starters. It’s exactly what it says in the tin. It’s designed to get people energized and thinking differently.

Kate: I love that.

Carla: Then what we do is we often interact with people in those sessions and we pull and we get insights and we get them telling us, what am I most interested to learn more about? It’s then about actually doing that bit of asking your people, where do they want you to step in? Where do they want support? What did they want from you in that environment? What you often have, you often get back very similar answers. Actually, yeah, it’s really powerful to be able to talk about this as a topic.

Kate: Also, when you start those conversations, it’s the same with any sort of conversational network when you’re involved in, all I’m involved in, is there’s a book recommendations that come out of those. Oh, did you read this? Did you read that? For example, the book that’s coming to mind is Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki.

It could just be that one conversation that then sends someone to a book which then sends you to another book. Then all of a sudden, if you didn’t have those kind of conversations growing up, you’ve now got access to that.

Carla: Well, what I would say, yeah, exactly. What I would say is the thing I’ve been very pleased to see is the sheer number of law firm leaders who after our conversation starters have said, we’ve never had so many people show up for an event like that before.

Or commenting, there were a lot of people on that dialling in, including a number of partners.

I think what the power of that and the ripple effect of those types of events is it’s proving to people just how hungry their workforce is for a space for this conversation to happen. I think that then often lends itself to us then being able to work with firms to say, okay, well, what does a program of education, awareness and proactive support actually look like?

Kate: I’m conscious of time because I could go on for another half an hour here because I’m really, I’m like drawn in and drawn into the conversation. So where can people find that survey?

Carla: Well, we can share it here on this chat. And for the purposes of the table as well for podcasts.

Kate: Yeah, for anyone listening on podcast, maybe we can share it in the show notes or something. I will do that. I’ll make sure that’s in the show notes. And we have a comment in, I’m sorry, the chat’s been disabled throughout. I think I did try and undisabled it, but I’ve had something come through. The Psychology of Money by Morgan Howsell is another great book that could be a conversation starter in this topic. Absolutely. Hopefully, that’s gone to the hosts and panelists. Oh, sorry. Trying to share that to everyone here. So you’ve got it. But when we send out the recording, so everyone that’s registered to watch this live, we’ll also send that link as well, Carla, as well as a link to contact you directly. But how can everyone else find you? How can everyone find you? LinkedIn is the best place to find me.

Carla: Definitely, LinkedIn is the place. I’d say come and join the conversation that we’re having on LinkedIn. You’ll see a lot of conversation about sort of the upside benefits of the work that we do and also continuing the discussion about why we need to continue to have in mind the kind of the potential for those downside risks as well. But yeah, I think I’d encourage people to think about how they might take some of what they’ve heard today and maybe have a conversation with a colleague or with their partner when they go home at night.

And I think it is as simple as that. It’s about making it feel okay to have conversations about personal finances and work. And it’s that cultural change that will ultimately lead to, I think, a much more financially healthy workforce. And that’s what we’re here to facilitate and what we’re driving mission is. So yeah, thanks for having me.

Kate: Thank you so much, Carla. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation and I’m going to be taking some of that home to our own business as well. So thank you so much for joining us.

Carla: See you next time. Thank you. Bye.