We spend decades being lawyers. By the time we reach retirement age, we’ve devoted more time to being lawyers than almost anything else in our lives. Many of us have been lawyers for longer than we’ve been spouses and life partners, and longer than we’ve been parents. We work hard. We often have few outside interests. We take client calls on evenings, weekends, vacations and holidays. It is hardly surprising that by the end of our careers, our identities as lawyers can feel inseparable from our identities as people.
Retirement changes everything. The work we loved, to which our identities are so closely bound, is about to end. Many of us find the task of figuring out what to do next daunting.
There is a lot a law firm can do to help a retiring partner prepare emotionally for retirement. There are excellent professional coaches who specialize in helping law partners through the challenges of imminent retirement. A retirement succession program can bundle these services with guidance on how to transfer client relationships to junior partners.
Most retiring partners have no idea how to create a retirement succession plan. They don’t know the precise steps to take in each client relationship to make transitions to the next generation happen. Many have trained and mentored lots of younger lawyers, but have only the vaguest idea how to prepare these lawyers to replace them. Most importantly, they don’t know how or when to disclose their upcoming retirements to clients, much less how to do this in a way that encourages clients to embrace junior partners.
Senior partners are smart people. Given enough time, they can figure out how to do all these things. But the more time a retiring partner must spend working out how to design and implement a successful transition plan, the less time the partner will have to make transitions happen. They either run out of gas, or (understandably) assume that their firm’s failure to tell them how to do it (by providing succession plans templates, a client transition task list, timelines for key events, and sample status reports to management) means the firm does not care whether they do this work.
Yet these are the nuts and bolts of a robust retirement succession program. Without them, a retiring partner cannot be expected to put maximum effort into transitioning clients to younger partners. It’s as simple as that.
Experience teaches that retiring partners benefit substantially from counseling and support as they detach their value as lawyers from their value as people. It also teaches that when retiring partners are given the tools to execute a succession plan, and are guided and supported through the process by management-level advisors, they get the message: Client transitions are important to the firm and their younger partners.
