I've been meaning to write about Matthew Courtney, the London associate at Freshfields who died a couple of weeks ago after falling from a stairwell at the Tate Modern museum (news articles here, here, and here). I've probably received more e-mail about this story than about anything for as long as I've been blogging here.

All the stories hint at a possible suicide, caused by the stress of his job, but none of the articles make that seem certain. Apparently he'd recently complained to his firm about his workload, and people at the museum saw him go into the stairwell to take a BlackBerry call. It seems like it's completely possible the whole thing was an accident, but it's causing a series of articles in the British papers concerning the workload of young associates.

And perhaps it's about time.

I've resisted blogging about this incident for the past couple of weeks -- and to some degree resisted blogging here at all -- because it's hard to write over-the-top satire when the reality is that the work might be causing people to leap off stairwells. A number of the e-mails I received pointed to the "minute of silence" observed by the firm after Courtney's death, and how it's predictable that they couldn't spare more than a minute.

The practice of law certainly isn't alone as far as jobs that eat up more hours of the day than desirable, and cause undue amounts of stress, but there seems to be something about the law firm culture -- the billing of hours, the nature of the work, the lack of connection to the client and the overall picture of the case -- that makes a blog like this resonate with people more than if I was writing about the long hours put in by neurosurgeons. Perhaps that's not really the case.

Regardless, if Courtney's death can spark a real discussion of working conditions at firms -- based in reality, and not just the satire written here -- at least it will have done some good.